20May 2020 by Post

The COVID Crisis and Our Healthcare System

borders, boroughs of New York, China, COVID-19, elderly people, Europe, experts, government planners, healthcare, Iran, Italy, Manhattan, mass transit, Medicine, mortality, New York City, nursing homes, officials, pandemic, patients, prisons, Queens, socialism, Staten Island, statism, United States, Venezuela, Wuhan, xenophobia
An essay by a pair of economists in Foreign Policy magazine pins the blame for our pandemic crisis on deficiencies in our health care system. It recommends a variety of interventions, each of which (predictably) entails more government control of health care by experts like… the authors of the essay. To see the COVID response as signifying a failure of the healthcare system is an insult to the brave and skilled people who responded so effectively to this virus, including colleagues at my own hospital on New York’s corona frontline. The authors, and others who think similarly, misunderstand the roots of the crisis and misunderstand the role the health care system has played. More importantly, they misunderstand the role of statism in generating this pandemic.  Retooled Overnight Given the unexpected…
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08May 2020 by Post

Stephen Meyer, Eric Metaxas: Gain and Loss and the Origin of Life

abiogenesis, Adolf Hitler, agnosticism, Atheism, Brian Miller, Charles Thaxton, Darwin's Doubt, Douglas Axe, Eric Metaxas, Evolution, Günter Bechly, Intelligent Design, James Tour, Jews, materialism, Nazi Germany, origin of life, Petra Moser, Richard Sternberg, Roger Olsen, Stanford University, Stephen Meyer, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, United States, Ur-text, Walter Bradley
Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany “revolutionized U.S. science and innovation,” as Stanford University historian Petra Moser and others have pointed out. Hitler’s loss was our gain. Something not entirely dissimilar is the case in the history of the intelligent design movement and its own revolution. On his radio show today, Eric Metaxas talked with Darwin’s Doubt author Stephen Meyer about the reissue of the expanded version of the Ur-text of intelligent design, a 35th anniversary edition of The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Dr. Meyer contributed a new chapter, as did James Tour, Brian Miller, and other scientists who have come to doubt purely materialist accounts of how the first life arose. Steve points out to Eric that “Some of our very best scientists are refugees from top-level institutions in the mainstream science establishment.”…
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11Apr 2020 by Post

Listen: Stephen Meyer on How Evolution Degrades Information

biological information, Center for Science & Culture, Discovery Institute, Evolution, Heritage Foundation, March for Science, Neo-Darwinism, science, scientism, Stephen Meyer, United States
On a classic episode of ID the Future, hear Center for Science & Culture director Stephen C. Meyer’s talk given at a 2017 event, “March for Science or March for Scientism? Understanding the Real Threats to Science in America,” hosted by Discovery Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Listen in as he discusses weaknesses in the theory of neo-Darwinism. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Photo: Stephen Meyer (screenshot), “March for Science or March for Scientism? Understanding the Real Threats to Science in America,” via YouTube. The post Listen: Stephen Meyer on How Evolution Degrades Information appeared first on Evolution News.
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08Apr 2020 by Post

Watch: Preview Stephen Meyer’s New Book — The Return of the God Hypothesis

Adolf Grünbaum, atheists, Bertrand Russell, Christianity, cosmology, Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Eric Metaxas, Evolution News, Faith & Science, Intelligent Design, Michael Behe, Paul Nelson, professors, publishing, religion, science, scientific atheism, Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, United States
Stephen Meyer has finished his next book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, and (here is a bit of insider information) is currently awaiting copyedits from his publisher. The wheels of book publishing do not grind hastily. I’ve read the book, and it’s fantastic. If you are impatient to get your hands on it, you can get a bit of a preview in a presentation Dr. Meyer gave at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. You can watch that right now: It’s poignant to think that the conference, on January 25, was held just a few days after the first COVID-19 case in the United States was confirmed, in a man who had visited Wuhan. That was here in Washington State. In our present surreal, locked-down virus world,…
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31Mar 2020 by Post

Are Evangelicals “Crippling” Our Coronavirus Response?

Alabama, americans, anti-Christian bias, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chernobyl, China, churches, coronavirus, COVID-19, Darwinism, doctors, Donald Trump, Earth Day, Easter, Evangelical Christians, Evolution and Ethics, Faith & Science, Federal Government, global warming, Katherine Stewart, Medicine, New York City, New York Times, nurses, pandemic, pastors, Scientific consensus, stock boys, Thomas Huxley, truck driver, United States, Wuhan, Yan Fu
Yep, according to this New York Times op-ed by Katherine Stewart: This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. Stewart, whose disdain for evangelicals is passionate, objects particularly to the President’s invocation of Easter rather than “mid-April”: Mr. Trump’s expressed hope that the country would be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” He could, of course, have said, “by mid-April.” But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”  “I think it would be a beautiful time,” the president said. Perhaps a Presidential wish that we will be back to business by Earth Day would have mollified Ms.…
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28Mar 2020 by Post

Wesley J. Smith on the March for Science and Rights Gone Wild

animal rights, Culture & Ethics, Discovery Institute, ethics, Heritage Foundation, ID The Future, March for Science, plant rights, scientism, United States, Wesley J. Smith
On a classic episode of ID the Future, hear Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith’s talk at an event hosted by Discovery and the Heritage Foundation: “March for Science or March for Scientism? Understanding the Real Threats to Science in America.” Listen in as he discusses how science has been conflated with ethics, and talks about animal and plant rights. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Photo: Wesley Smith speaking at the “March for Science or March for Scientism? Understanding the Real Threats to Science in America” event (screenshot).  The post Wesley J. Smith on the March for Science and Rights Gone Wild appeared first on Evolution News.
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12Mar 2020 by Post

China Credibly Accused of Organ-Harvesting Atrocity

Apple, atrocity, Boeing, brain death, China, cornea, Culture & Ethics, Department of State, hearts, human rights, kidneys, lethal injection, livers, lungs, Medicine, Nike, organ harvesting, People’s Republic of China, PR department, prisoners, private sector, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, skin, South Carolina, United States
Last week, the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China issued its final report concluding that China engages in the systematic human-rights atrocity of killing political and other prisoners and harvesting their organs. (I wrote about the preliminary report here.) It is a horrific account to which woefully inadequate attention has been paid. Shocking Evidence Over more than 500 detailed pages, the report presents shocking evidence of horrific human-rights abuses, including from witness testimony, analyses of public records, and reviewing of scholarly reports. The question presented could not be more disturbing. From the final “Judgment”: If the accusations are true, then thousands of innocent people have been killed…having their bodies — the physical integrity of their beings — cut open while still alive for their…
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25Jan 2020 by Post

Pressuring a Hospice to Kill

and organ-transplant centers, Angeline Ireland, assisted suicide, Big Government, British Columbia, Canada, caring, conscientious objection, Delta Hospice Society, dementia, doctors, ethics, euthanasia, freedom of conscience, hospice, hospice palliative care, killing, MAiD, medical assistance in dying, Medicine, memory-support facilities, minister of health, nursing homes, organ harvesting, patients, pediatric euthanasia, pediatric hospitals, podiatry, psychiatric institutions, Quebec, religious beliefs, socialism, socialized medicine, United States
Should hospice professionals be forced to assist the suicides of their patients who want to die? Not too long ago, the answer to that question would have been an emphatic “Of course not!” Hospice is not about making people dead. Rather, it seeks to help terminally ill patients live well through intensive medical, spiritual, psychological, and social treatments to alleviate the pain and emotional suffering that dying people and their families may experience. Don’t tell that to the provincial government of British Columbia. After the Supreme Court of Canada conjured a right for anyone diagnosed with a serious medical condition that causes “irremediable suffering” to receive lethal-injection euthanasia, British Columbia passed a law requiring all medical facilities that receive at least 50 percent of their funding from the government to…
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23Jan 2020 by Post

“World Happiness Report” Focuses on…Government

Canada, creator, Culture & Ethics, Czech Republic, Declaration of Independence, Denmark, faith, Finland, France, Gallup World Poll, GDP per capita, happiness, happiness inequality, Iceland, Israel, Italy, life expectancy, life satisfaction, meaningful life, Norway, Pilate, pro-social behavior, religion, Spain, suicide, technocrats, United States, World Happiness Report
The annual “World Happiness Report” for 2019 is out. Depending on the Gallup World Poll, it turns out the U.S. comes in rather low among free countries at number 19. The Declaration of Independence states that all of us are “endowed” by our Creator with “inalienable rights,” among which is “the pursuit of happiness.” The idea, of course, is that finding happiness is the responsibility of the individual and that government may not unduly interfere with that quest. The Technocrats Speak But according to the study’s technocratic authors, government is the prime creator of happiness. Indeed, the first topic mentioned in the report is “happiness and government,” which are the subjects of the first two chapters. In Chapter 2 they write: At the most basic level, good government establishes and…
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20Dec 2019 by Post

Molybdenum Is Stored in Cells by a Powered Piercing Machine

anhydride hydrolysis, armor, armor-piercing bullets, ATP, ATP-binding groove, bacteria, Biochemistry (journal), biomineralization, carbon, chemical energy, Chile, China, diet, DNA replication, Earth’s crust, Energy, energy metabolism, entropy, Evolution, genetic information, gun, human body, industry, Intelligent Design, kinetic energy, Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, melting point, metal, molecular machines, molybdate, molybdenum, MoSto system, motility, nitrogen, PNAS, protein, steel, Steffen Brünle, sulfur, United States
Molybdenum comprises the second smallest percentage of mass in a normal human body, but that trace amount serves a vital function in several key enzymes. Chemical element molybdenum, affectionately called “moly” by manufacturers, is classified as a refractory metal (i.e., able to retain its shape when heated), bearing similarities to lead. It was only declared a chemical element in 1790 with the abbreviation Mo. Because of its very high melting point, it is prized in industry for its ability to toughen steel and armor. Molybdenum’s abundance in Earth’s crust is estimated at 1.2 ppm, mined mostly in China, the United States, and Chile (molybdenum.com). An Essential Element Why would soft, squishy biology need such a hard substance? The answer is that without it, life would not be possible. A 2009…
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