Moscow Mitch

For my old neighbor on Capital Hill

Jack Johnson - My Mind is For Sale

AMERICAN CRISIS 2017

States Refuse to Expand Medicaid

Mario Cuomo - In Memorium

HT to CB for this find.

qKsv624" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Darwin and Lincoln born same day, same year.

Two hundred and five years ago today the men pictured above simultaneously drew their first breaths.  Like the coincidental death of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson today's anniversary serves to give thinking minds a pause. A pause to reflect on the balance between CHANCE and WILL. When we think about the birth of Lincoln and Darwin we know this coincidence was purely a product of chance. There was no conscious connection between Lincoln's mother Nancy and Darwin's mother Susannah helping random chance along during the winter of 1809. There was however a strong conscious connection, a willful awareness of time between Adams and Jefferson who had been in regular correspondence as they laid in their deathbeds. Both Adams and Jefferson were ill prior to the day of their mutual death but somehow willed themselves to survive to see the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the great experiment on July 4th, 1826. Similarly Lincoln and Darwin both spent large parts of their lives fighting chance itself. Through the power of intellect they lead and changed the flow of ideas through written and spoken word.

Even more perplexing than a shared birth is the relationship between the social effects originating from this pair. Lincoln's visage stirs up thoughts of equality and emancipation, while Darwin's work drives home the fact that all organisms are engaged in a struggle for existence and do not begin life with equal footing. This does indeed include man. So here we see the dichotomy between equality before the law and inequality before nature.

I would like to make it clear that I think it self-evident that the preservation of equality before the law is paramount for a sustainable democracy. It would take volumes to address here the complex attitudes of the public towards the idea of social Darwinism but it is easy to summarize an average public opinion regarding one massive case in which an attempt was made to apply social Darwinism to a population by a governing body. That summary is - pure evil. The specter of EUGENICS and Nazi death camps haunts and pervades collective memory. The idea that man can judge the worthiness of a human life repulses modern senses. But even now the beginnings of a rift in the genetic constitution of humanity is beginning with a whisper in the esoteric and often-times inaccessible language of clinical genetics.

Here I present the most pertinent and contemporary application of the ideas of Lincoln and Darwin. The practice of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or PGD gives a prospective mother the ability to choose genetic characteristics she wishes to eliminate from here offspring. Simply put, multiple embryos are fertilized, tested, and the one free of the undesirable gene (like breast or colon cancer predisposition) is selected for implantation and a human that has been selected based on genetic constitution is born. This is not something 50 or 100 years away. It is happening now. Before I lose readers that say "no no no that is horrible. It should be banned" it should be known that this technique is not ubiquitous and is not currently being used for genes like eye color or obesity, but is mostly used for the colo-rectal and breast cancer genes.

If you had a decision to remove something from your life that gave you a 50:50 chance of getting cancer at age 40 would you remove it? Maybe not, but it is not unethical to want to do that and parents with children that are a product of PGD should not be condemned for their decision. They are using science to protect their children and that is something all people should have the right to do. The major ethical concern here is access. Right now there is no federal regulation surrounding PGD and as a result insurance companies can deny PGD to parents. If this trend continues there will be a genetic difference between families that have the money to pay for the procedure (>$10,000) and those that do not. A world where a genetic rift mirrors the financial rift in society is not a world where equality reigns. May this day be a day to contemplate and compose legislation guaranteeing the right of all families to protect their children, not just those that can afford the cost.

Subsequently, I would like to share some of the highlights from the web regarding both Lincoln and Darwin. Doris Kearns Goodwin articulates the philosophy of life after death through memorable acts and words in the following video. This forms the basis for the title of this blog "Tom Paine's Ghost." I do not believe an ectoplasmic glowing form of Thomas Paine floats in the aether, but I do believe that his pen keeps his spirit alive centuries after his death.



I am currently reading the Origin of Species in and I must say it takes a while to dig into. The first 40 pages are dedicated to a rather dry topic - pigeons. Specifically the un-natural process of pigeon breeding which is controlled by man. The first breath of literary gravity did not come for me until page 76 when Darwin describes the adaptations of some particular organisms.

"How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world."

This post was first made here February 12th, 2009. I've made a few minor edits to catch it up-to-date.

ShutDown/OpenUp Funny

So if I understand this right, John Boehner came out of his burrow and saw his shadow, and that means we get a gov't for six more weeks.

— Adam Lee (@DaylightAtheism) October 17, 2013

Scalia and Satan

Netroots Nation 2013 LIVE VIDEO

Colbert on "Pulpit-Freedom Sunday"

Stephen Colbert takes his satire to a whole new level here. He can hardly keep his contempt for Jim Garlow and his anti-church-and-state-separation mentality.

Obama visits Colorado State University (Photos)

Power to the people!!! Photo by Kristopher Hite. Creative commons license - feel free to use any of these photos but please give credit to www.tompainesghost.com

President Barack Obama

I took these photos yesterday as I watched President Obama speak to a crowd of 13,000 people on the Monfort quad in the center of the campus at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. He talked a lot about expanding grants and tax credits for college students, not being discriminated against for who you love, and the dangers of a "Romney Doesn't Care" health plan. It made me happy that Obama mentioned the solar and wind industries in Colorado and how we need to re-elect him because "we have a lot more renewable energy to make!"

Photos by Kristopher Hite

Creative Commons license - feel free to use any of these photos but please give credit to www.tompainesghost.com

Ken Salazar - Secretary of the Department of the Interior and former Senator of Colorado

Ken Salazar - Photo by Kristopher Hite

John Hickenlooper - Current Governor of Colorado - I do not like him because of his stance on FRACKing. Thus the photo I choose looks like he is going to the bathroom.

Photo by Kristopher Hite PhD

Photo by Kristopher Hite PhD

Photo by Kristopher Hite PhD

Science and the Religious Right

This week on the Point of Inquiry podcast Chris Mooney interviews author Peter Montgomery. The discussion is long so I felt compelled to transcribe the following exchange which I think neatly sums up their respective positions.

Chris Mooney: I wrote a book called the Republican War on Science and it had this section on the religious right messing with science. And so what turns out is that if you take away their god-inspired moralistic language about sex, abortion, or whatever, then they make up phony scientific arguments that are secular. So suddenly adult stem cells are better than embryonic stem cells, and they've got phony science on that. Or, condoms don't actually work, and they've got phony science on that. Or, abstinence education DOES work, phony science, here it comes. Or what are the other ones? It goes on and on. Abortion causes breast cancer, abortion causes mental illness. They start makin' all this stuff up. But REALLY it's the religion driving the policy view.

Peter Montgomery: Well that's right but the thing about the fact that they feel compelled to make up phony science, I think it's a good thing because that science can be exposed and challenged as bogus and phony and as no real basis for policy and that's what our side has to do better. If it's just about disputing their theology then you kind of get stuck on who's got god right. And there's really no way to know who's got god right. But it is a lot easier to know who's got science right. And even though they have a tremendous propaganda machine that backs a lot of these bogus scientific claims, those are things that we can engage on, we can challenge them and we can martial the consensus support of the scientific community to challenge those claims.

Listen to the entire discussion here.

While Peter Montgomery was making this point I immediately thought of the incessant denial of anthropogenic global warming among some very vocal conservatives. From my perspective, the best part of this debate is when conservatives fund scientific assessments of climate change and find exactly the same conclusions as have been reported over and over by federally funded researchers. The climate is changing and human generated carbon dioxide is largely to blame.  This recently happened to the Koch brothers. The satisfaction in seeing real science vindicated is priceless. 

Participate in Government!

Please join me in signing this petition to the White House urging congress to remove tax-exempt status from politically engaged churches. If churches want a say in government they'd better pay into it like the rest of us! I think we should go further and request that all churches relinquish their tax exempt status but this would be a big step anyway.  

America?

The landscape in the video reminds me of my back yard growing up in New York State. This was shown to me via the French political web site Rue89 last night. This is what the rest of the world is seeing when they think about the United States and our humble reflection on a historic assassination.

“Osama’s dead, baby. Osama’s dead.”