This is the most interesting article in yesterday's New York Times. It's about a British woman who recently died at age 101. She flew war planes during World War Two. She is what I call a "real woman".

New York Times - Mary Ellis, Who Flew British Spitfires in World War II, Dies at 101

By Ceylan Yeginsu

July 26, 2018

LONDON — Mary Ellis, a pioneering aviator and one of Britain’s last surviving World War II female pilots, who overcame public disapproval to fly hundreds of Spitfires and heavy bombers to the front lines, died on Wednesday at her home on the Isle of Wight. She was 101.

Her death was confirmed by the Royal Air Force.

Mrs. Ellis was one of the last two living members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, or A.T.A., which has since disbanded. She alone ferried 400 Spitfires and 76 other kinds of aircraft to airfields during the war.

She joined the A.T.A. in 1941, a year after Britain allowed women to fly military aircraft, but they were still prohibited from involvement in combat missions.

“Everybody was flabbergasted that a little girl like me could fly these big airplanes all by oneself,” Ms. Ellis said at a party to celebrate her 100th birthday.

They were among the first women in Britain to get equal pay; 168 women, including volunteers from the United States, served in the A.T.A., according to the BBC.

Mary Wilkins was born on Feb. 2, 1917, on a farm in Oxfordshire, west of London, to Charles and Ellen Wilkins, according to the autobiography “A Spitfire Girl,” written with Melody Foreman. She grew up close to the bases of the Royal Air Force as one of five siblings.

Ms. Ellis told the BBC that she became interested in airplanes “from almost the year dot.” When father paid a flying circus to take her on a joy ride, she said, it “sealed her fate forever.”

She took her first flying lesson when she was a teenager and flew for pleasure until 1940, after she heard a radio advertisement seeking female pilots to join the A.T.A.

“Sometimes, as her efficiently compiled Logbook of those years between 1941 and 1946 reveals, she could have up to four aircraft in a day to deliver, ranging from Spitfires to Tempests, Hudsons, or a twin-engine Airspeed Oxford,” Ms. Foreman wrote in an online post.

The decision to allow women to fly Spitfires and bombers during the war was met with widespread resistance in Britain.

“Women anxious to serve their country should take on work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man’s occupation,” an editorial published in Aeroplane magazine in 1940 declared.

Ms. Ellis recalled in the BBC interview, “Girls flying airplanes was almost a sin at that time.”

But eventually the female aviators proved that they were up to the job, she said, and as a result they received a lot of attention.

“At that time we were called the ‘glamour girls.’ I don’t know why,” she said. “But there were always plenty of escorts around.”

In 1945, after the war ended, Ms. Ellis was invited to join the R.A.F. and became one of the first women to fly the Meteor jet fighter, according to Ms. Foreman.

She went on to work as a private pilot for a wealthy businessman, who bought Sandown Airport on the Isle of Wight, where Ms. Ellis was appointed manager in 1950.

She married a fellow pilot, Don Ellis, in 1961. The couple, who lived close to the Sandown Airport runway, had no children. He died in 2009.

Her death leaves Eleanor Wadsworth, who lives in Bury St. Edmunds, England, as the last surviving A.T.A. member.

During her service at the airport, which lasted until 1970, Ms. Ellis helped introduce passenger flights to and from the island to Europe. In recent years she had become a popular member of the Air Transport Auxiliary Association.

In January she received the Freedom of the Isle of Wight award for what the local council described as “heroic actions in delivering more than 1,000 aircraft to front-line units during World War II.”

Mrs. Ellis’s goddaughter, Clare Mosdell, a council cabinet member, described Ms. Ellis as “the last link to female pilots who did vital work in the fight against the Nazis and also against perceptions of what women could do.”

“Despite the danger and the attitudes of the time, Mary and her comrades came out triumphant in both,” she added.

About 15 female A.T.A. members were killed during World War II, according to the BBC.

In the autobiography, Ms. Ellis described flying her first Spitfire, on Oct. 15, 1942, which she called “a date and time etched in my memory.”

“I decide to pull back on the power to plus four boost and 2,400 r.p.m.,” she said, “and I fly away from the airfield at around 150 m.p.h. to the delight of an enthusiastic ground crew waving in celebration at my successful takeoff. I soon realize the ailerons are quite weighty but very responsive and the elevators refreshingly light in pitch.

“I look down from the neat cockpit and for a few moments enjoy the view below. I see fields, tiny random houses and then a cluster of buildings, a small village and the lanes to and from it. I listen to the thumping hum of a happy Merlin flexing its power in the sky where it belonged.

“But while my heart was completely fulfilled, my mind was busy in the cockpit of the fastest, most beautiful fighter aircraft in the world, as I was responsible for its safe journey to the R.A.F. pilots who needed it.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2018, on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Mary Ellis, Who Flew British Spitfires During Second World War, Dies at 101. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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BBC News is free. I suggest click the link.

BBC News - WW2 Spitfire pilot Mary Ellis from Isle of Wight turns 100

Mary Ellis joined the ATA in 1941 after hearing an advertisement on BBC radio

Mary Ellis in Biggin Hill, England, in 2015. She took her first flying lesson as a teenager and flew for pleasure until 1940, when she heard a radio ad for female pilots to join Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary.

Ms. Ellis in 2015. She and other women who flew for the Royal Air Force in World War II defied the norms of her era. “Everybody was flabbergasted that a little girl like me could fly these big airplanes all by oneself,” she said.

A comment I wrote at the New York Times. An editorial criticized Trump's tax reform. Not a good idea. Trump is a moron but signing the tax reform bill was a good idea. He contributed nothing but at least he knows how to sign his name.

"the Trump tax cut, which is so useless to ordinary workers"

Tax Reform made it possible for corporations to make more investments and hire more people. I would not call being able to get a job "useless".

This is just one of numerous examples:

"The Farmington parent of Pratt & Whitney, Carrier, Otis Elevator and United Technologies Aerospace Systems says recent federal tax reform will unleash enough of its capital to hire 35,000 workers — including 9,000 more in Connecticut — and to invest more than $15 billion in the U.S. in the next five years."

If the Democrats want to defeat Trump (as do I) then I suggest do not criticize tax reform.

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New York Times - Trump’s Supreme Betrayal

JUST IN: 35,000 jobs announced thanks to tax reform

Everything you always wanted to know about the evolution of the human eye

I googled "wikipedia evolution of human eyes".

As usual wikipedia provided tons of information and numerous links to more stuff, for example Evolution of color vision. I looked for but could not find anything about the Magic Man doing it.

Here in Idiot America our liars for Jeebus like to quote mine Charles Darwin. For example:

"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."
-- Charles Darwin

Their idea: Charles Darwin was an evolution denier therefore the Magic Man did it.

I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.

This is what the morons for Jeebus never see because their professional liars don't provide it and Christians are too lazy to look things up.

The rest of the Charles Darwin quote:

"Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound."

These days we know virtually everything there is to know about how eyes evolved. The research done is overwhelming. Evolution works. Evolution is a fact. Or to be more accurate evolution is the strongest fact of science.

Why is Idiot America infested millions of evolution deniers? The only possible explanation is extreme stupidity.

"Duh, duh, the Magic Man did it, duh."

American Christians, the Islamic State terrorists are on your side. Evolution makes Muslims cry. You stupid fucking assholes are equal to terrorists.

A Christian might complain: "I'm a Christian and I accept the established truth of evolution."

That's bullshit. You Christian scum don't accept evolution. You pollute evolution with god bullshit every chance you get. You invoke your fairy to invent and/or guide evolution. That's not science. That's magical creationism.

You Christian retards know evolution makes your magic god fairy completely unnecessary and that's why you have to stick your fairy into it.

There is an alternative: Grow up and face facts. There is no magic in the universe. Your fairy is not real. Your cowardly belief in a magical 2nd life is not real.

Reality or fantasy. You Christian scum prefer fantasy because you're cowards. Reality makes you cry. So you hide in your everything-is-magic fantasy land. Your childish fear of reality is not your only problem. Your worst problem is extreme stupidity. Your brain damage can't be fixed.

Everything you always wanted to know about earthworms

http://darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com/2018/04/many-years-ago-i-created-best-organic.html

At the New York Times Frank Bruni asked a good question: "Are you sure you want to get rid of Donald Trump?" The problem is if Trump is impeached then another stupid fucking asshole will get the job.

As everyone knows President Fucktard Trump is an uneducated moron.

Vice president Fucktard Pence is worse than Trump. Mike Pence is a fucking idiot.

When Pence was in the House of Representatives gave a speech about why magical creationism is true and why evolution is wrong. Somewhere in this blog there is a YouTube video of the whole thing. Click the label "Mike Pence" to find it.

As far as I know nobody in the entire history of Idiot America did a congressman give a speech in Congress about magical creationism.

I wrote this comment at the New York Times: "When Mike Pence was a congressman he gave a speech about why evolution is wrong and why magical creationism is true. I'm not making this up."

There is quite a bit more to know about this stupid fucking asshole for Jeebus so here is the entire article from the New York Times.

Mike Pence, Holy Terror

Are you sure you want to get rid of Donald Trump?

By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist

July 28, 2018

There are problems with impeaching Donald Trump. A big one is the holy terror waiting in the wings.

That would be Mike Pence, who mirrors the boss more than you realize. He’s also self-infatuated. Also a bigot. Also a liar. Also cruel.

To that brimming potpourri he adds two ingredients that Trump doesn’t genuinely possess: the conviction that he’s on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity. Trade Trump for Pence and you go from kleptocracy to theocracy.

That’s the takeaway from a forthcoming book by the journalists Michael D’Antonio, who previously wrote “The Truth About Trump,” and Peter Eisner. It’s titled “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” it will be published on Aug. 28 and it’s the most thorough examination of the vice president’s background to date.

I got an advance look at it, along with a first interview about it with D’Antonio, and while it has a mostly measured tone, it presents an entirely damning portrait of Pence. You’ve seen his colors before, but not so vividly and in this detail.

The book persuasively illustrates what an ineffectual congressman he was, apart from cozying up to the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos and other rich Republican donors; the clumsiness and vanity of his one term as governor of Indiana, for which he did something that predecessors hadn’t and “ordered up a collection of custom-embroidered clothes — dress shirts, polo shirts, and vests and jackets — decorated with his name and the words Governor of Indiana”; the strong possibility that he wouldn’t have won re-election; his luck in being spared that humiliation by the summons from Trump, who needed an outwardly bland, intensely religious character witness to muffle his madness and launder his sins; and the alacrity with which he says whatever Trump needs him to regardless of the truth.

In Pence’s view, any bite marks in his tongue are divinely ordained. Trump wouldn’t be president if God didn’t want that; Pence wouldn’t be vice president if he weren’t supposed to sanctify Trump. And his obsequiousness is his own best route to the Oval Office, which may very well be God’s grand plan.

“People don’t understand what Pence is,” D’Antonio told me. Which is? “A religious zealot.”

And D’Antonio said that Pence could end up in the White House sooner than you think. In addition to the prospect of Trump’s impeachment, there’s the chance that Trump just decides that he has had enough.

“I don’t think he’s as resilient, politically, as Bill Clinton was,” D’Antonio said. “He doesn’t relish a partisan fight in the same way. He loves to go to rallies where people adore him.”

There’s no deeply felt policy vision or sense of duty to sustain him through the investigations and accusations. “If the pain is great enough,” D’Antonio said, “I think he’d be disposed not to run again.”

So it’s time to look harder at Pence. “The Shadow President” does. It lays out his disregard for science, evident in his onetime insistence that smoking doesn’t cause cancer and a belief that alarms about climate change were “a secret effort to increase government control over people’s lives for some unstated diabolical purpose,” according to the book.

It suggests callousness at best toward African-Americans. As governor, Pence refused to pardon a black man who had spent almost a decade in prison for a crime that he clearly hadn’t committed. He also ignored a crisis — similar to the one in Flint, Mich. — in which people in a poor, largely black Indiana city were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead. D’Antonio told me: “I think he’s just as driven by prejudice as Trump is.”

During the vice-presidential debate with Tim Kaine, Pence repeated the laughable, ludicrous assertion that Trump would release his tax returns “when the audit is over” and falsely insisted that Trump hadn’t lavished praise on Vladimir Putin’s leadership — though the record proved otherwise.

The book says that in a high-level briefing about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Pence was told that intelligence officials hadn’t determined whether that interference had swayed the results. He then publicly claimed a finding of no effect.

At Trump’s urging and with taxpayer money, he and his wife, Karen, flew to a football game in Indianapolis just so he could make a big public gesture of leaving in protest when, predictably, some of the players took a knee during the national anthem.

And, following Trump’s lead, he rallied behind the unhinged former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. In a speech he called Arpaio a “tireless champion” of the “rule of law.” This was after Arpaio’s contempt-of-court conviction for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop using illegal tactics to torment immigrants. The conservative columnist George Will seized on Pence’s speech to write that Pence had dethroned Trump as “America’s most repulsive public figure.”

You can thank Pence for DeVos. They are longtime allies, going back decades, who bonded over such shared passions as making it O.K. for students to use government money, in the form of vouchers, at religious schools. Pence cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate to confirm her as education secretary. It was the first time in history that a vice president had done that for a cabinet nominee.

Fiercely opposed to abortion, Pence once spoke positively on the House floor about historical figures who “actually placed it beyond doubt that the offense of abortion was a capital offense, punishable even by death.” He seemed to back federal funds for anti-gay conversion therapy. He promoted a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“He is absolutely certain that his moral view should govern public policy,” D’Antonio told me.

D’Antonio then recounted two stories that he heard from college classmates of Pence’s after the book had gone to bed, so they’re not in there. One involved a woman in Pence’s weekly college prayer group. When she couldn’t describe a discrete “born again” experience, “he lectured her on her deficiencies as a Christian and said that she really wasn’t the sort of Christian that needed to be in this group,” D’Antonio said.

Another involved a college friend of Pence’s who later sought his counsel about coming out as gay. D’Antonio said that Pence told the friend: “You have to stay closeted, you have to get help, you’re sick and you’re not my friend anymore.”

According to D’Antonio’s book, Pence sees himself and fellow Christian warriors as a blessed but oppressed group, and his “hope for the future resided in his faith that, as chosen people, conservative evangelicals would eventually be served by a leader whom God would enable to defeat their enemies and create a Christian nation.”

I asked D’Antonio the nagging, obvious question: Is America worse off with Trump or Pence?

“I have to say that I prefer Donald Trump, because I think that Trump is more obvious in his intent,” he said, while Pence tends to “disguise his agenda.” D’Antonio then pointed out that if Pence assumed the presidency in the second half of Trump’s first term, he’d be eligible to run in 2020 and 2024 and potentially occupy the White House for up to 10 years.

Heaven help us.

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

Frank Bruni has been an Op-Ed columnist since June 2011. His columns appear every Sunday and Wednesday. He joined The Times from The Detroit Free Press in 1995, and is the author of three New York Times best sellers. @FrankBruni • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 2018, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Mike Pence, Holy Terror. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

This is what I copied & pasted from Amazon:

"Producing a biography of a living, controversial politician is always difficult. D'Antonio and Eisner have succeeded in this well-documented, damning book. Cue the outrage from Sean Hannity et al." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In this well-rounded, deeply-investigated biography, the first full look at the vice president, two award-winning journalists unmask the real Mike Pence.

Little-known outside his home state until Donald Trump made him his running mate, Mike Pence―who proclaims himself a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third―has long worn a carefully-constructed mask of Midwestern nice. Behind his self-proclaimed humility and self-abasing deference, however, hides a man whose own presidential ambitions have blazed since high school. Pence’s drive for power, perhaps inspired by his belief that God might have big plans for him, explains why he shocked his allies by lending Christian credibility to a scandal-plagued candidate like Trump.

In this landmark biography, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael D’Antonio and Emmy-nominated journalist Peter Eisner follow the path Pence followed from Catholic Democrat to conservative evangelical Republican. They reveal how he used his time as rightwing radio star to build connections with powerful donors; how he was a lackluster lawmaker in Congress but a prodigious fundraiser from the GOP’s billionaire benefactors; and how, once he locked in his views on the issues―anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro big-business―he became laser-focused on his own pursuit of power.

As THE SHADOW PRESIDENT reveals, Mike Pence is the most important and powerful Christian Right politician America has ever seen. Driven as much by theology as personal ambition, Pence is now positioned to seize the big prize―the presidency―and use it to fashion a nation more pleasing to his god and corporate sponsors.

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Some more stuff I found about this book:

KIRKUS REVIEW

Award-winning, veteran journalists collaborate on a well-researched and moderately toned yet searing biography of Vice President Mike Pence (b. 1959).

D’Antonio (A Consequential President: The Legacy of Barack Obama, 2017, etc.) and Eisner (MacArthur's Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II, 2017, etc.) begin with Pence’s middle-class, Catholic, politically moderate Indiana upbringing before tracing how the ambitious, polite young man turned toward increasingly exclusionary politics during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. As for the religious component, Pence’s mainstream Catholicism morphed into evangelical zealotry with a heavy emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible. Pence came to believe that God decided the path of every human; while still a student, he also adopted the notion that God would elevate him to the presidency. Of course, at such an early age, he did not foresee that serving as vice president to Donald Trump would constitute part of God’s plan. When that became reality much later, Pence tolerated Trump’s vitriol and scandals as preordained by God, simply a means to an end. The authors devote the final third of the book to the Trump-Pence partnership. In the middle sections, they document Pence’s marriage; an unfocused, meandering work history during his 20s; and impatient attempts to join the House of Representatives by defeating an entrenched Democratic incumbent. Pence lost twice before starting a career as an Indiana radio personality, which, a decade later, provided the name recognition he needed to become a Congressman. The authors provide copious evidence of Pence’s lackluster legislative accomplishments in Washington, D.C.; nonetheless, Pence won the governorship of Indiana in 2012. He demonstrated a low level of interest in actually governing, and he was often evasive or heartless when confronted with hot-button issues. Trump showed little interest in Pence’s legislative record, focusing instead on Pence’s patina of inoffensive behavior, pleasant physical appearance, and faith-based zealotry.

Producing a biography of a living, controversial politician is always difficult. D’Antonio and Eisner have succeeded in this well-documented, damning book. Cue the outrage from Sean Hannity et al.

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Vice president Pence is batshit crazy. I found this article about Pence. When he was governor of Indiana he tried to force women to have funerals for fetuses. I'm not making this up.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a law this year that mandated funerals for fetuses

By Emily Crockett@emilycrockettemily@vox.com Updated Oct 3, 2016

It’s no secret that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate, opposes abortion rights. Pence basically invented the Republican Party's war on Planned Parenthood while he was in Congress. He wants Roe v. Wade to be overturned. He signed every anti-abortion bill that crossed his desk as governor of Indiana.

But Pence signed one anti-abortion bill in March of this year that was so extreme, even some pro-life Republicans opposed it. And it was eventually blocked from going into effect by a federal judge for violating women’s right to choose.

The law did something truly bizarre. It would have basically forced women to seek funerary services for a fetus — whether she’d had an abortion or a miscarriage, and no matter how far along the pregnancy was.

The law Pence backed would have required all fetal tissue to be cremated or buried, an unprecedented measure in state law. The law also banned abortion if the fetus had a "disability" — which would have denied women the right to end a pregnancy even in case of serious fetal anomalies.

The wording of the burial provision meant that technically, even if a woman had a miscarriage at eight weeks of pregnancy at home, she would have to keep the blood and tissue, take it to a hospital or clinic, and have it buried or cremated by a funeral home. The law would have also dramatically increased the cost of an abortion, since providers would have had to spend time and money on arranging the funerary services.

And since about half of miscarriages happen shortly after a fertilized egg is implanted, and occur at roughly the same time a woman would expect her period, many women could be having a miscarriage and not even know it — and thus, technically be violating the law if they didn’t cremate or bury the resulting tissue.

As a protest against the new law's extreme requirements, women who opposed the law started a Facebook group called "Periods for Pence." Members of the group started calling Pence’s office in droves to tell him about their periods in graphic detail.

"Any period could potentially be a miscarriage," wrote the anonymous founder of Periods for Pence in an introductory post. "I would certainly hate for any of my fellow Hoosier women to be at risk of penalty" if they don't properly dispose of or report a potential miscarriage.

The idea of women reporting their periods as a legal precaution sounds absurd and Orwellian. But it's also what happens when you take a law as bizarre and medically incoherent as Indiana's to its logical conclusion.

Anti-abortion laws like the one Pence signed are often criticized for being medically incoherent — for requiring doctors to do things that make no sense from a medical perspective, or restricting abortion in ways that fail to account for the medical realities of pregnancy.

Pence also fell afoul of medical reality in 2015, when Indiana faced a devastating HIV outbreak. Pence arguably helped prolong the outbreak by waiting two months to authorize a clean needle distribution plan. And Pence's budget cuts that shuttered a rural Planned Parenthood arguably helped cause the outbreak in the first place.

Trump often comes across as incoherent and inconsistent on the issue of abortion. But Trump's choice of Pence as running mate helps indicate that Trump is willing to go all in on banning abortion in America.

Science makes Christian fucktards cry.

The science deniers don't understand the science that makes them cry. They don't understand the thousands of evidences for evolution and they don't understand how evolution works.

What's their problem?

Extreme stupidity and laziness. Education makes makes them cry. Reality makes them cry.

How hard is it to google "wikipedia evidence evolution"? They refuse to look anything up. They're just plain fucking stupid.

The Islamic State terrorists are creationists. American creationists are equal to terrorists, equally insane.

What I wrote a long time ago on this blog:

Evolution does not need defending because it's a basic scientific fact. The religious alternative, magical intelligent design creationism, is the most ridiculously stupid idea in the history of the human race. Creationism is more than an idiotic fantasy, it's a disease, a severe mental illness. Why do Christians deny the established truth of evolution, despite massive, powerful, and still growing evidence that's been accumulating for more than 150 years? There can be only one possible explanation. Christians (and their Muslim terrorist friends) are uneducated morons.

Christians are batshit crazy terrorists. They're fucking insane. Imagine the brain damage required to write this bullshit.

HELL

1. Place yourself in the Presence of God and humbly ask His help.

2. Imagine yourself in a city of gloom, a city of burning pitch and brimstone, a city whose inhabitants can never escape.

Considerations

1. Like those in this city, the damned are in the depths of hell, suffering unspeakable torments in every sense and member. Having used their life to sin, they suffer pain befitting their sin; eyes which looked on evil things will endure the awful visions of devils and of hell; ears which delighted to hear evil conversations will listen forever to awful wailing’s and lamentations and cries of despair.

2. Yet greater than all these torments is the loss of the glory and the Presence of God, being deprived of it forever. If Absalom found the suffering of never seeing his father’s face greater than that of banishment, how much greater our suffering at being excluded forever from the Face of God!

3. Consider that what makes hell intolerable is the fact that our suffering can never have and end. If a ache in the tooth or a slight fever makes the night seem endless, then how terrible that eternal night when afflicted with so many sufferings! An eternal night which gives birth to eternal despair and frenzied blasphemies without end.

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There is much more Christian stupidity at Do you think threatening people with eternal torture in hell is a good way to convince them to become Christians?

From a middle of nowhere town in Tennessee, some anti-science bullshit written by a know-nothing asshole preacher.

The people of Tennessee are famous for their fear of evolution. This is one of the most idiotic states of Idiot America.

There is a small town in Tennessee called Athens. Their newspaper has an article written by a preacher who says evolution is wrong. Besides not knowing what he was talking about, he is extremely dishonest.

Pastor’s Pen - Fearfully and wonderfully made

The 1st paragraph is just plain fucking stupid:

"Man is the apex of God’s creation. To suggest that man evolved from some primeval soup not only borders on the ridiculous, but also is scientifically unexplainable when considering the complexity of the human body."

Translation: Complexity therefore magic.

Click the link if you want to read the rest of what the liar for Jeebus wrote.

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I wrote this comment there:

From the article: Darwin said, “It is the height of bigotry to have only one theory of origins taught in our schools.”

I looked it up. The quote is not from Charles Darwin. He never said that.

"You could read that Charles Darwin claimed to have found the Piltdown man in a rock quarry near Piltdown Common in Sussex, England in 1912. This was proven to be a hoax in 1953. Yet, this lie was being printed in many science books."

Charles Darwin died in 1882 so he did not make that claim. It was Charles Dawson who is a different person. It was a scientist who proved it was wrong in 1953 which was 65 years ago. In 1912 many scientists thought it was wrong. Since then there have been numerous fossils found that have shown evolution is true.

Even Charles Darwin, the founder of evolution, wrote in The Origin of Species, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

This is quote mining and it's dishonest. In the next sentence Charles Darwin explained the evidence that shows the eye did evolve. And today we understand this process in extreme detail. Scientific progress did not stop in 1859.

Evolution is the strongest fact of science. You don't have to trust me or anyone else because anyone can study the thousands of evidences for evolution. Just google "wikipedia evidence for evolution".

Dr. Jack Scallions is a dishonest person and he doesn't know what he is talking about.

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UPDATE July 28, 2018

This small town newspaper deleted my comment, probably because I proved the preacher man is a fucking liar. This is how Christian scum defend their moronic death cult. They love censorship.

I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.

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The same newspaper in god-soaked Tennessee has numerous articles about god bullshit at http://www.dailypostathenian.com/community/religion/

If you're interesting in extreme Christian stupidity then I suggest click the link.

Do you think threatening people with eternal torture in hell is a good way to convince them to become Christians?

One example from a bible-thumping terrorist:

It's not a threat but rather a warning. God makes promises, not idle threats. He doesn't want to see you go there. He sent his only begotten Son to keep you out of that awful place.

He could just not warn you and let you go there. But that would be evil.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John 3:17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

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These assholes for Jeebus have a few problems.

They're batshit crazy. They are extremely gullible. And they have an extreme stupidity problem.

They don't realize threatening people (they call it a warning) with eternal torture is not a good way to sell their moronic death cult. People will just think they're assholes which is what they are.

Christianity is brain damage. There is no cure. Christian morons will never grow up and face facts. Reality makes them cry.

There is of course no magical 2nd life in a magical heaven or a magical hell. Magic is not real. Also it's impossible to torture a corpse because the thing is fucking dead.

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UPDATE July 28, 2018.

There are now 44 answers to the question I asked. Some of it was written by normal people, aka atheists, but mostly it's different ideas about the Magic Man, and all of it is very moronic. Of course no real evidence for their bullshit is provided. Just lots of bible quotes as if the Magic Man wrote the idiotic holy book.

Why do Christian assholes like President Fucktard Trump?

Why do Christian assholes like President Fucktard Trump (also known as the celebrity clown)?

As usual with Christian scum it's a stupidity problem.

Trump was not religious at all.

Then he decided to win the Republican nomination for president. He didn't want the job and he knew he wasn't qualified, he just wanted to get some publicity for future TV shows. He was surprised and disappointed when he defeated Clinton despite the odds. These days he is doing all he can to lose in 2020 and that's why he is trying to destroy the planet and the global economy. He also repeatedly makes a fool out of himself and he is dishonest about everything. But that might be because he's a idiot.

To win the nomination he sucked up to Christian morons. He said all the right things, for example abortions should be illegal even though he used to respect the Supreme Court's decision about it.

Christians want to stick their nose into other people's private lives. They never learned how to mind their own fucking business.

"Ospreys have rebounded in numbers following the ban on the pesticide DDT." Interesting fact about Idiot America: We have millions of stupid fucking assholes who say DDT doesn't harm birds. I'm not making this up. America is infested with millions of science deniers.

All About Birds - Osprey

Unique among North American raptors for its diet of live fish and ability to dive into water to catch them, Ospreys are common sights soaring over shorelines, patrolling waterways, and standing on their huge stick nests, white heads gleaming. These large, rangy hawks do well around humans and have rebounded in numbers following the ban on the pesticide DDT. Hunting Ospreys are a picture of concentration, diving with feet outstretched and yellow eyes sighting straight along their talons.

Wikipedia - Osprey

The osprey or more specifically the western osprey (Pandion haliaetus) — also called sea hawk, river hawk, and fish hawk — is a diurnal, fish-eating bird of prey with a cosmopolitan range. It is a large raptor, reaching more than 60 cm (24 in) in length and 180 cm (71 in) across the wings. It is brown on the upperparts and predominantly greyish on the head and underparts.

The osprey tolerates a wide variety of habitats, nesting in any location near a body of water providing an adequate food supply. It is found on all continents except Antarctica, although in South America it occurs only as a non-breeding migrant.

As its other common names suggest, the osprey's diet consists almost exclusively of fish. It possesses specialised physical characteristics and exhibits unique behaviour to assist in hunting and catching prey. As a result of these unique characteristics, it has been given its own taxonomic genus, Pandion and family, Pandionidae. Three subspecies are usually recognized; one of the former subspecies, cristatus, has recently been given full species status and is referred to as the eastern osprey. Despite its propensity to nest near water, the osprey is not classed as a sea eagle.

Status and Conservation:

The osprey has a large range, covering 9,670,000 km2 (3,730,000 sq mi) in just Africa and the Americas, and has a large global population estimated at 460,000 individuals. Although global population trends have not been quantified, the species is not believed to approach the thresholds for the population decline criterion of the IUCN Red List (i.e., declining more than 30% in ten years or three generations), and for these reasons, the species is evaluated as Least Concern. There is evidence for regional decline in South Australia where former territories at locations in the Spencer Gulf and along the lower Murray River have been vacant for decades.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the main threats to osprey populations were egg collectors and hunting of the adults along with other birds of prey, but osprey populations declined drastically in many areas in the 1950s and 1960s; this appeared to be in part due to the toxic effects of insecticides such as DDT on reproduction. The pesticide interfered with the bird's calcium metabolism which resulted in thin-shelled, easily broken or infertile eggs. Possibly because of the banning of DDT in many countries in the early 1970s, together with reduced persecution, the osprey, as well as other affected bird of prey species, have made significant recoveries. In South Australia, nesting sites on the Eyre Peninsula and Kangaroo Island are vulnerable to unmanaged coastal recreation and encroaching urban development.

Wikipedia - DDT

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, is a colorless, tasteless, and almost odorless crystalline chemical compound, an organochlorine, originally developed as an insecticide, and ultimately becoming infamous for its environmental impacts. It was first synthesized in 1874. DDT's insecticidal action was discovered by the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller in 1939. DDT was used in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops. Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods" in 1948.

By October 1945, DDT was available for public sale in the United States. Although it was promoted by government and industry for use as an agricultural and household pesticide, there were also concerns about its use from the beginning. Opposition to DDT was focused by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. It cataloged environmental impacts that coincided with widespread use of DDT in agriculture in the United States, and it questioned the logic of broadcasting potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment with little prior investigation of their environmental and health effects. The book claimed that DDT and other pesticides had been shown to cause cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. Its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on DDT's agricultural use in the United States. A worldwide ban on agricultural use was formalized under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, but its limited and still-controversial use in disease vector control continues, because of its effectiveness in reducing malarial infections, balanced by environmental and other health concerns.

Along with the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the United States ban on DDT is a major factor in the comeback of the bald eagle (the national bird of the United States) and the peregrine falcon from near-extinction in the contiguous United States.

President Fucktard Trump is wrong about everything including his tweet-war against Amazon.

Washington Post - Is the post office making or losing money delivering Amazon packages?

It seems like a straightforward question: Is the U.S. Postal Service making or losing money on its package delivery contract with Amazon — you know, the one President Trump can’t stop tweeting about? To answer it, all you need to do is start with the Postal Service’s revenue from Amazon, subtract all the expenses associated with delivering the Amazon packages and — voila! — you either get a positive number (a profit) or a negative one (a loss). Accounting 101.

As with most interesting questions, however, this one turns out to be more complicated than that.

For starters, other than Amazon and the Postal Service, almost nobody — including Trump — knows for sure what the revenue from the contract is. Analysts have estimated that Amazon uses the Postal Service for 40 percent of its shipping and that the per-package cost works out to roughly $2, or about half of the standard rate charged by other big shippers. One reason the Postal Service is willing to give Amazon such a big discount is the huge volume of deliveries that the contract guarantees — a key factor in business with high fixed costs. Another is that Amazon performs a fair amount of the shipping work itself, arranging the packages by Zip code and carrier route and dropping them off on pallets at one of 20 Postal Service distribution centers across the country. (Amazon founder and CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The trickier challenge, however, is figuring out what it costs the Postal Service to deliver those presorted packages from the distribution centers to millions of households and businesses.

If the Postal Service had set up a new, dedicated fleet of trucks and delivery personnel to work exclusively on the Amazon account, that would be a fairly easy number to come up with. And if that were the case, it’s a good bet that a contract charging $2 per package would be a money loser.

But that’s not what happened. When it sat down to negotiate its deal with Amazon, the Postal Service, in its role as the government-designated postal monopoly, was already required to stop by every home, business and rural post box six days a week, and already had the workforce and infrastructure to do that. In that context, the additional — or “incremental” — cost of delivering the additional Amazon packages would be much more modest. It might involve a few more trucks here and there, or the cost of buying slightly larger trucks than would otherwise have been needed. Perhaps additional delivery personnel would be necessary to accommodate the higher volumes Monday through Saturday. And there’s the extra overtime for providing the service on Sundays, which Amazon required. Looked at from the standpoint of incremental revenue (huge) minus these incremental expenses (modest), the Postal Service could very easily have come to the conclusion that, even at $2 a package, the Amazon contract was likely to be highly profitable.

So who is right? Is Amazon getting a sweetheart deal, as Trump protests, one that it could never have gotten from UPS or FedEx? Or, as the Postal Service contends, does the Amazon contract allow it to reduce its annual operating deficit and put itself on a more solid financial footing?

The answer, it turns out, is that both are right. In a very real sense, the arrangement is a win-win proposition, a great deal for both Amazon and the Postal Service.

Of course, we still haven’t exactly answered the larger accounting question, whether the Postal Service is making or losing money on the Amazon contract. Using short-term incremental accounting — incremental revenue minus incremental costs — the Amazon contract certainly looks profitable. But any enterprise that uses only short-term incremental accounting to price its products would, over the long run, probably find itself out of business. That’s because incremental cost accounting ignores the common costs (or what the Postal Service calls “institutional” costs) that can’t easily be attributed to any one customer or any one line of business — regular first-class “letter” mail, for example, or second-class newspapers and magazines, or third-class catalogues.

Indeed, under federal law, the Postal Service must not calculate only the incremental costs and revenue associated with any special contract or any of its lines of business when calculating costs. In setting rates, it must determine the full cost of providing the service by assigning an appropriate share of the common, or “institutional,” costs.

You could reason, for example, that since the postal worker was coming by my house to deliver a birthday card from Aunt Millie, it doesn’t add much cost for the postal worker to drop off a catalogue from Orvis and a paperback book from Amazon while he is there. But does that mean you should charge Aunt Millie the full cost of sending a postal worker to my house, while charging Orvis and Amazon only the incremental cost of adding their material to Aunt Millie’s delivery? Federal law says no — that in setting rates for Orvis and Amazon, the Postal Service should assign to them an appropriate share of the cost of the postman’s visit.

In the case of the Postal Service, these common, or “institutional,” costs are calculated to be quite high — 45 percent of all costs, according to a primer on postal costing issues put out by the agency’s Office of Inspector General. These costs include pensions, TV advertising, the salary of the postmaster general and a considerable amount of delivery costs — any expenses that do not change as the volume of mail rises or falls.

So how should these common costs be fairly shared and assigned to different contracts or lines of business? Should it be on the basis of the number of items delivered? Or by weight? By size? By the amount of revenue generated? Whatever method is chosen, inevitably it will be somewhat arbitrary, involving guesswork, averages, rules of thumb and plenty of subjective judgment.

With so much money at stake, you won’t be surprised to learn that there is a cottage industry of economists, accountants, lawyers and lobbyists in Washington who spend their days fighting over all this, along with the staffs of the Postal Service and the separate and independent Postal Regulatory Commission. Big companies that send out a lot of bills and catalogues, for example, are always arguing that their class of mail is assigned a too-high share of common costs, resulting in third-class postal rates that are too high. And then there are Federal Express and UPS, which make elaborate arguments about why too little of the common costs are assigned to package delivery, resulting in rates that are too low, allowing the Postal Service to steal business away from them.

Currently, the way the Postal Service calculates its package-delivery costs is to start with the incremental costs directly attributable with package delivery, or any of its “competitive” business lines, and then add an “appropriate" surcharge to cover common, or institutional, costs.

For all of the Postal Service’s competitive lines of business, including third-class mail and package delivery, this surcharge now covers 23.2 percent of all of the Postal Service’s common costs, significantly higher than the minimum 5.5 percent level required by federal law. Using that methodology, the Postal Regulatory Commission found that special contracts such as Amazon's generated $7 billion in profit for the Postal Service last year.

But a number of analysts, including more than a few hired by UPS and FedEx, have argued that the common charge assigned to the Amazon contract was way below that average, and way below what it should be to keep competition fair. The correct charge, they argue, would add about $1.50 to the calculated cost for the Postal Service to deliver a package.

So what would happen if Trump got his way and the Postal Service was required to charge that much for a package? It’s a pretty good guess that the Postal Service would lose many of its biggest package delivery customers, including Amazon. And without that revenue, the Postal Service would lose a lot more money than it is already losing. That would force it to dramatically raise rates on Aunt Millie and Orvis, who would respond by mailing fewer birthday cards and catalogues. And in the end, what you would get would be a death spiral that eventually would force Congress to shut down the Postal Service and sell it off to the highest bidder.

For years, critics of the Postal Service argued that it should act more like a profit-making business. Now that it is, those same critics are arguing that it should be prevented from using pricing strategies routinely used by profit-making businesses and act more like a government agency.

The reality is that the modern Postal Service has been set up to be a hybrid — part government agency with a mission of universal service, part private enterprise with a mission not to lose money, overseen by an independent regulator whose job is to make sure that the two missions are held in proper balance. Unfortunately, that is a reality that is way too complicated for our president to understand.

So what would happen if Trump got his way and the Postal Service was required to charge that much for a package? It’s a pretty good guess that the Postal Service would lose many of its biggest package delivery customers, including Amazon. And without that revenue, the Postal Service would lose a lot more money than it is already losing. That would force it to dramatically raise rates on Aunt Millie and Orvis, who would respond by mailing fewer birthday cards and catalogues. And in the end, what you would get would be a death spiral that eventually would force Congress to shut down the Postal Service and sell it off to the highest bidder.

For years, critics of the Postal Service argued that it should act more like a profit-making business. Now that it is, those same critics are arguing that it should be prevented from using pricing strategies routinely used by profit-making businesses and act more like a government agency.

The reality is that the modern Postal Service has been set up to be a hybrid — part government agency with a mission of universal service, part private enterprise with a mission not to lose money, overseen by an independent regulator whose job is to make sure that the two missions are held in proper balance. Unfortunately, that is a reality that is way too complicated for our president to understand.

A U.S. Postal Service worker delivers Amazon parcels.pred

Christian fucktard: "The Earth is a big fucking deal. The Magic Man did it."

When god-soaked morons use the words "fine tuned universe" (which is bullshit) what they really mean is "The Magic Man did it."

A know-nothing fucktard (at the Wall Street Journal, aka Fucktard Central) wrote:

"The Earth is a VERY VERY special place in a fine tuned universe, in a unique galaxy, with a unique sun, in a unique solar system. It is not an lucky accident, science is increasingly illumination how unique our earth is."

What I wrote for the fucktard:

"Earth is a VERY VERY special place"

"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
-- Carl Sagan

What I saw last night, July 27, 2018 at 3:00am. "In the final evenings of this month, the planet looms like a red lantern in the East, just 35,784,871 miles from Earth — the closest it has been in 15 years."

Last night I saw Mars which is very close to Earth these days. It was red. Nearby I could see the full moon.

http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury

More news about Mars:

New York Times - A Large Body of Water on Mars Is Detected, Raising the Potential for Alien Life

The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet.

For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life-forms beyond Earth.

Italian scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission announced on Wednesday that a 12-mile-wide underground liquid pool — not just the momentary damp spots seen in the past — had been detected by radar measurements near the Martian south pole.

“Water is there,” Enrico Flamini, the former chief scientist of the Italian Space Agency who oversaw the research, said during a news conference.

“It is liquid, and it’s salty, and it’s in contact with rocks,” he added. “There are all the ingredients for thinking that life can be there, or can be maintained there if life once existed on Mars.”

The body of water appears similar to underground lakes found on Earth in Greenland and Antarctica. On Earth, microbial life persists down in the dark, frigid waters of one such lake. The ice on Mars would also shield the Martian lake from the damaging radiation that bombards the planet’s surface.

Jonathan Lunine, director of the Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science at Cornell University, who was not involved with the research, said the finding transforms Mars from a dusty planet to yet another “ocean world” in the solar system.

“I think the more we explore Mars, the more intriguing and complex it becomes,” Dr. Lunine said.

For years, “follow the water” has been the mantra of NASA and indeed humanity’s search for life somewhere else. Without water, there is no life as we know it. In recent years, that has led the space agency to contemplate robot probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, like Europa or Enceladus, where it is now known that salty oceans exist underneath thin shells of ice and where imaginative astrobiologists can envision microbes or more complex creatures.

Since humans could see through telescopes across space, Mars has been the favorite abode of imaginary life, the backyard just over the fence where the astronomer Percival Lowell imagined he could see canals and even cities webbing the orange globe. In the final evenings of this month, the planet looms like a red lantern in the East, just 35,784,871 miles from Earth — the closest it has been in 15 years.

Those early science fiction visions were dashed when the first spacecraft photos of the planet revealed a dry, cratered and lifeless-looking surface — a seemingly dead planet. In the history of Mars exploration ever since, the more we learn, the more we think it could have had a watery, perhaps life-sustaining past. The surface is scored by old gorges, canyons, beaches, ocean basins and giant volcanoes, whose eruptions could have kept things riled up on the planet. Where this water went and how, taking most of Mars’s atmosphere with it, is one of the great and ominous environmental mysteries of our time.

Ju Wenjun, the new women’s World Chess Champion from Shanghai, China.

          

The special substance.

To the Editor:

In “A Case Against Marijuana,” by David Leonhardt (Opinion Today newsletter, July 20), we’re told that more marijuana research is needed. Here’s all the research you need: Marijuana use in America has been widespread for over 50 years. If there were any alarming social or health effects, we’d know by now.

There’s no justification for America’s draconian marijuana laws. Marijuana as a societal ill, when measured against alcohol, tobacco, sugar, guns, driving, climate change, Donald Trump and fast food, comes out looking like a breath of fresh air. Although you may eat more fast food.

Mark Laseau
Burlington, Vt.

What I wrote at a news website about Amazon and President Fucktard Trump.

"President Donald Trump earlier this week again tweeted a threat to the company, expressing his belief that Amazon takes advantage of the U.S. Postal Service, which he called its 'delivery boy'.”

The Postal Service makes a nice profit. Everyone wins including the customers. Trump is an idiot.

Unlike the Republican fucktards of the 21st century, James Madison, the 4th American president, respected our wall of separation between church and state, aka the Establishment Clause of our Bill of Rights.

Wikipedia - James Madison

James Madison Jr. (March 16, 1751 – June 28, 1836) was an American statesman and Founding Father who served as the fourth President of the United States from 1809 to 1817. He is hailed as the "Father of the Constitution" for his pivotal role in drafting and promoting the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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"What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy."
-- James Madison

Madison objected to state-supported chaplains in Congress and to the exemption of churches from taxation. He wrote: "Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

What I wrote for a Christian fucktard who pretends he has a brain.

Mr. Bell wrote “I am a christian, born and raised, but I do believe in evolution. Please don’t make sweeping over generalizations about religious people. Most of us are intelligent.”

If you’re intelligent then why do you live in the Christian fantasy world? And why do you say you “believe” in evolution? Since when did basic scientific facts become beliefs?

Most likely you stick your magic god fairy into evolution somewhere, either to invent, use, or guide evolution. That’s not accepting evolution. It’s polluting it with magic. If you really accepted evolution as the purely natural process it is, then you couldn’t possibly be a Christian because evolution makes your magic god fairy and your worthless dead Jeebus unnecessary.

By the way, you should have written “I am a Christian, born and brainwashed.”

New York Times article: Some very interesting science in Mozambique, Africa.

If you want to see the numerous photos you can click the link. At the New York Times you can read 5 articles a month for free.

New York Times - In Mozambique, a Living Laboratory for Nature’s Renewal

At Gorongosa National Park, scarred by civil war, scientists are answering fundamental questions about ecology and evolution, and how wildlife recovers from devastation.

By Natalie Angier

July 23, 2018

GORONGOSA NATIONAL PARK, MOZAMBIQUE — The 14 African wild dogs were ravenous, dashing back and forth along the fence of their open-air enclosure, or boma, bouncing madly on their pogo-stick legs, tweet-yipping their distinctive wild-dog calls, and wagging their bushy, white-tipped tails like contestants on a game show desperate to be seen.

Since arriving at the park three months earlier, as they acclimated to their new setting and forged the sort of immiscible bonds that make Lycaon pictus one of the most social mammals in the world, the dogs had grown accustomed to a daily delivery of a freshly killed antelope to feast on.

But it had been nearly 48 hours since the pack’s last meal and, hello, anybody out there?

Ah, here comes the food truck now. Paola Bouley, the park’s associate director of carnivore conservation, and two of her colleagues rode up to the fence in a pickup, opened the gate, edged the vehicle just inside the boma and began lowering the carcass of a male impala.

As she stood in the back of the truck, Ms. Bouley gripped a rope tied to the antelope’s rear legs, with the intention of luring the dogs from the comfort of their enclosure by slowly dragging their breakfast outside. Nice idea, but the dogs couldn’t wait.

They snatched at the carcass, tried disemboweling it in midair, yanking at the rope so violently they practically pulled the extremely fit Ms. Bouley to the ground. Stop, stop! she cried.

New plan: Let’s tie the rope to the pickup instead.

Again, lure and vehicle inched out through the gate, and this time the dogs followed, their coats the color of army camouflage, their ears the size of soap dishes. One, two, three, four, a baker’s dozen.

The dogs bounded to freedom and fell on the impala en masse, just as the scientists hoped they would do. Except something was wrong. The dogs stopped eating. They ran around in confusion.

One dog was missing, and not just any cur: It was the top dog, the alpha female of the pack. Where was their queen?

The scientists scrambled, too.

“It’s Beira — she’s still inside!” Ms. Bouley called out, referring to the name chosen for the alpha female by local schoolchildren in honor of the capital city of their province.

Loping over to the assembled observers, Ms. Bouley said, “She’s not coming out. She’s cautious. She’s always been cautious.”

Now more than ever: Beira was pregnant with pups that the entire pack would help raise. There was too much commotion. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave,” Ms. Bouley said.

It’s tough trying to resuscitate one of Africa’s most storied and biologically diverse national parks from a state of near-annihilation, the result of a brutal 16-year civil war in which an estimated one million Mozambicans were killed and a huge swath of Gorongosa’s wildlife destroyed. Tough, but by no means impossible.

Thirty minutes after dispersing her guests, Ms. Bouley sent a joyful update: All pack members had left the pen, and the gate had been closed to prevent their re-entry. The dogs had polished off their last free brunch and were exploring the neighborhood, clearly eager to resume their career as team hunters par excellence.

“This is a very special time for me,” said Pedro Muagura, Gorongosa’s park warden. In Mozambique, he said, many families have a totem animal, and his family’s is the wild dog.

Yet until the gang of 14 had been relocated from several sites in eastern South Africa as part of Gorongosa’s restoration plan, the only time Mr. Muagura had encountered a wild dog was as roadkill.

“To see live dogs in my own country, to have them released into Gorongosa,” he said, almost tearfully, “that is a beautiful thing.”

Over the next several days, the ebullient carnivores managed to dispatch another impala and two waterbucks — beefy, handsome antelopes with bright bull’s-eye markings on their rears. They are all too common in Gorongosa.

Beira’s pregnant belly bulged ever more visibly, and the pack was digging her a den. Lions were no longer the only resident meat-eaters able to keep the burgeoning herds of grazing mammals in check.

Another apex predator, absent for decades from the park’s 1,500 square miles, was back — yet more evidence that Gorongosa is on track for a great second act.
A Massive Experiment

Named after a mountain on the rim of the park that in turn was named after the Mwani term for “place of danger,” Gorongosa is far from the largest national park or game reserve in Africa. Kruger National Park in South Africa is five times its size. Gorongosa is not even the biggest park in Mozambique.

Yet Gorongosa stands out from the continent’s many photogenic safari destinations as a kind of living laboratory, an ongoing experiment in how nature recovers from the equivalent of a massive hemorrhaging event, and which parts mend best when left to themselves and which require infusions of new blood.

Gorongosa has attracted the attention of scientists from around the world who see an opportunity to address, in real time, fundamental questions of ecology, evolution, the rise and fall and shifting distribution of species, and changes in what researchers call the landscape of fear.

The bushbuck of Gorongosa, for example, are unusually brazen about venturing away from the concealing foliage that surrounds termite mounds, where the shy, slender antelope traditionally are found. Instead, Gorongosa’s bushbuck are grazing in open grassland, with all the cockiness of African buffalos or zebras.

Is that good, neutral or destructive to the local habitat — to the mix of vegetation and its microfaunal throngs, the flow of water, the cycling of nutrients, the ease with which dung beetles can put the far-flung bounty to use? And how long before the insouciant bushbuck realize that Gorongosa’s predators are multiplying and headed their way?

Gorongosa is at once more and less “natural” than other game reserves in Africa. “There are no fences around Gorongosa, and that’s the way a park is supposed to be,” said Test Malunga, a field guide at the park.

At the same time, the park management, with the blessing of the Mozambique government, has decided to “actively encourage and promote science,” said Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton University who is on the Gorongosa Project’s board of directors.

As a result, researchers are not confined to simple observational studies of the park’s free-ranging wildlife. They can manipulate field conditions to narrow down the spurs to animal movement and foraging choices. They can dart animals to take blood samples, measure their vital signs and then outfit them with GPS collars — and for the elephants, that means necklaces big enough to girdle an oak tree.

“Many parks limit or even prohibit such activities,” Dr. Pringle said. “But without them you can’t have a truly science-based management strategy or definitively answer burning questions at the forefront of ecological knowledge.”

Gorongosa also is preternaturally lucky to have a wealthy benefactor dedicated to the park’s restoration and future.

Since 2004, Gregory C. Carr, who made a fortune in telecommunications before turning to full-time philanthropy and human rights advocacy, has spent tens of millions of dollars on the park and the 1,300 square miles of so-called buffer zone that surrounds it, where some of the poorest communities in Mozambique, and hence in the world, can be found.

Mr. Carr, 59, is genial, driven and unerringly gregarious, a kind of L. pictus in a baseball cap, always looking for new connections, new ideas for helping the park and its people, new ways to win over skeptics and bridge political divides. Despite recurring guerrilla skirmishes in the region, Mr. Carr said, “I think the park has done a pretty good job of being everyone’s friend.”

His foundation and various donors-in-arms have invested in local schools, mobile clinics, bee farms, sustainable coffee plantations, girls’ clubs, and a master’s program in conservation biology for Mozambican students. The classroom is Gorongosa.

“It’s the only conservation biology program in the country,” Mr. Carr said. “We’re told it may be the only one in the world taught entirely in a national park.”

Yet thorny sociocultural challenges remain. Mr. Carr is a white American with a lot of money, and though Gorongosa is a national park that belongs entirely to Mozambique, Larissa Sousa, who works in the department of human development at the park, said that many people in the region believe Mr. Carr is the owner of Gorongosa, and they’ve never been inside.

In fact, Gorongosa park was founded by colonial Portugal in 1960 largely for the pleasure of affluent Western adventurists, but it was quickly claimed as a national treasure when Mozambique won independence in 1975.

Behind the park’s splendor, explained Piotr Naskrecki, an associate director of research at Gorongosa, is its location at the southernmost tip of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, a massive geological formation that, over millions of years, has channeled huge amounts of biodiversity into Mozambique’s midriff.

To the east of the rift is soft limestone, kneaded and puckered by water into caves and gorges and giving rise to riverine forests, replete with endemic bats, crickets, mollusks and millipedes that thrive on the limestone’s calcium bounty.

On the western rim is hard granite and granitic soils that nurture an entirely different assemblage of life-forms, like a newly discovered species of lizard that wedges itself deep into rock cracks, beyond a predator’s reach.

In the middle are the floodplains, cycling seasonally between deluge and drainage, and turning tuxedo-black with concentrated nutrients on which vegetation can bloom and herds of herbivores can fatten.

Spanning elevations from sea level to 6,000 feet at the top of Mt. Gorongosa, the park is a great mixtape of “nearly every conceivable habitat,” Dr. Naskrecki said: alpine forest, montane meadow, woodland savanna, grassland, scrub forest, a touch of true rain forest.

And as you drive through it, bumping over roads so deeply rutted you feel like a human castanet, you realize you’ve never been so happy in your life.
Ecological Disaster

In the 1980s, the music stopped. A civil war broke out, the park was shuttered, and government and rebel forces turned Gorongosa into a battlefield and makeshift abattoir.

Elephants were slaughtered for their tusks. Elands, sables, wildebeests, zebras and other large herbivores were hunted for meat or sport. Lions, leopards and hyenas were killed for being in the way, and many animals simply died of starvation.

By the time the fighting and rampant hunting ended in the mid-1990s, the park’s thundering census of large mammals had been slashed by 95 percent, to numerical whimpers: 15 African buffalos here, six lions there, five zebras, a few dozen hippos and elephants. Park infrastructure had been destroyed. Only Gorongosa’s bird life, some 500 species strong, survived relatively intact.

The park’s wildlife began recovering, but slowly, and on visiting the park in 2003, Mr. Carr said, “I could drive around all day and not see a single animal.” After consulting with a broad range of experts, Mr. Carr proposed to the Mozambican government a public-private partnership that he hoped would both hasten the recovery of Gorongosa’s grandeur and lift the economy, too.

“Being an economic engine and a promoter of human rights, that’s a new way to think about national parks,” said Mr. Carr. “The people who live around here, this is their homeland, and they have a right to live in a decent environment that can sustain them.”

The team started by restocking the larger herbivores, importing 200 buffalos and 200 wildebeests from South Africa. As the bulk grazers began trimming back the overgrown grassland, the park’s array of smaller antelope species, with their twisty, calligraphic horns and their Modigliani faces, could get through to feed and more reliably breed.

The expanding prey options soon lofted the lion count, which in turn began luring back tourists for whom a lion sighting is synonymous with a safari vacation. But the lions alone could not handle the swelling ranks of herbivores and omnivores, and Gorongosa’s scientists realized the park needed a more diverse guild of predators.

Where were the leopards? Leopards are the most widespread great cats in the world, yet for mysterious reasons they hadn’t found their way back to Gorongosa. As a result, Gorongosa’s baboons, a favorite leopard menu item, are breeding like gray squirrels, devouring everything they can get their unfastidious fingers on and moving fearlessly through the landscape.

“You don’t elsewhere in Africa see baboons walking on the ground at night or sleeping on the ground,” Dr. Pringle said. “But here you do.”

The researchers’ efforts to import leopards from elsewhere in Africa have proved legislatively challenging, and so they were thrilled when an adult male leopard, a voluntary immigrant from the buffer zone, showed up in late March and as of midsummer appeared to still be around.

The scientists admitted they have made mistakes. “We tried to introduce the cheetah,” Dr. Naskrecki said, “but we learned this is not the right environment for them, and historically they have not been here.”

African wild dogs, by contrast, have a history in Gorongosa and are under fewer trade restrictions, and Ms. Bouley said they will be bringing in another pack next year.

Other puzzling aspects of Gorongosa’s recrudescence remain. On most African reserves, for example, waterbucks are uncommon, bit players compared to other antelope species. In Gorongosa, their numbers have exploded to 50,000.

A possible explanation: as one of the few species able to persist on the floodplain year-round, through low water and high, waterbucks may have stayed out of target range during the war and been well positioned to rebound when the shooting stopped.

The waterbuck’s triumph, however, may incidentally be slowing the recovery of another water-loving mammal: the hippopotamus.

Zebras also have had a surprisingly hard time regaining their footing. Elephants have nearly rebounded to their prewar numbers, the population notably enriched in individuals that naturally lack tusks and thus were spared the selective wrath of ivory poachers.

“Gorongosa is not a Ming vase that we’re trying to restore,” Dr. Pringle said. “It’s a dynamic ecosystem in recovery” — working like a dog and getting better all the time.

Natalie Angier became a columnist for Science Times in January 2007. She joined The Times in 1990, covering genetics, evolutionary biology, medicine and other subjects, and was awarded the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2018, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Nature’s Renewal Lab. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe