Mahler: Symphony No. 1 "Titan" - Claudio Abbado - Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.1 in D major "Titan"

I. Langsam. Schleppend. Wie ein Naturlaut - Im Anfang sehr gemächlich (00:00)
II. Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell (16:20)
III. Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen (23:37)
IV. Stürmisch bewegt (34:31)

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Claudio Abbado (Recorded in 1981)

When I was in the United States Army I knew nothing about classical music and I never listened to it. Another soldier told me about Mahler: Symphony No. 1 which I thought was fantastic, especially the 4th movement. Now I listen to classical music everyday, thanks to being in the Army.

One of the most interesting facts of science: All life on Earth comes from a single ancestor.

Evidence of common descent of living organisms has been discovered by scientists researching in a variety of disciplines over many decades, demonstrating that all life on Earth comes from a single ancestor.

It would take more than a lifetime to study the whole thing at Wikipedia - Evidence of common descent, and this is just one of hundreds of Wikipedia articles about evolution.

Also the Encyclopedia Britannica has numerous articles about the evidence for evolution. Same thing for thousands of other science websites.

There are thousands of YouTube videos about the evidence for evolution.

There are tons of books about the subject. I have read these 6 books about how evolution works and the evidence for it:

Your Inner Fish - A Journey Into The 3.5-Billion-Year History Of The Human Body by Neil Shubin

Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne

The Making of the Fittest - DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll

Evolution - The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer

The Greatest Show on Earth - The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

"God's Word or Human Reason? An inside Perspective on Creationism" by Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby, and Michael Keesey.

I study evolution because it's interesting. Here in Idiot America most people don't want to study anything. They would rather throw out all of science than make any effort to understand it.

In Idiot America know-nothing science deniers would rather get all their information about evolution from professional morons for Jeebus. Then they learn nothing which is their goal. I'm not making this up. Millions of American fucktards go way out of their way to know nothing. In the 21st century that's quite a feat.

"If there's a paper in one of the big journals that discusses more evidence for evolution, there is a creationist hack somewhere who'll quickly write it up and lie about it."
-- PZ Myers, University of Minnesota biologist

Central America’s Violent Northern Triangle

I was wondering why so many people from Central America desperately want to move to Idiot America so I looked it up.

El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras consistently rank among the most violent countries in the world. El Salvador became the world’s most violent country not at war in 2015, when gang-related violence brought its homicide rate to 103 per hundred thousand. It has since fallen by one third. Nevertheless, all three countries have significantly higher homicide rates than neighboring Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama.

Extortion is also rampant. A 2015 investigation by Honduran newspaper La Prensa found that Salvadorans and Hondurans pay an estimated $390 million, $200 million, and $61 million, respectively, in annual extortion fees to organized crime groups. Extortionists primarily target public transportation operators, small businesses, and residents of poor neighborhoods, according to the report, and attacks on people who do not pay contribute to the violence.

The whole thing is at Council on Foreign Relations - Central America’s Violent Northern Triangle

What's the solution? I suggest if these people want to work we have plenty of jobs available, so let them get in. Of course this solution requires throwing out President Fucktard Trump.

In Belize (formerly British Honduras), English remains the official language.

A section of reef off the coast of Belize. The government has imposed a moratorium on oil exploration in the area.

Most news about the environment is bad news. Our planet is being destroyed by stupid fucking assholes, for example the President of the United States.

This article from the New York Times is about a country that did something right for the environment and it worked. Well done Belize.

New York Times - A Victory for Coral: Unesco Removes Belize Reef From Its Endangered List

By Tryggvi Adalbjornsson

June 27, 2018

It was a drop of good news about the world’s oceans: The Belize Barrier Reef, the largest barrier reef system in the Northern Hemisphere, has been removed from the United Nations list of endangered world heritage sites.

Unesco, the world body’s educational, scientific and cultural agency, said its heritage committee voted Tuesday to remove the reef from its list of threatened sites because it no longer faced immediate danger from development.

“In the last two years, especially in the last year, the government of Belize really has made a transformational shift,” said Fanny Douvere, the coordinator of the marine program at Unesco’s World Heritage Centre.

United Nations officials initially cited “mangrove cutting and excessive development” as the main concern when the reef was added to the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2009. They have also expressed concern about oil exploration. Since then, the Belize government has imposed a moratorium on oil exploration around the reef and implemented protections for coastal mangrove forests.

Experts cautioned, though, that the long-term danger to the world’s reefs from climate change remains real.

“The primary threats are all still there,” said John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The big one, of course, is ocean warming.”

The world’s largest coral ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef, has been hit hard by rising temperatures in recent years. An underwater heat wave in Australian waters two years ago spurred a die-off of coral so severe that scientists say that reef will never look the same again.

Scientists say they have observed signs of coral bleaching on the Belize reef. Bleaching occurs when unusually warm water causes the corals to lose plantlike organisms that help keep them alive. In 2015 and 2016, almost a quarter of the corals off the Belizean coast were affected by bleaching, according to a report by the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative, an organization that monitors reefs.

If most of the world’s coral reefs die, as scientists fear is increasingly likely, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with income from reef tourism. In poorer countries, lives are at stake: Hundreds of millions of people get their protein primarily from reef fish, and a reduction of that food supply could become a humanitarian crisis.

Australia successfully demanded that a chapter detailing damage to the Great Barrier Reef be cut from a 2016 Unesco report on threatened heritage sites so that it would not affect tourism.

The Belize Barrier Reef system, which extends roughly 200 miles, was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1996. The system is made up of a series of coral reefs, cays and islands, many of which are covered with mangroves.

Despite covering less than a thousandth of the ocean floor, coral reefs are home to more than a quarter of marine fish species. The state of reefs is considered an important indicator of the overall health of the seas.

Many Christian morons are liars for Jeebus. They dishonestly say they used to be atheists. It's obvious they don't know what an atheist is.

I found this at Trendy Testimonies: Why Christians Keep Saying They’re Ex-Atheists

The Key Differences Between Atheism and Christians’ Version of Atheism.

We can spot some very key differences between the version of atheism most atheists seem to embrace, and the one that Christians invented.

FIRST: The definition itself.

Most atheists embrace a definition of their worldview that involves a simple lack of belief in any gods. Some atheists are hard atheists. They’ll say outright that gods don’t exist. Others content themselves with concluding that no evidence supports the notion of deities.

By contrast, many Christians believe that atheism is simply a childish desire to rebel against a god that atheists totally still believe in. They think that this form of atheism requires the same level of faith that they have for their god. They even insist that atheists still perform all the same kinds of faith-based rituals and devotions that Christians do–just in service to atheism’s idols rather than to Christian ones.

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The "lack of belief" atheists are wimps. Real atheists would say they're 100% certain magic god fairies and Easter Bunnies are not real. The wimpy wimps disgrace atheism.

Many Christian fucktards think atheists believe in the god fairy. Their stupidity is breathtaking.

Christianity is brain damage. There is no cure. Extreme stupid can't be fixed.

What is love? Baby don't hurt me, Don't hurt me, No more

Some extreme Christian stupid in Idiot America.

“I believe that creation is a religion, but so is evolution,” he said. “The only difference is, only one religion is allowed to be taught to the kids.”

Evolution is a scientific idea, not a religious idea. Evolution also has the advantage of being the strongest fact of science.

What we have here is an uneducated moron who has made religious brainwashing his career. This is child abuse. The child abuser belongs in prison.

Here is the whole ridiculous thing. It's in Wyoming.

Lingle Baptist church examines creationism with mobile museum

Staying alive is a good thing.

Wikipedia - Jeanne Calment

Jeanne Louise Calment 21 February 1875 – 4 August 1997) was a French supercentenarian who has the longest confirmed human lifespan of 122 years, 164 days.

Although Calment came from a long-living family, there is no particular explanation for her extreme longevity. She had lived a comfortable and stress-free life, with a healthy appetite and a daily exercise routine, enabling her to walk without a stick until 114.

I found some good advice for Democrats.

The Republican Party wants to throw out science, they want to destroy the environment, they are god-soaked and theocratic, and they're stupid fucking assholes.

The Democratic Party doesn't have any of those problems but unfortunately they are an anti-business party. That's a big mistake.

Here is the advice I found. Will the Democrats know about this advice? Probably not. Will they accept this advice? Probably not. Will Trump win the election in 2020? Unfortunately I think the Democrats are going fuck everything up again. Trump (aka lunatic, aka uneducated moron) will be president for 8 years instead of 4 years.

This is important to understand:

"The new tax bill is also instructive. Let me state something that is heresy with some Democrats: Cutting the corporate tax rate was good for the economy. It levels the playing field with other countries, keeps thousands of jobs at home, and makes billions of dollars available for reinvestment, especially in smaller companies with limited access to capital markets."

The Democrat were against this tax bill. That's a terrible mistake. Workers are getting raises and bonuses. Are they going to vote for the Democrats who want to throw out the tax reform bill? Of course not. Trump will win again if the Democrats continue to be the anti-business party.

Go for Growth, Fellow Dems

To counter Trump, become the party of inclusive prosperity.

By Tony James

June 28, 2018

We Democrats assumed a Trump presidency would be disastrous for the economy. But despite a disorderly administration and confusion in Washington, the economy is on a roll and the stock market has soared. Whether we view President Trump as a nightmare to be endured or a foe to be battled, Democrats should hear a wake-up call.

Economic growth, hourly wages, consumer confidence and personal spending are accelerating. Unemployment is the lowest in two decades. For the first time, job openings exceed the number of unemployed. Some of the current expansion is built on the foundation laid by the Obama administration. And although Mr. Trump’s lack of fiscal discipline risks ballooning deficits, Democrats cannot dismiss the critical importance of new policies that have helped propel the economy.

Many Trump voters—high-school-educated Americans battered by globalization—are our natural constituents. We need to win them back. If Democrats are going to return to power, we need a strong pro-prosperity platform that includes pragmatic and economically inclusive policies that drive growth.

Let’s look at regulation. The attitude that regulation is fundamentally good—and any attempt to reduce it bad—is far too prevalent among Democrats. In 2012 and again in 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that landowners could sue to challenge Environmental Protection Agency decisions to protect wetlands. No one at the EPA seems to have asked if its regulations were actually the best way to preserve wetlands. Regulation of the wrong sort hurts economic growth and diminishes U.S. competitiveness.

The new tax bill is also instructive. Let me state something that is heresy with some Democrats: Cutting the corporate tax rate was good for the economy. It levels the playing field with other countries, keeps thousands of jobs at home, and makes billions of dollars available for reinvestment, especially in smaller companies with limited access to capital markets.

A recent Morgan Stanley survey showed that companies expect to reinvest the bulk of the tax savings in higher wages, increased capital expenditures and research and development. The companies surveyed anticipated passing only a quarter to shareholders in dividends and buybacks. That squares with the plans of the companies our firm has invested in, and is corroborated by the significant jump in capital expenditures—24%—by S&P 500 companies last quarter.

Many think corporate tax reform was not the appropriate national priority. It certainly didn’t do enough to help struggling Americans, and the personal tax cuts were insufficiently progressive. But heated rhetoric from Democrats often dismisses tax reform altogether. From the results, it appears that these policies have given the economy a significant boost. As Democrats, what blinded us? Did our overriding disdain of all things Trump mean we failed to recognize that some of his policies make economic sense?

It is time we built a closer partnership with business, and prioritize ideas over criticisms. One example is infrastructure. Investment in infrastructure would provide fiscal stimulus, create high-paying jobs, improve safety, and increase productivity. Over the longer term, fixing aging infrastructure can add 0.5% to annual economic growth.

Another driver of economic expansion is growth in our labor force. That means we need immigrants—skilled and unskilled. Tech businesses struggle with the deficit of workers trained in science, technology, engineering and math. Agriculture suffers from a lack of seasonal workers. A more accommodating immigration policy would be embraced by business, unleashing further economic growth and expanding the tax rolls.

Addressing trade inequities would also help U.S. producers protect jobs at home. The U.S. has effective tariffs of 9%; China, 27%. Beyond tariffs, China also appears to have benefited disproportionately from current trading rules and has not taken sufficient steps to open its own economy. The result for the U.S. is a trade deficit of $375 billion a year.

Contrary to the prevailing views of most corporate executives, economic evidence shows that a higher minimum wage would benefit business because the added demand more than offsets the added cost. It doesn’t help anyone to have consumers at the poverty line. By engaging constructively with business leaders, Democrats should be able to build consensus on this issue.

There are other areas where Democrats’ priorities and business goals should align: What business executive wouldn’t favor more-efficient health care for everyone, an effective retirement system, better education for more talented employees, and federal support for technological innovation?

Embracing business doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to its flaws. Sensible regulation is vital to a vibrant market economy. More fundamentally, Americans have to feel that the economic system is fair and can work for everyone.

But if we want voters to hand us back the reins of government, we must be able to help the economy grow. That means establishing a constructive partnership with private business. As Democrats, we have already conceded faith, family and freedom to the Republican Party. We need to be the party of inclusive prosperity. Let’s not also concede that to the Republicans.

Mr. James is executive vice chairman of Blackstone and author of “Rescuing Retirement.”

Appeared in the June 29, 2018, print edition.

Every week the Wall Street Journal has something called "Houses of Worship". I call it "Houses of Stupidity". This one is about Islam, also known as the world's largest terrorist organization. Islam requires throwing out evolution. Everything is "Allah did it". The stupid, it burns.

I wrote this comment at the Wall Street Journal - Muslim women stop rationalizing or tolerating abuse.

"The Quran tells me that God has created women and men equally."

The Magic God Fairy created nothing. The thing is a myth. The religions that believe in this moronic fantasy should be thrown out.

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My Wall Street Journal subscription expires on Tuesday July 3, 2018. Good riddance when that happens. It's a god-soaked anti-science newspaper and I'm fed up with it.

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The fucktards at the Wall Street Journal vaporized my comment. They love censorship. Drop dead Wall Street Journal.

Jacek Kaspszyk conducts Grieg's Morning Mood from Peer Gynt. Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra recorded at Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall in Warsaw, Poland, February 21, 2016.

The Art Institute of Chicago

Oh Yeah

This is a well done quote about the Magic Jeebus Man.

"Nothing is too far fetched when you claim to base your life around the fictional ramblings of some Magic-zombie-Jew-on-a-stick™ and his psycho dad!"

I have seen this mistake many times. People are not spelling "Jeebus" correctly.

The correct spelling is "Jeebus", not Jesus and not Jebus.

For example: The Magic Jeebus Man magically became a zombie after decomposing for 3 days.

Numerous times I have seen an idea that's totally wrong not to mention ridiculous and childish.

Numerous times I have seen an idea that's totally wrong not to mention ridiculous and childish.

The idea goes like this: A person can accept evolution (aka the strongest fact of science and the foundation of biology) and still believe in a magic god fairy, but the fairy must be part of the evolution thing. These morons for Jeebus say the fairy invented or used or guided evolution. They have to stick their fairy in there because the only alternative is throwing the fairy in the garbage where it belongs.

The fairy did not invent evolution. The fairy did not use evolution. The fairy did not guide evolution.

Evolution by natural selection is a natural process. All natural processes, especially evolution, do not require a fairy's magical powers for anything. If people can't figure that out then they're insane. Does this mean most Americans are batshit crazy? Yes, that's exactly what it means. Most Americans are insane and most of them have an incurable stupidity problem.

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Encyclopedia Britannica - Molecular biology

The field of molecular biology provides the most detailed and convincing evidence available for biological evolution. In its unveiling of the nature of DNA and the workings of organisms at the level of enzymes and other protein molecules, it has shown that these molecules hold information about an organism’s ancestry. This has made it possible to reconstruct evolutionary events that were previously unknown and to confirm and adjust the view of events already known. The precision with which these events can be reconstructed is one reason the evidence from molecular biology is so compelling. Another reason is that molecular evolution has shown all living organisms, from bacteria to humans, to be related by descent from common ancestors.

A remarkable uniformity exists in the molecular components of organisms—in the nature of the components as well as in the ways in which they are assembled and used. In all bacteria, plants, animals, and humans, the DNA comprises a different sequence of the same four component nucleotides, and all the various proteins are synthesized from different combinations and sequences of the same 20 amino acids, although several hundred other amino acids do exist. The genetic code by which the information contained in the DNA of the cell nucleus is passed on to proteins is virtually everywhere the same. Similar metabolic pathways—sequences of biochemical reactions (see metabolism)—are used by the most diverse organisms to produce energy and to make up the cell components.

This unity reveals the genetic continuity and common ancestry of all organisms. There is no other rational way to account for their molecular uniformity when numerous alternative structures are equally likely. The genetic code serves as an example. Each particular sequence of three nucleotides in the nuclear DNA acts as a pattern for the production of exactly the same amino acid in all organisms. This is no more necessary than it is for a language to use a particular combination of letters to represent a particular object. If it is found that certain sequences of letters—planet, tree, woman—are used with identical meanings in a number of different books, one can be sure that the languages used in those books are of common origin.

Genes and proteins are long molecules that contain information in the sequence of their components in much the same way as sentences of the English language contain information in the sequence of their letters and words. The sequences that make up the genes are passed on from parents to offspring and are identical except for occasional changes introduced by mutations. As an illustration, one may assume that two books are being compared. Both books are 200 pages long and contain the same number of chapters. Closer examination reveals that the two books are identical page for page and word for word, except that an occasional word—say, one in 100—is different. The two books cannot have been written independently; either one has been copied from the other, or both have been copied, directly or indirectly, from the same original book. Similarly, if each component nucleotide of DNA is represented by one letter, the complete sequence of nucleotides in the DNA of a higher organism would require several hundred books of hundreds of pages, with several thousand letters on each page. When the “pages” (or sequences of nucleotides) in these “books” (organisms) are examined one by one, the correspondence in the “letters” (nucleotides) gives unmistakable evidence of common origin.

The two arguments presented above are based on different grounds, although both attest to evolution. Using the alphabet analogy, the first argument says that languages that use the same dictionary—the same genetic code and the same 20 amino acids—cannot be of independent origin. The second argument, concerning similarity in the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA (and thus the sequence of amino acids in the proteins), says that books with very similar texts cannot be of independent origin.

The evidence of evolution revealed by molecular biology goes even farther. The degree of similarity in the sequence of nucleotides or of amino acids can be precisely quantified. For example, in humans and chimpanzees, the protein molecule called cytochrome c, which serves a vital function in respiration within cells, consists of the same 104 amino acids in exactly the same order. It differs, however, from the cytochrome c of rhesus monkeys by 1 amino acid, from that of horses by 11 additional amino acids, and from that of tuna by 21 additional amino acids. The degree of similarity reflects the recency of common ancestry. Thus, the inferences from comparative anatomy and other disciplines concerning evolutionary history can be tested in molecular studies of DNA and proteins by examining their sequences of nucleotides and amino acids. (See below DNA and protein as informational macromolecules.)

The authority of this kind of test is overwhelming; each of the thousands of genes and thousands of proteins contained in an organism provides an independent test of that organism’s evolutionary history. Not all possible tests have been performed, but many hundreds have been done, and not one has given evidence contrary to evolution. There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms.

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Evolution is the strongest fact of science and a magic god fairy had absolutely nothing to do with it.

"There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms."

"It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views."

New York Times - Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential

By NICHOLAS WADE

FEB. 9, 2009

Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part.

It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.

Biologists quickly accepted the idea of evolution, but for decades they rejected natural selection, the mechanism Darwin proposed for the evolutionary process. Until the mid-20th century they largely ignored sexual selection, a special aspect of natural selection that Darwin proposed to account for male ornaments like the peacock’s tail.

And biologists are still arguing about group-level selection, the idea that natural selection can operate at the level of groups as well as on individuals. Darwin proposed group selection — or something like it; scholars differ as to what he meant — to account for castes in ant societies and morality in people.

How did Darwin come to be so in advance of his time? Why were biologists so slow to understand that Darwin had provided the correct answer on so many central issues? Historians of science have noted several distinctive features of Darwin’s approach to science that, besides genius, help account for his insights. They also point to several nonscientific criteria that stood as mental blocks in the way of biologists’ accepting Darwin’s ideas.

One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, and for 12 years more before its sequel, “The Descent of Man,” which explored how his theory applied to people.

He brought several intellectual virtues to the task at hand. Instead of brushing off objections to his theory, he thought about them obsessively until he had found a solution. Showy male ornaments, like the peacock’s tail, appeared hard to explain by natural selection because they seemed more of a handicap than an aid to survival. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick,” Darwin wrote. But from worrying about this problem, he developed the idea of sexual selection, that females chose males with the best ornaments, and hence elegant peacocks have the most offspring.

Darwin also had the intellectual toughness to stick with the deeply discomfiting consequences of his theory, that natural selection has no goal or purpose. Alfred Wallace, who independently thought of natural selection, later lost faith in the power of the idea and turned to spiritualism to explain the human mind. “Darwin had the courage to face the implications of what he had done, but poor Wallace couldn’t bear it,” says William Provine, a historian at Cornell University. (Read commentary by Dr. Provine on passages from "On the Origin of Species." )

Darwin’s thinking about evolution was not only deep, but also very broad. He was interested in fossils, animal breeding, geographical distribution, anatomy and plants. “That very comprehensive view allowed him to see things that others perhaps didn’t,” says Robert J. Richards, a historian at the University of Chicago. “He was so sure of his central ideas — the transmutation of species and natural selection — that he had to find a way to make it all work together.”

From the perspective of 2009, Darwin’s principal ideas are substantially correct. He did not get everything right. Because he didn’t know about plate tectonics, Darwin’s comments on the distribution of species are not very useful. His theory of inheritance, since he had no knowledge of genes or DNA, is beside the point. But his central concepts of natural selection and sexual selection were correct. He also presented a form of group-level selection that was long dismissed but now has leading advocates like the biologists E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson.

Not only was Darwin correct on the central premises of his theory, but in several other still open issues his views also seem quite likely to prevail. His idea of how new species form was long eclipsed by Ernst Mayr’s view that a reproductive barrier like a mountain forces a species to split. But a number of biologists are now returning to Darwin’s idea that speciation occurs most often through competition in open spaces, Dr. Richards says.

Darwin believed there was a continuity between humans and other species, which led him to think of human morality as related to the sympathy seen among social animals. This long-disdained idea was resurrected only recently by researchers like the primatologist Frans de Waal. Darwin “never felt that morality was our own invention, but was a product of evolution, a position we are now seeing grow in popularity under the influence of what we know about animal behavior,” Dr. de Waal says. “In fact, we’ve now returned to the original Darwinian position.”

It is somewhat remarkable that a man who died in 1882 should still be influencing discussion among biologists. It is perhaps equally strange that so many biologists failed for so many decades to accept ideas that Darwin expressed in clear and beautiful English.

The rejection was in part because a substantial amount of science, including the two new fields of Mendelian genetics and population genetics, needed to be developed before other, more enticing mechanisms of selection could be excluded. But there were also a series of nonscientific considerations that affected biologists’ judgment.

In the 19th century, biologists accepted evolution, in part because it implied progress.

“The general idea of evolution, particularly if you took it to be progressive and purposeful, fitted the ideology of the age,” says Peter J. Bowler, a historian of science at Queen’s University, Belfast. But that made it all the harder to accept that something as purposeless as natural selection could be the shaping force of evolution. “On the Origin of Species” and its central idea were largely ignored and did not come back into vogue until the 1930s. By that time the population geneticist R. A. Fisher and others had shown that Mendelian genetics was compatible with the idea of natural selection working on small variations.

“If you think of the 150 years since the publication of ‘Origin of Species,’ it had half that time in the wilderness and half at the center, and even at the center it’s often been not more than marginal,” says Helena Cronin, a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics. “That’s a pretty comprehensive rejection of Darwin.” (Dr. Cronin's comments on Darwin's text.)

Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. “People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior,” Dr. Cronin says. “But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin’s tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies — that’s quite an influential body that’s still rejecting Darwinism.”

The yearning to see purpose in evolution and the doubt that it really applied to people were two nonscientific criteria that led scientists to reject the essence of Darwin’s theory. A third, in terms of group selection, may be people’s tendency to think of themselves as individuals rather than as units of a group. “More and more I’m beginning to think about individualism as our own cultural bias that more or less explains why group selection was rejected so forcefully and why it is still so controversial,” says David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at Binghamton University.

Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”

Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.

A version of this article appears in print on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Darwin: A Mind Still Prescient After All These Years. Order Reprints Today's Paper Subscribe

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One more thing: If you're a know-nothing creationist fucktard then grow up and educate yourself you lazy worthless piece of garbage. We know about your extreme stupidity problem but that's no excuse. Get to work, look things up, and educate yourself. If education makes you cry then shut the fuck up. You're not qualified to say anything about science because you don't even know what science is.

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Another one more thing: Charles Darwin was the most important person who ever lived. Period. There should be no debate about this. Nobody has ever changed the world more than Charles Darwin.

Some stuff from the New York Times about the evidence for evolution. I will be using this to look things up.

Google search - New York Times - evidence for evolution

News about evolution, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

Loreena McKennitt "Penelope's Song"

Wikipedia - Loreena McKennitt

"Penelope's Song"

Now that the time has come
Soon gone is the day
There upon some distant shore
You'll hear me say

Long as the day in the summer time
Deep as the wine dark sea
I'll keep your heart with mine.
Till you come to me.

There like a bird I'd fly
High through the air
Reaching for the sun's full rays
Only to find you there

And in the night when our dreams are still
Or when the wind calls free
I'll keep your heart with mine
Till you come to me

Now that the time has come
Soon gone is the day
There upon some distant shore
You'll hear me say

Long as the day in the summer time
Deep as the wine dark sea
I'll keep your heart with mine.
Till you come to me

This New York Times editorial is about President Fucktard Trump's moronic love for trade wars.

The President of the United States is destroying the global economy and he's too fucking dense to realize it. When he finally realizes he is fucking up everything he won't admit it.

"The administration has no idea what it’s doing. Its ideas on trade don’t seem to have evolved at all from those expressed in a white paper circulated by Wilbur Ross, now the commerce secretary, and Peter Navarro, now the trade czar, in 2016. That white paper was a display of sheer ignorance that had actual trade experts banging their heads on their desks. So these people are completely unprepared for the coming blowback."

"And remember, soybeans and steel offer just a minor preview of the disruptions ahead. How will the administration react to the blowback when the trade war really gets going? Will it admit that it misjudged the effects of its policies? Of course not."

Here is the whole thing:

New York Times - The Great Soybean Conspiracy

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

June 25, 2018

The Trump administration appears to be headed for a trade war on three fronts. As far as anyone can tell, it is simultaneously going to take on China, the European Union and our partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement. The economic fallout will be ugly.

But that’s probably not the whole story: There’s also likely to be ugly political fallout, not just abroad but here at home, too. In fact, I predict that as the downsides of hard-line trade policy become apparent, we’ll see a nasty search by President Trump and company for people to scapegoat. In fact, that search has already started.

To understand what’s coming, you need to understand two crucial points.

First, the administration has no idea what it’s doing. Its ideas on trade don’t seem to have evolved at all from those expressed in a white paper circulated by Wilbur Ross, now the commerce secretary, and Peter Navarro, now the trade czar, in 2016. That white paper was a display of sheer ignorance that had actual trade experts banging their heads on their desks. So these people are completely unprepared for the coming blowback.

Second, this administration is infested — I use that word advisedly — with conspiracy theorists. In fact, it seems, literally, to treat belief in absurd conspiracy theories as a job qualification. You may remember the case of an official at the Department of Health and Human Services who was temporarily suspended after reports that she had worked for a conspiracy-theory website. Well, it turns out that she listed that connection on her résumé when she applied for government employment. She was hired not despite but because of her connection to paranoid politics.

So what will happen when cluelessness meets conspiracy theorizing?

About that trade blowback: Trump famously declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Never mind the goodness issue: It’s already becoming apparent that the “easy to win” part is delusional. Other countries won’t quickly give in to U.S. demands, in part because those demands are incoherent — Trump is demanding that Europe end the “horrific” tariffs it doesn’t actually impose, while the Chinese can’t even figure out what the Trump administration wants, with officials callingAmerica “capricious.”

Add in the enormous amount of ill will Trump has generated around the world, and the idea that America is going to get major concessions anytime soon is deeply implausible. In fact, I’m finding it hard to see how we avoid a series of tit-for-tat retaliations that end up taking us well down the path toward full-blown trade war.

And while some import-competing industries might gain from such a trade war, there would be a lot of American losers. For one thing, a lot of American jobs — more than 10 million, according to the Commerce Department — are supported by exports. Agriculture, in particular, is a very export-centered sector, sending more than 20 percent of what it produces abroad. A trade war would eliminate many of these jobs; it would create new jobs in import-competing industries, but they wouldn’t be the same jobs for the same people, so there would be a lot of disruption.

And the damage wouldn’t be limited to export industries: More than half of U.S. imports, and 95 percent of the Chinese goods about to face Trump tariffs, are intermediate inputs or capital goods — that is, things that U.S. producers use to make themselves more efficient. So the coming trade war will raise costs and hurt prospects for many businesses, even if they aren’t exporters.

So how will this conspiracy-minded administration react when domestic victims of its trade policy start complaining? We’ve already had a preview.

To date we’ve only had some minor trade skirmishes; but even these have sent the price of soybeans, which we export to China, plunging, while the price of steel has soared. And farmers and steel-using businesses are unhappy.

So did the administration say, “Look, we’re taking a tough stand, and there will be some costs”? Why, no. Instead, Ross declared that the price changes were the work of “antisocial” speculators engaged in “profiteering,” and called for an investigation. See, we aren’t looking at the predictable effects of administration policy; we’re looking at an anti-Trump conspiracy.

By the way, this kind of accusation isn’t normal for a top government official. I follow these things, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

And remember, soybeans and steel offer just a minor preview of the disruptions ahead. How will the administration react to the blowback when the trade war really gets going? Will it admit that it misjudged the effects of its policies? Of course not.

What I predict, instead, is that it will start seeing villains under every bed. It will attribute the downsides of trade conflict not to its own actions, but to George Soros and the deep state. I’m not sure how they can work MS-13 into it, but they’ll surely try.

The point is that the politics of trade war will probably end up looking like Trump politics in general: a search for innocent people to demonize.

Follow me on Twitter (@PaulKrugman).

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A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2018, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Great Soybean Conspiracy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The difference between science and religion: Scientists throw out ideas when new evidence shows it's wrong while primitive religions never throw out anything.

“I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it”.

-- Charles Darwin

According to a recent Gallup poll 81 percent of Americans are uneducated morons.

Gallup poll - May 22, 2017 - In U.S., Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low

Only 19% of Americans agree with the biologists: Evolution is how the world works and the Magic Man had nothing to do with it.

38% of Americans think the Magic Man magically created all creatures including human apes out of nothing. Most likely a magic wand was required.

Another 38% of Americans think the Magic Man is one of the mechanisms of evolution.

5% of Americans said "What is evolution?"

I don't understand how anyone could think a natural process like evolution requires supernatural magic. Maybe they realize their magic god fairy of the gaps is running out of hiding places so they stick their fairy into evolution.

Why evolution and not gravity? Evolution always gets special treatment. Other branches of science they accept without magic. It's obvious Charles Darwin killed the god fantasy and that's what the god-soaked are worried about.

The obvious solution is growing up and facing facts. Unfortunately virtually all these morons for Jeebus will never grow up. Reality makes them cry.

What about the 38% of Americans who want to throw out all of biology? That's extreme stupid and always it's incurable.

Jeebus and Mohammad

The last rose of summer

'Tis the last rose of summer,
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
Or give sigh for sigh.

I'll not leave thee, thou lone one!
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go, sleep thou with them.
Thus kindly I scatter,
Thy leaves o'er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow,
When friendships decay,
And from Love's shining circle
The gems drop away.
When true hearts lie withered,
And fond ones are flown,
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?

Everything you always wanted to know about whales and how they evolved.

We have fossils that explain the transition from fish to land animals. And we also have fossils that explain the transition from land animals to whales. All of this fossil evidence has been been confirmed by DNA sequencing.

It's amazing what natural selection can accomplish in millions of years.

This is a fossil of an ancient whale, an ancestor of modern whales. As whales evolved from land animals their hind limbs were no longer necessary so those limbs gradually shrunk until they were gone. Natural selection doesn't select for something that is not necessary.

Look at how the forelimbs have become paddles, the tail has become long and flexible, and, especially, how the rear limbs have almost disappeared (they’re the tiny bones flanking the mid-section of the tail). But they’re still recognizable: rock-hard evidence that whales evolved from land animals—something amply confirmed by DNA sequencing.

"Creationists often deny that these vestigial limbs are evidence for evolution, noting that they could function in copulation. But that’s ridiculous, for we not only see their gradual shrinkage over time, but—more important—why would the Creator make a 'copulation guide' that had every bone homologous to those of the fully-functioning hind limbs of their ancestors, and of modern tetrapods? To deny that this is evidence for evolution shows the intellectual dishonesty of creationists."
-- Jerry Coyne

There is more evidence for the evolution of whales at Jerry Coyne's website. I suggest click the link, it's very interesting.

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Since June 10, 2018 I have been getting a New York Times delivered 7 days a week. My subscription to the Wall Street Journal ends on July 3, 2018. Good riddance when that happens. The Wall Street Journal has articles about science but always the people who write comments there are know-nothing science deniers. Science, especially evolution, makes Republican morons cry. Virtually every WSJ subscriber is a Republican.

The New York Times science articles are better and much more numerous then what the WSJ has.

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New York Times - Wrap Your Mind Around a Whale

By Nick Pyenson

Dr. Pyenson is a paleobiologist who studies marine mammals.

June 23, 2018

The facts of a blue whale seem improbable; it is hard to wrap your mind around an animal with jaws the height of a football goal post. Those jaws are not just the ocean’s utmost bones (to borrow from Melville) but the utmost bones in the history of life on Earth.

And yet these superlative whales haven’t been huge that long. In fact, they emerged just about 4.5 million years ago, coinciding almost perfectly with the human era.

We are living right now in the age of giants. Blue whales, fin whales, right whales and bowhead whales are the largest animals, by weight, ever to have evolved. How did this happen? And what does this tell us about how evolution works?

Fossils show that the earliest whales were more obviously mammalian — they had four legs, a nose, maybe even fur. They had bladelike teeth and lived in habitats that ranged from woodlands with streams to river deltas, occasionally feeding in the brackish waters of shallow equatorial coasts. And they were the size of a large dog.

If you were somehow able to return to an ancient shoreline and happened upon the entire assemblage of early whales, you wouldn’t be able to guess which four-legged creature would beget the whales we know. In their own times and habitats, each was as well adapted as any sea lion or otter living today. But it was the whales that completely severed their ties to land that eventually won the evolutionary sweepstakes.

Still, it took these whales most of their 50-million-year history to become giants. It was not the parade of evolutionary transformations and innovations to their bodies (the refashioning of forelegs into flippers or the appearance in some species of baleen, for feeding, for example) that made them big. Instead, my colleagues and I argued in a 2017 study that the onset of ice ages, a few million years ago, affected the distribution of their prey, making it hyperabundant in warmer seasons along the coasts. This set the stage for long-range migration, while enhancing advantages that baleen whales already had for living large.

This brings up a theoretical question: Can whales continue to get bigger?

A lot about an animal’s biology — how quickly its heart races, how many young it produces, how long it lives — can be predicted from its size alone, whether it is enormous or microscopic. The mathematics that describes how biology changes across these scales is called allometry (the same math is used to explain economies and traffic jams). Applying allometry to the study of whales is the key to understanding not just what it takes to be a giant, but also the limits of living things on Earth.

There are disadvantages to being enormous. The largest whales are so big and thick with blubber that overheating in warmer waters is a risk.

Whale lungs are so large and specialized that they present their own quandaries. They must be able to collapse quickly enough to avoid rupturing when the whales dive deep (as some toothed whales do), but also to reinflate rapidly at the surface after two hours underwater. Blue whales don’t dive anywhere close to the depths you’d expect for their body size. In part it’s because their prey live near the light, but it also seems that it takes too much energy to breathe all the oxygen necessary for a deeper plunge.

As organisms scale up, physics dictates what’s possible for any kind of movement and function, be it blood flow, digestion or locomotion. Sauropod dinosaurs, for example, had limbs like columns to support their massive weight, yet their load was most likely lightened by an avian-like respiration system, which permeated their skeleton with air sacs.

Whales obviously haven’t had to deal with the force of gravity since they became fully aquatic; underwater, they are essentially weightless. Instead, forces such as drag have shaped their bodies, especially when feeding. When scientists used allometry to calculate drag on mathematical models of different-size whales, they found that beyond lengths of 110 feet a blue whale would not be able to close its mouth fast enough around quickly escaping prey. Others have found that a whale that big wouldn’t gain enough calories from the mouthful to make up for the energy lost from the act.

In other words, the largest whales ever measured, at 109 feet, are theoretically the largest whales that can exist.

Of course, physics isn’t the only factor imposing limits on these leviathans. Whaling is estimated to have killed nearly three million whales in the 20th century alone.

Human hands have imperiled other cetaceans. Not a whistle or splash of the Yangtze River dolphin has been recorded since the first decade of the 21st century. Responsibility for the extinction of this species can be placed squarely on our shoulders: We dammed the only river in which it lived. Other species such as the vaquita, a small porpoise that has never been spotted outside the Gulf of California, remain on the extinction watch list; there are only one or two dozen left.

The news isn’t all dire: Some whale species, such as humpbacks, have rebounded from the brink; gray whales, icons of the West Coast, are even expanding to new habitats as climate and oceans change.

But on today’s planet, large body size is correlated with a higher extinction risk. Almost all of the largest whale species today, including blue whales and right whales, are navigating an increasingly urbanized ocean, full of larger and faster ships, noise and detritus. The extreme size of the largest whales puts them at risk of entanglement in fishing gear and trauma from ship strikes.

Their size can also be a liability if the environment changes rapidly, which we know is happening now, thanks to the behavior of our own species. Features of past whale worlds, such as sea-level rise and the acidification of ocean water, will return in the near future as a result of widespread burning of fossil fuels driving climate change.

How successfully whales and humans can share this evolutionary moment is a high-stakes story that’s still being written. The more we learn about these giants that can live more than twice as long as we do, and whose migrations take them across entire oceans, the better their chances of survival on Earth in the age of humans.

I think we have reason to hope that these largest creatures on the planet will continue to awe us for centuries to come, living, as they do, on the knife-edge between perfect and perilous adaptation.

Nick Pyenson is the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and the author of the forthcoming “Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures,” from which this essay is adapted.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2018, on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Wrap Your Mind Around A Whale. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Why is the Republican Party infested with anti-science theocratic Christian assholes?

A quote from Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for president in 1964:

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the Republican party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

-- Barry M. Goldwater

I answered a good question: "Why do people believe in God when the level of proof is so low? We ask the highest standards from science, but we take the content of a book as truth. What would be the acceptable standard for an event to be considered divine intervention?"

"Why do people believe in God when the level of proof is so low? We ask the highest standards from science, but we take the content of a book as truth. What would be the acceptable standard for an event to be considered divine intervention?"

"Why do people believe in God when the level of proof is so low?" Some people are willing to believe any ridiculous bullshit if it makes them feel good, for example the totally impossible magical-2nd-life fantasy.

"We ask the highest standards from science, but we take the content of a book as truth." Before a scientific idea is accepted it has to be tested numerous times and it must pass every test. Religion is much different. Ancient people wrote a disgusting book and they called it "The Word of God". Their evidence: Nothing. I don't understand why there are so many morons who just assume the "word of god" bullshit is true.

"What would be the acceptable standard for an event to be considered divine intervention?" Fantastic claims require fantastic evidence. The god-soaked have nothing but their wishful thinking and their total ignorance of science. Divine intervention is impossible so I can't imagine what evidence is required to accept something that requires throwing out all of reality.

The god-soaked like to invoke their magic-god-fairy of the gaps. The idea goes like this: "I don't understand how this happened therefore the Magic Man did it." This is called giving up. Scientists never give up. They do research to find out what really happened.

If a moron doesn't understand something that doesn't mean it was a magical event. It only means the moron doesn't understand.

The god of the gaps has run out of hiding places. There will always be research opportunities in every branch of science but the basic stuff has been figured out including the development of the 1st simple living cells 4 billion years ago and how the universe began almost 14 billion years ago. They even have ideas about how something can come from nothing.

People can use google to look things up they don't understand. The god-soaked never look things up. They have zero curiosity. They don't understand how the world works because they don't want to understand. They just want to hide in their childish everything-is-magic fantasy land. What a pathetic waste of a life.

If the Democrats nominate a liberal extremist to be the candidate for president in 2020, Trump could win the election again which would be a disaster.

According to the New York Times, Elizabeth Warren is one of the Trump's "leading potential opponents in the 2020 election." Ms. Warren is a liberal extremist. For example she wants to throw out the one thing President Fucktard Trump did right which was signing the tax reform bill which has created thousands of jobs. Trump contributed nothing for the development of this bill. He just signed it. Trump is an uneducated moron but he knows how to sign his name.

The Democrats need to nominate someone who admits the Republicans sometimes have good ideas. If they nominate an extremist we could be stuck with a lunatic president until 2024.

President Fucktard Trump's moronic love for trade wars is already destroying American jobs. Trump is a stupid fucking asshole.

"Harley-Davidson Inc. (HOG) was down 5.3% after saying it would shift production of some of its Europe-bound motorcycles to international facilities because of trade tariffs."

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Dow Falls Sharply, Nasdaq Sinks as Wall Street Weighs Trump's New Trade Threats

Johann Strauss II - The Blue Danube Waltz. Simon and Garfunkel - Kathy's Song.

I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory it falls Soft and warm continuing Tapping on my roof and walls. And from the shelter of my mind Through the window of my eyes I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets To England where my heart lies. My mind's distracted and diffused My thoughts are many miles away They lie with you when you're asleep And kiss you when you start your day. And a song I was writing is left undone I don't know why I spend my time Writing songs I can't believe With words that tear and strain to rhyme. And so you see I have come to doubt All that I once held as true I stand alone without beliefs The only truth I know is you. And as I watch the drops of rain Weave their weary paths and die I know that I am like the rain There but for the grace of you go I.

50 years on, the British girl who inspired Paul Simon: Woman immortalised in Kathy's Song now lives in quiet Welsh village

A question for Christian creationists and Muslim creationists, how long does it take for the blindingly obvious to be accepted?

A question for Christian creationists and Muslim creationists, how long does it take for the blindingly obvious to be accepted?

There are countless thousands of evidences for evolution. Are you people insane or stupid or what? What's your fucking problem?

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By David Horton (Australia) May 28, 2010

A curious thing about creationists. I try to study the minds of these strange people, who still, 150 years after Alfred Wallace, retain the primitive mindset of the eighteenth century when people thought that animal species, including the naked ape, had been created, each in its own place, by a finger-pointing white-bearded figure in the sky. It is as if we still had, living among us, people who believed in phlogiston, or humors, or the heart as the seat of emotions; a glimpse back into a distant past of primitive ideas about the world around us.

So I study them, much as a time traveler visiting the Dark Ages might, or a traveler to the deepest Amazon finding a previously uncontacted tribe.

And in the case of creationists, these strange throwbacks living still among us, I try to see the world through their eyes, wonder what strange shadows that imperfect organ is throwing on to the retina of these good simple people as they struggle to come to grips with the realities of several hundred years of scientific advances.

Here is one for you. What do creationists see when they look in the evolutionary mirror? What do they see when they look at Chimpanzee or Gorilla? Do they see both as just another mammal, like Cat or Dog, Kangaroo or Opossum, Platypus or Echidna? Do they not see the close resemblances to us in the face, the expressions, the hands and feet, the body, the behavior, the movement, the social groups, the young? Do they not say, well, my cousin is a hairy man, but he is still my cousin? Do they not say there but for the grace of Darwin go we? That these close cousins just traveled a different path from an obviously identical starting point?

And looking at the faces of their cousins, are they not inspired to investigate further, find that the resemblance is not just skin deep but extends through brain and skeleton and into the most fundamental unit of evolution the DNA?

I mean it is one thing to believe that the old silverback in the sky created beasts of burden and sheep and cattle, obviously different to, and, from an anthropocentric view, inferior to, humans, as part of his reward of dominion over all as long as you didn’t eat of the “tree of evolutionary knowledge” scheme. But the bronze age sheepherders typing out the Old Testament on a piece of goatskin didn’t know about the great apes, or even the monkeys, which did not live around what the desert nomads thought of as the centre of the universe but which we now call the Middle East, a kind of evolutionary backwater with barely enough species known to fill a boat.

If there had been a band of gorillas living by the Dead Sea, or a band of chimpanzees living on the Mount of Olives, do you think one of the sheepherders might have modified the relevant bit of his creation mythology to read, “And then Yahweh created the great apes, and he took a rib from a chimpanzee and it became the first human”?

With that kind of mythology, one of Darwin’s early ancestors, say living in Ancient Athens, might well have been inspired to discover the reality of evolution long before Alfred Wallace. And in that case, would the primitive members of the Texas School Board still be demanding that creationism be taught? How long does it take for the blindingly obvious to be accepted?

Why do Muslim nations treat women like second class citizens? It's because Muslim morons are afraid of women.

Wall Street Journal - Saudi Women Drivers Face One Last Roadblock: Saudi Men

Kingdom’s ban on female drivers will end on Sunday, but some fear harassment on the road.

By Margherita Stancati and Donna Abdulaziz June 21, 2018

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—When this kingdom’s ban on women driving ends Sunday, many Saudi women say they still face a major obstacle to getting behind the wheel: the opposition of conservative men.

Some women who are otherwise excited by the idea of driving worry they will be harassed by men on the road or by relatives ashamed of their own family breaking a cultural taboo. Some men have openly vowed to menace women drivers, sparking the Saudi government to issue a new antiharassment law that came into effect earlier this month.

Alanoud Hakami, who is 22 and lives in Jeddah, said she has no plans to get a driver’s license out of fear of harassment, which her husband and father have both warned her about. They drive her to work as a handbag saleswoman and oppose her driving.

“I don’t want to drive because young Saudi men are not respectful. It’s not like abroad,” says Ms. Hakami.

The decision to allow women to drive in Saudi Arabia is part of a broader program of social change spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and aimed at opening up the kingdom and diversifying its oil-dependent economy. Encouraging more women to join the workforce is an important part of the plan—and making it easier for them to get to work is a prime reason the government decided to lift the ban.

For decades, the kingdom’s roads have been reserved for men only, and clerics repeatedly branded driving as immoral for women, saying it allowed them freedom to behave sinfully.

That mind-set is beginning to change, but the social stigma attached to women driving will take some time to fade.

Many men have vented their opposition to the decision to lift the ban using a Twitter hashtag that translates to “you will never drive.” After the ban’s planned lifting was announced in September, a man was arrested for posting a video online in which he threatened to set fire to women and their cars if they dare to drive.

Many women have responded defiantly. “I will drive,” one said on Twitter, posting a picture of her Saudi driving school textbook.

Even some men who say they are in favor of women driving admit they don’t want their own female relatives to get behind the wheel.

A Jeddah-based businessman who goes by the name of Abu Mohammed said he would only allow his wife and daughters to drive in case of emergency. He predicted “total chaos” on Saudi roads after the ban is lifted and said he planned to travel abroad to avoid what he believes will be a traffic mess.

“There will be so many accidents,” he said, repeating a familiar theme among Saudi men that new women drivers will make mistakes. “They’ll end up pressing the gas instead of the brakes. Accidents are inevitable. They are going from the kitchen to the street for the first time.”

Many Saudi women have welcomed the freedom to drive. Tens of thousands of women have signed up for driving courses at the six driving schools for women that have so far opened, and many already obtained their Saudi driving licenses. They will soon be able to work as taxi drivers, with ride-hailing apps like Uber eager to recruit Saudi women.

But the fear of harassment is holding some of them back. A survey carried out in March by the Saudi National Center for Public Opinion Polls showed that 61% of women polled wanted to drive. Of those who didn’t want to drive, 41% said it was because they feared traffic accidents and 27% because they were scared of being harassed by men.

Those fears prompted the government to issue a new law coming into effect this month to stop harassment. Those found guilty—even of online harassment—face a fine of 100,000 Saudi riyals ($26,700) or up to two years in prison. Repeat offenders and perpetrators who are in a position of authority over the victims could face even higher penalties.

But many women worry that isn’t enough and want to wait to see whether the law will serve as an effective deterrent.

“Many girls, myself included, won’t feel completely safe until we see the actual effect of the law,” said Sarah Ibrahim, 23, a saleswoman in Jeddah. “It’s like cellphones: There is a law prohibiting the use of mobile phones while driving, but people do it all the time.”

She still wants to learn to drive. “We can’t continue to be the only country in the world where women can’t drive,” Ms. Ibrahim said.

Noura al-Mangour, a driving instructor at Riyadh’s Princess Noura University, said she has already experienced harassment firsthand. She was driving with a beginner on the university campus when she noticed the school car was being followed. The man driving it then overtook them and jammed on the brakes, she said. Ms. Mangour used the emergency brake to avoid a crash.

Like many of her students, she wasn’t sure she would ever dare drive outside the university’s sprawling campus for fear of being harassed—until the government passed the antiharassment law.

“I feel safe now,” says Ms. Mangour, who said she had a second unpleasant encounter with a male driver in the campus last week. “All I had to do was take out my phone, and they panicked and fled. There is definitely more awareness now about girls not staying silent victims to harassment.”

She plans to install a dashboard camera on the car she is planning to buy.

Many women have to summon the will to challenge both men who would harass them while driving and their husbands who oppose it.

Ghadir al-Mezeni, 29, said her husband opposed her driving because he considers it immoral and believes it would expose her to harassment.

“I want to rely on myself. I definitely want to drive. I don’t want to be at the mercy of men,” said Ms. Mezeni, who works as a saleswoman in a shoe store.

“Hopefully, he’ll change his mind,” she said of her husband. “Once he gets used to seeing women drive, maybe he’ll agree.”

Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com

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In Saudi Arabia and the other Middle East theocracies women are required to wear a black tent. Islam is a disgusting cult.

A driving instructor in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, earlier this month.

I found a well done explanation of what Jews in Europe had to endure during World War Two.

I have read 8 books about the Holocaust. Christianity is what made these atrocities possible. Long before the 20th century Christians were murdering Jews. During World War Two, Poland, a very religious Catholic country, had no problem with Jews being exterminated.

Here it is, written by Jay Winik:

Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were rounded up and packed into cattle cars, with little air or light, no food and virtually no water, for a harrowing two- to three-day trip to Auschwitz. They rode in terror and anticipation, having no idea what was in store for them at the destination. Exhausted and scared, they frequently had to stand for the entire trip. Mothers clutched sons; daughters held on to fathers; children gripped both parents’ hands; grandparents and the infirm struggled to stay alive. Many didn’t survive the journey.

When the trains arrived at Auschwitz, it was a scene of chaos, confusion and horror. After days trapped in darkened cattle cars, squinting into bright floodlights lining the tracks was almost unbearable. So was the stench, like nothing the captives had ever smelled before. They didn’t know it at the time, but it was the odor of burning human flesh and hair.

Outside, they heard all kinds of noises: German shepherds and Doberman pinschers barking loudly, and commands in German most of them couldn’t understand. When they stumbled out of the cattle cars, disoriented and anxious, timidly asking questions, the German shouted back, “Raus, raus, raus!” (“Out, out, out!”). In the distance, the prisoners saw a skyline of chimneys, with bright orange plumes of flame shooting into the clouds. They didn’t know that most of them would be ash within hours.

The SS separated the healthy males, slating them for work details while everyone else was taken to the gas chambers.

Invariably, mothers wanted to stay with their children. The SS would say, “good, good, stay with child.” Under a rain of baton blows, women, children and old men were marched into “changing rooms” and told to undress. The Germans told the prisoners that they were going to be “disinfected.” Then they tightly wedged some 2,000 people at a time into the chambers, where they saw what looked like shower heads.

The massive airtight doors were locked with an iron bolt. It was dark. Zyklon B was released, and the screaming began. The prisoners huddled together, screamed together, gasped for air together. While children violently hugged their parents, hundreds of people tried to push their way to the door, trampling children in the process. In the dark, skulls were crushed and hundreds of people were battered beyond recognition. The bloodcurdling screams turned into a death rattle, then a gasp. Within 20 minutes, the job was done.

The bodies lay in heaps, every one of them dead—as many people as were cut down in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg; two-thirds of the 9/11 death toll. The bodies were then burned, the ashes used as filler for German roads and walking paths. Within hours, the Nazis would repeat the process, extinguishing another 2,000 human lives.

As for the prisoners who were selected to work in the camps, the Germans stripped them of their identities, referring to them instead by numbers tattooed on their forearms. Prisoners were forced to stand half-naked, doused with buckets of ice-cold water, or lashed 50 times with a whip. They were awakened at 4 a.m., forced to do backbreaking work for 12 hours with virtually no rest or food. They slept almost naked, with no blankets in temperatures often below freezing in the winter. Most died within weeks of arriving at the camp.

Between the gas chamber and the work detail, more than a million people were murdered this way at Auschwitz.

Mr. Winik, formerly the inaugural historian-in-residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of “1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History.”

Railroad tracks lead into Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi death camp in Poland.

What I wrote for a wimpy agnostic fucktard.

"I consider myself to be an agnostic, I don't know if God exists."

What's your problem? Are you too dense to be able to figure it out?

Answer this question: Is magic real or not? Can you figure that one out?

God is just another word for magic.

"I try to be respectful of others beliefs."

Then you have no problem with religious brainwashing (aka child abuse), religious violence, and a religious war against teaching evolution? All this stuff is OK with you?

Today I found out cockroaches have the same problem beetles have. If they're on their back it's very difficult for them to get on their feet again.

Today I saw a big Florida cockroach upside down in my living room. The creature was desperately trying to get back on its feet. If this was outside I would have gently flipped it over. I'm not so nice to cockroaches in my home. I picked it up and squeezed it. Then it was very dead. I gave it a proper Christian funeral. It's now decomposing in my garbage can.

I share an ancestor with the creature I murdered.

I used http://timetree.org/ to find out how long ago was the common ancestor of human apes and cockroaches.

Estimated Time: 797 million years ago.

A creationist fucktard will now say scientists think people evolved from cockroaches. That makes no sense. After 797 million years ago our ancestors were on different branches of the tree of life.

I found an interesting article about the common ancestor of human apes and chimpanzee apes. The idea is our common ancestor was not the same as today's chimpanzees. Today's chimps evolved just as much as we have.

The last common ancestor of humans and chimps probably wasn’t much like either

BY ERIN WAYMAN SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

Picture it: an African forest 7 million years ago. An evolutionary split is under way. One species of ape is about to give rise to two distinct lineages; one leading to humans, the other to chimpanzees. What does this last common ancestor of humans and their closest living relatives look like?

For years, many researchers have just imagined a chimpanzee.

At first glance, that seems sensible. Even though chimpanzees are genetically closer to humans than they are to the other great apes, chimps appear to have much more in common with gorillas and orangutans than with humans. These apes all look so similar and primitive: shaggy beasts with long arms and handlike feet for climbing and swinging through trees. Humans are the oddballs in this group. With naked bodies, nimble hands, a two-legged stance and, of course, supreme intellect, it seems logical that hominids have changed much more over the last 7 million years than chimps and their ancestors. This kind of thinking has led some scientists to view chimpanzees as a kind of baseline from which hominid anatomy and behavior evolved.

But over the last few decades, anthropologists have realized that this view of evolution is too simplistic and human-centric — and insulting to chimpanzees. In reality, our closest living cousins are not frozen in time; the chimp lineage has undergone its own evolution over the last several million years.

One source of flawed thinking about the human-chimp ancestor may be the sparse fossil record of chimps and their predecessors. Scientists have little tangible evidence to track chimp evolution, so it’s easy to imagine that their lineage hasn’t changed much. But there are plenty of signs that these apes aren’t stuck in a time warp.

Some of those signs are written in DNA. In 2007, biologists reported that chimpanzees have more genes that appear to have been changed by natural selection than humans do (233 versus 154 out of nearly 14,000 shared genes).

Behaviorally speaking, chimps are also unlikely to be carbon copies of their last common ancestor with humans, a fact demonstrated by Czech researchers in August. The team used a family tree of apes and monkeys and 65 characteristics related to development, ecology and mating and social behavior to reconstruct ancestors for various branches in the tree. The findings suggest that both humans and chimpanzees evolved a plethora of unique traits since separating from their common ancestor, Pavel Duda and Jan Zrzavý of the Czech Republic’s University of South Bohemia conclude in the Journal of Human Evolution. (Gorillas, by comparison, may be quite primitive, having kept many attributes of the common ancestor of great apes and humans that lived roughly 15 million years ago.)

With their analysis, Duda and Zrzavý paint a picture of the lifestyle of the human-chimp ancestor. They speculate that the ape lived in groups where one male bred with several females and he provided some care and protection to his progeny. In contrast, modern chimps are more promiscuous, living in large communities where many males mate with many females and vice versa. Humans are considered monogamous, although our mating behavior does vary around the world.

Other evidence hints that the body plan of chimpanzees has also changed dramatically since the human-chimp split, according to anthropologists who unearthed and analyzed what they claim is the closest thing anybody has ever seen to a fossil of a human-chimp ancestor. Discovered in Ethiopia, the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus is the earliest hominid for which scientists have found a nearly complete skeleton. In 2009, researchers unveiled an assessment of the species’ bones. Based on what they saw, they gave the human-chimp ancestor a complete makeover.

Before then, many scientists thought hominids descended from a tree-swinging ape that walked on its knuckles when it visited the forest floor, just like modern chimps and gorillas. But aspects of A. ramidus’ hands, feet, spine, hips and limbs indicate that the species must have instead originated from an ape that was quite monkeylike. Rather than hanging from tree limbs, the ancestors of hominids (and therefore chimps) probably walked on all fours on the tops of tree branches, C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio and colleagues proposed.

That assessment implies that chimpanzees and gorillas independently evolved their tree-swinging ways. Lovejoy’s team suggests this kind of arboreal behavior arose in both apes because they increasingly relied on fruits and leaves in the treetops while human ancestors depended more on terrestrial foods. Eventually, as forests thinned out in Africa, knuckle-walking emerged in both gorilla and chimp lineages as a way for the tree-climbers to travel between patches of forest.

Not all anthropologists agree with this analysis of A. ramidus, or even that the species was a hominid. But the study does highlight that chimpanzees aren’t living fossils. That doesn’t mean that studying chimps won’t shed light on our evolutionary history; it just means that researchers shouldn’t think of the apes as direct portals to the past.