At the House Government Reform Committee’s hearing on Merck’s attempt to bury relevant safety data about its signature painkiller, Vioxx, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD) read from a Merck training manual that directed instructors to play a recording of Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech and then say to the sales force: “King was someone with goal-focus – he kept getting shut down but kept going. . . Just as with a physician, you must keep repeating the compelling message and at some point, the physician will be ‘free at last’ when he or she prescribes the Merck drug, if that is most appropriate for the patient.” [Read the whole thing.]
I have a dream that one day black children and white children will be victimized by politically skewed FDA drug approval processes concerning our drugs, and are then denied the class action they deserve by federalism-sapping, plutocracy-emboldening "tort reform" legislation.
I don't know whether to laugh at their total immaturity, cry at their hijacking of a social drive for corporate ends, or be appalled that the medication that my doctor writes me could be the result of one of these vapid bimbos.
TOPEKA, Kansas (Reuters) -- Evolution is going on trial in Kansas.
Eighty years after a famed courtroom battle in Tennessee pitted religious beliefs about the origins of life against the theories of British scientist Charles Darwin, Kansas is holding its own hearings on what school children should be taught about how life on Earth began.
The Kansas Board of Education has scheduled six days of courtroom-style hearings to begin Thursday in Topeka. More than two dozen witnesses will give testimony and be subject to cross-examination, with the majority expected to argue against teaching evolution...
"I feel like I'm in a time warp here," said Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray who has agreed to defend evolution as valid science. "To debate evolution is similar to debating whether the Earth is round. It is an absurd proposition."
Irigonegaray's opponent will be attorney John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, a Kansas organization that argues the Earth was created through intentional design rather than random organism evolution...
"We're not against evolution," said Calvert. "But there is a lot of evidence that suggests that life is the product of intelligence. I think it is inappropriate for the state to prejudge the question whether we are the product of design or just an occurrence."
The problem is proof. I think it was best summed up by noted philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, on the subject of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction:
"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Neither evolution, or a six day creation, or a sort of evolution by some sort of intelligent creator can be proven. Any one of these COULD be correct, although the evidence is overwhelmingly in the favor of the first. The point is that you can't know, any more than you could know if you are going to win the lottery. That's the problem with proving a negative. Every thing is possible, but there is much that is just not probable. Most of life is this way. I can't prove that you won't win the Nobel Prize in physics next year. It's possible, just not probable. I can't prove that death rays from mars won't annihilate you in the next two minutes. It's possible, just not probable. Creationalists and IDers don’t mind believing in what is not probable and are checking their mailboxes everyday wondering when Ed Mc Mahn will deliver their Nobel Prize, while putting tin foil under their caps to deflect thosedeath rays.
This is the sad heart of this whole brouhaha. It simply doesn't matter how much evidence from geology, paleontology, genetics, comparative anatomy, and a dozen other fields you bring to the table, all converging to a single line of reasoning. These people want us back in the dark ages, teaching kids that the Bible is the truth. Even if they can't get through the first two chapters of Genesis and tell you whether God made trees or women first.
Intelligent Design? Then why do we have a fallible heart instead of a neat system of general peristolsis to circulate our blood? Why do we have the knee instead of a good joint that works in an upright stance? Why do we get hemorrhoids because our blood column pushes down too hard (which it doesn't in our four-legged and knuckle-walking ancestors?)This is the best God could come up with? C'mon!!
Sure, to the thinking human, there is no conflict with a Designer with a lovely sense of humor and an elegant creation process through 3 billion years of evolution. But that is not what these folks want. In their hubris, they want a bearded old potter who spit in some dirt and molded us and blew in our mouths. They think they can understand a mind that created the Universe, and stands outside of time and space. And they whine at "her," and ask for favors they could never pay back, ask "her" to change his whole plan to suit their convenience.
And they seek to impose this narrow, selfish, perception on everyone, exactly like the Catholic Church, which they loathe, imposed it's world-view on Europe for centuries and used it to destroy one of the most enlightened civilizations of the day in the Middle East.
If God created the world in 6 days only 6,000 years ago why did SHE make all of the evidence say a 13.8 billion year old universe and 4 billion year old earth. How do you explain the light from the Andromeda Galaxy that took 2 million years to get here? What about ice layers in Greenland that go back, year by year, for 250,000 years. Perhaps the creator slipped up when She created so many bacteria that change so quickly that they can adapt to new antibiotic drugs. Either the creator slipped up (d'oh! Those pesky Staphylococcus aurelii!), or She deliberately creates organisms that adapt to and attack innocent folks. Why would God create a world 6000 years ago and make it look 4 billion years old.
My only explanation is that God is getting a big laugh out of it and included all sorts of amazingly clever traps in order to fool our (god-given) intellect into thinking that science really works. We have to accept that god is an infinite prankster, constantly controlling all the laws of nature and every scientific experiment in order to fool us since millions of clues say 4 billion years ago ...but only the most dedicated Christians really know the truth.
