Wednesday, February 9, 2011

300 Years of Justice and Liberty:

When Government was Against The Law

“Anarchy might be great, if only it could be enforced” – Joseph Sobran, Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian

“’But what would you replace the state with?’ The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be ‘replaced.’” – Joseph Sobran, The Reluctant Anarchist

The Garden of Fire and Ice:
When Government was Against The Law.

A common objection to the advocacy of a State-Free, or “anarchist”, society — is the claim that the maintenance of an ordered, peaceful human society would not be possible without the institution of Forcible Government, the institution of the State. And indeed, this objection might carry a lot of weight – if it weren’t for the fact that the last time folks decided that they could get along just fine without any such Government at all, they only managed to maintain an ordered, peaceful society for… well, over 300 years.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Free Commonwealth of Iceland, AD 930 – 1262.

Iceland first began to be settled around AD 870, principally by Pagan refugees from Norway “fleeing the harsh rule of the Norwegian king Haraldur Harfagri (Harald the Fair-haired), who is believed to have been uniting some parts of modern Norway during the period”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iceland). In addition, it is known that “Culdees”, Celtic Christian monks and evangelists from the Presbyteric Christian community of Iona, had begun to settle in Iceland by this early date (“History of the Scottish Nation”, http://www.reformation.org/vol2ch28.html). These Celtic Christians of Ireland and Scotland had their own, similar reasons to flee to the North: their churches were organized along the most ancient of Christian organizational structures, the Presbyteric structure of Acts 15 – in which assemblies of Elders or “Presbyters”, freely elected by their own local congregations, governed the Church in mutual council together – and during this time, a new theory of Church organization, that of monocratic domination by the Roman Pope, was extending its power northward by fire and sword, and replacing the elected Presbyters of these ancient Hibernian Christian churches with the Pope’s own appointed Priests.

So we see that Iceland was settled largely by people with good reason to distrust the power of Forcible Government – Pagans fleeing the Norse King, and Christians fleeing the Roman Pope. And so, as Iceland became completely settled over the next 60 years — it is perhaps unsurprising that when these peoples decided upon what form of State should rule over them, they decided that it would be best if they should be ruled by No State at all.

This is not to say that Iceland was a country without laws. Indeed, it was said of Iceland that “they have no king except the law.” (http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/society/text/laws.htm). What Iceland did not have, was any form of Forcible Government – for “Instead of a king they had local chieftains (“Godhar”)…. These men who were law-makers did not have power just because they held the title godord. They were powerless ‘unless he could convince some free-farmers to follow him.’ This kept tyranny and injustice in check. Jesse Byock states in his book that, ‘leadership evolved in such a way that a chieftain’s power and the resources available to him were not derived from an exploitable realm.’ This was because free farmers could change allegiance between godi without moving to a new geographical location. “The legal godi-thingman bond was created by a voluntary public contract.” The ability to switch legal systems without moving, is key to a decentralized system. It creates secession down the level of the individual, making all governance structures formed truly voluntary.” (http://mises.org/daily/1121)

A citizen of the Free Commonwealth, thus, enjoyed a degree of liberty virtually unprecedented in human history, precisely because the law-givers were forced to compete for the citizens’ allegiance, and to compete for the fees required to provide Justice and other government services. No one law-giver enjoyed any legal right whatsoever to compel any citizen to accept his rule, or to pay his demanded taxes. Since all governing structures were truly and completely voluntary, the defining characteristic of forcible Government — the power of the State to compel the citizen to obey its governance and pay its required taxes – simply did not exist; indeed, legally could not exist.

In short, the foundation of three hundred years of Icelandic Justice and Liberty could therefore be summed up in one simple statement:

Government – was Against The Law.

However, the liberties enjoyed by the Anarchistic Free Commonwealth of Iceland did not last forever (although, 332 years was at least a pretty good run – considerably longer than the United States of America has existed thus far) – and to understand the causes of its downfall, we return once again to the villains of our thus-far happy tale: The Norse King, and the Roman Pope.

By AD 1000, seventy years after the full settlement of Iceland and the institution of their Anarchist Commonwealth – the power of the Roman Pope had come to hold sway over the Norse King, and with him the powers of the Norwegian State. And where once Christianity had been founded upon a Declaration of War against the State (http://slave-state.org/blog/2010/11/28/christianity-as-a-declaration-of-war-against-the-state/), now the Roman Pope employed the mailed fist of the Norse State to introduce into Iceland, that rocky little garden of fire and ice, the Serpent of forcible taxation. Under threats from the powerful Roman Catholic King of Norway, Iceland – formerly a country enjoying relative religious liberty and equality for both Pagans and Presbyteric Culdee-Christians — had chosen mass conversion to Roman Catholic Christianity in AD 1000. Although their local churches retained many of their more-ancient elective and presbyteric traditions for several hundred years, the Roman Church did succeed by AD 1100 in coercing all the Godhar into universally imposing a small, but mandatory, tithe upon all citizens of Iceland for the support of the Roman Church. And while Icelandic Bishops were still elected after the Presbyteric fashion, rather than appointed by the Pope, the existence of this mandatory tithe created a potential source of revenue unconstrained by any accountability to the people.

Over the next hundred years, some of the more ambitious Godhar gradually began to pursue, and succeed, in securing election as Bishops – thus gaining control over a stream of “Religious” revenues with which to build their own private armies, from which the citizenry of Iceland could not opt out or change their allegiance as they could with any and all “Political” taxes. These Godhar-Bishops, with their guaranteed stream of church revenues, were thus able to gradually displace Godhar who held to the old ways, and who still only collected voluntary taxes freely paid for services rendered. By 1230, domination over the country had become concentrated in the hands of five or six wealthy, powerful families, and civil wars between them began to break out in earnest. Finally, by 1262, the destructive effects of mandatory taxation had run their full course in ravaging Icelandic society, and the Icelanders traded away their liberties for the security provided by the Norse King, and submitted to Norwegian rule. The Icelandic Free Commonwealth, founded 332 years earlier by refugees from the tyranny of Norway’s first monarch, Harald Fairhair, fell at last under the yoke of a Norwegian King.

And in the downfall of their liberties, the Icelanders proved, many centuries before James Madison, the accuracy of his pronouncement: “Practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government is essential to the purity of both”.

– The Theonomic Libertarian

**********

One closing observation, for the sake of comparison: historians have now concluded that “examination of the historical evidence indicates that the murder rate in Iceland during the Sturlung Period — the era that Icelanders regarded as so intolerably violent as to justify abandoning their political system — was about the same as the murder rate in the United States today.” (http://libertariannation.org/a/f13l1.html)

In short, Icelanders concluded that their Anarchy had failed, only when their Murder Rates got as bad as… what we currently suffer under the “protection” of Government, today. Prior to the institution of mandatory tithing and the attendant rise of the powerful Godhar-Bishops, during the Icelandic “Pure Anarchy” period when Justice was administered by Godhar who had to compete for Citizens’ allegiance and voluntary taxes, their violent crime rate was much lower.


Friday, August 6, 2010

Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian


March 27, 2001

The whole thing is wrong. How did we get into this mess? How can we ever get out?

That’s my political outlook in a nutshell. Not so long ago, I was comfortably nestled into the Republican Party, confident that Ronald Reagan would set the world right. Oh, how naive! I shouldn’t even be confessing this in public.

Well, here I am, much sadder but somewhat wiser, living under a government that kept expanding without limit during and after Reagan, while running up a national debt that would have made Jefferson — or for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt — ask whether he heard you right; and of course the moral and cultural garbage we live amidst seems to be getting irreversibly worse.

I can’t even call myself a conservative anymore. I don’t see much left to conserve. Most of today’s conservatives are to the left of yesterday’s liberals. They quote John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and they have plans to save Social Security and Medicare. They think a minor tax cut would cure the country’s ills.

It’s hard for me to get very interested in today’s political squabbles. I don’t have a dog in these fights; my dog died a long time ago. You know you’re politically homeless when you go to a John Birch Society dinner and you feel you’re surrounded by well-meaning liberals.

Am I a libertarian? Sort of. An anarchist? Anarchy might be great, if only it could be enforced.

I guess the label that suits me best is reactionary utopian. I want to go back to a better world that never quite existed.

Most people are conservative in the wrong way. They accept whatever they’re used to as the natural order of things. They have no sense that the world really went radically wrong somewhere, and is still going further wrong. In this sense, people who think Bill Clinton left this country in fine shape are supremely conservative.

Right now we enjoy the highest level of comfort and prosperity in history. But to make that the criterion of the good life is swinish. Besides, we’re still at the mercy of the modern state, and we never know when it will all come crashing down. There is plenty of precedent, especially in the twentieth century, for huge and rich societies meeting sudden and unforeseen disasters.

After two world wars, countless smaller wars, mass murders, religious and racial persecution, several species of tyranny, punishing taxation, erosions of ancient liberties, debasement of money, and state-sponsored moral decadence, you’d think modern man would have drawn certain lessons about the modern state. All of us ought to talk about the state the way the Jews talk about Hitler.

On the contrary, we have also lost our old standards for judging political well-being. As the poet says, men’s judgments are a parcel of their fortunes. When things get truly bad, you can lose your sense of how bad they are. We are inured to the kind of government our ancestors would have recognized as tyrannical; they crossed oceans to get away from it, and it has grown up here.

George Orwell saw modern man becoming inured to servitude. His most famous novel ends with the chilling sentence: “He loved Big Brother.” Many people still honor the memories of two of the biggest brothers, Roosevelt and Stalin.

[Breaker quote: The one  thing the modern state can't take from you]The task of a reactionary utopian is simply to pull his head out of his immediate environment and look to religion, philosophy, history, and art for intimations of how social life ought to be. A decent man should always be somewhat alienated from the herd, from the age he lives in, from the dominant political gangs. When you feel at home in a world that has gone wrong, you’ve gone wrong too.

Not that you should be an anti-social hermit (though you shouldn’t rule that out too quickly). But at least you should keep a free mind, a mental and spiritual space that is all your own, unpenetrated by official lies and propaganda.

The tyrant really wants your soul — he speaks solicitously of “raising your consciousness” — but you don’t have to yield it to him. That’s the one private property he can’t take away from you.

Joseph Sobran

Friday, April 9, 2010

The Creation of the Universe

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Scientific Law Of Causality necessitates acknowledgment of a Divine Creator:

Indisputably, the most universal, and the most certain, of all scientific laws is the law of cause and effect, or as it is commonly known, the law (or principle) of causality. Scientists, and philosophers of science, recognize laws as “reflecting actual regularities in nature” (Hull, 1974, p. 3). So far as scientific testing and historical experience can attest, laws know no exceptions. And this certainly is true of the law of causality. This law has been stated in a variety of ways, each of which adequately expresses its ultimate meaning. Kant, in the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, stated that “everything that happens (begins to be) presupposes something which it follows according to a rule.” In the second edition, he strengthened that statement by noting that “all changes take place according to the law of connection of cause and effect” (see Meiklejohn, 1878, p. 141). Schopenhauer stated the proposition as, “Nothing happens without a reason why it should happen rather than not happen” (see von Mises, 1951, p. 159). The number of examples of various formulations could be expanded almost indefinitely. But simply put, the law of causality states that every material effect must have an adequate antecedent cause....

Scientists and philosophers alike understand that the Universe must have had a cause. They understand that this cause had to precede the Universe, and be superior to it in every way. Admittedly, there is no natural cause sufficient to explain the origin of matter, and thus the Universe, as Jastrow candidly admits. This presents a very real problem, however. R.L. Wysong commented on this problem as follows:

Everyone concludes naturally and comfortably that highly ordered and designed items (machines, houses, etc.) owe existence to a designer. It is unnatural to conclude otherwise. But evolution asks us to break stride from what is natural to believe and then believe in that which is unnatural, unreasonable, and...unbelievable. We are told by some that all of reality—the universe, life, etc.—is without an initial cause. But, since the universe operates by cause and effect relationships, how can it be argued from science—which is a study of that very universe—that the universe is without an initial cause?....

Although critics have railed against, and evolutionists have ignored, the law of cause and effect, it stands unassailed. Its central message remains intact: every material effect must have an adequate antecedent cause. Life in our magnificent Universe is here; intelligence is here; morality is here; love is here. What is their ultimate cause? Since the effect never can precede, or be greater than the cause, it stands to reason that the Cause of life must be a living Intelligence which Itself is both moral and loving. When the Bible records, “In the beginning, God...,” it makes known to us just such a First Cause.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2005

The Creation of Light

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Biblical Space-Time Dilation better explains the observed universe than does the Big Bang:

An experimentally verified prediction of Einstein’s General Relativity Theory is a phenomenon called gravitational time dilation. It has long been established that gravity affects the rate at which time flows in any particular location in the universe. A graphic example of this phenomenon is the GPS satellite navigation system which is becoming a standard feature in many motor vehicles today....

Another mechanism for time dilation is rapid acceleration of the fabric of space in an expanding universe. This is explained more fully in Hartnett’s book referenced above....

In at least 11 places, the Scriptures speak of God ‘stretching out the heavens’ (e.g. Job 9:8, Isaiah 40:22 and 42:5, Jeremiah 10:12, Zechariah 12:1) and in Genesis 1:15 the words ‘And it was so.’ are recorded in connection with the events of Day 4 of Creation Week, implying the completion of the events described on that Day. It is a reasonable conclusion to draw that God stretched out the heavens to the vast extent of the observable universe in just one 24 hour day and then ceased the action of ‘stretching out’. This is more rational than the inflation fudge of big bangers discussed above. That is, where the universe just happened to expand much faster than light, although there is no known physical cause for starting or stopping this superluminal expansion....

By the end of Day 4, when God completed his work of creating the sun, moon and stars, and had stretched out the heavens to their vast extent, billions of years of cosmic time could have elapsed at the outer edges of the cosmos in just one 24 hour earth day. There would have been more than enough time for the light from distant stars to have reached the earth so that when Adam gazed at the night sky on that sixth night he would have seen much the same as what we see today.

http://creation.com/how-can-distant-starlight-reach-us-in-just-6000-years

The Creation of the Firmament

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

The decay of the Earth's magnetic field strength proves that the Earth cannot be more than 100,000 years old:

The average "intensity" of the earth's magnetic field has decreased exponentially by about 7% since its first careful measurement in 1829.[1] The field's intensity includes components of strength and direction and tells us the amount of force turning a compass needle northward. By estimating the field intensity everywhere (in, on, and above the earth), we can calculate the total electrical "energy" stored in the field. Such calculations show that the total energy in the field has decreased by about 14% since 1829....

"Archaeomagnetism" is the study of the magnetization of bricks, pottery, campfire stones, and other man-related objects studied by archaeologists. Iron oxides in those objects retain a record of the strength and direction of the earth's magnetic field at the time they last cooled to normal temperatures. Archaeomagnetic data taken worldwide show that the intensity of the earth's magnetic field was about 40% greater in 1000 A.D. than it is today, and that it has declined steadily since then.[7]

Such a rapid decay could not have been going on continuously for millions of years, because the field would have to have been impossibly strong in the past in order for it to still exist today....

The precise age limits above depend not only on the dynamic decay theory, but also on the theory of planetary magnetic-field origins. However, we can still set a rough maximum to the initial energy from basic physical considerations, as Dr. Barnes has done.[2] Such a maximum would limit the age to roughly 10,000 years.

It is also possible that a small percentage of today's energy decay is not free decay, due to the core's electrical resistance; but rather is dynamic decay, due to residual motions in the core fluid. In that case, the resistance of the core would be less, and the maximum age of the field would be greater. But even in this extreme case, the maximum age would still be only about 100,000 years, far short of the billions of years evolution needs.

http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=371


The presence of Carbon-14 in coal and diamonds proves that the Earth cannot be more than 100,000 years old:

Carbon 14 has a half life of only 5,730 years. This means an object 5,730 years old should have only half the amount of carbon 14 in ratio to carbon 12 as a new object.

Any object that is older than twenty carbon 14 half lives should not have any detectable carbon 14. In other words, since carbon 14′s half life is 5,730 years, twenty half lives would be 114,600 years and there should be no detectable carbon 14 in a sample that old.

The RATE group tested ten samples of coal which it obtained from the US Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank. The ten samples were of coal taken from coalfields all across the United States. The samples represented a wide range of standard time frames in the geologic column including the Cenozoic, Mesozoic and Paleozoic.

The coal samples were considered to be tens to hundreds of millions of years old by traditional old earth standards. However, in direct contradiction to the standard old earth timeframe, all ten samples of coal had significant levels of detectable carbon 14.

The fact that carbon 14 was detected in every sample of coal clearly shows that the standard old earth estimates for the age of coal are wrong by several orders of magnitude.

http://www.articlestoreprint.net/article_321282_carbon-14-in-all-coal-and-diamonds-proves-young-earth.htm

Consider that in recent years “readily detectable amounts of carbon-14” in materials evolutionists suppose are millions of years old “have been the rule rather than the exception” (DeYoung, 2005, p. 49). When geophysicist John Baumgardner and colleagues obtained 10 coal samples from the U.S. Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank, one of the leading radiocarbon laboratories in the world tested the samples for traces of carbon. The coal samples were analyzed using the modern accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) method. If the coal were really many millions of years old (as evolutionists suggest), no traces of carbon-14 should have been found. “[A]ny carbon-containing materials that are truly older than 100,000 years should be ‘carbon-14 dead’ with C-14 levels below detection limits” (DeYoung, p. 49). But, in fact, traces of carbon-14 were found. “[A] residue of carbon-14 atoms was found in all ten samples.... The amounts of C-14 in coal are found to average 0.25 percent of that in the atmosphere today” (DeYoung, p. 53). Diamonds assumed to be hundreds of millions of years old were also tested—12 in all. Once again, traces of C-14 were found in every sample (see DeYoung, pp. 45-62).

http://www.apologeticspress.com/articles/3469

The Creation of Life

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

Evolution contradicts the Scientific Law of Biogenesis:

In the field of biology, one of the most commonly accepted and widely used laws of science is the law of biogenesis. This law was set forth many years ago to dictate what both theory and experimental evidence showed to be true among living organisms—that life comes only from preceding life, and perpetuates itself by reproducing only its own kind or type. As David Kirk correctly stated: “By the end of the nineteenth century there was general agreement that life cannot arise from the nonliving under conditions that now exist upon our planet. The dictum ‘All life from preexisting life’ became the dogma of modern biology, from which no reasonable man could be expected to dissent” (1975, p. 7)....

Down through the years, countless thousands of scientists in various disciplines have established the law of biogenesis as just that — a scientific law stating that life comes only from preexisting life and that of its kind. Interestingly, the law of biogenesis was firmly established in science long before the contrivance of modern evolutionary theories....

R.L. Wysong, in his classic work, The Creation-Evolution Controversy, commented:

The creationist is quick to remind evolutionists that biopoiesis and evolution describe events that stand in stark naked contradiction to an established law. The law of biogenesis says life arises only from preexisting life, biopoiesis says life sprang from dead chemicals; evolution states that life forms give rise to new, improved and different life forms, the law of biogenesis says that kinds only reproduce their own kinds.

Why, then, are we suddenly being told that, in regard to biogenesis, the word “law” no longer applies? It did in the nineteenth century. Has it been disproven? On the contrary, every piece of scientific evidence still supports the basic concept that life arises only from preexisting life. Is biogenesis no longer an “actual regularity in nature”? On the contrary, every piece of scientific information we possess shows that it is, in fact, just that — an actual regularity in nature (remember Dr. Simpson’s statement that “there is no serious doubt that biogenesis is the rule, that life comes only from other life...”). Has biogenesis somehow ceased being experimentally reproducible? Not at all. Why, then, does the evolutionist wish us to refrain from calling the law a law? The answer, it would seem, is obvious. If evolutionists accept biogenesis as a law — an actual regularity in nature — how could evolution ever get started? Biogenesis (the law of biogenesis) would represent the complete undoing of evolutionary theory from the ground floor up.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2004

The Creation of the Stars and Planets

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

The low angular momentum of the Sun disproves theories of materialistic origin and suggests an Intelligent Design:

What are some of the difficulties with the Modified Nebula Hypothesis? One long-standing problem is with angular momentum. Any object in motion around the Sun has angular momentum and the spin of the object itself gives it additional angular momentum. If our Sun formed according to the Nebula Hypothesis, it would spin more and more rapidly as it contracted and the result would be a very rapidly spinning Sun. But, in our solar system we observe that the Sun spins very slowly and the planets move around the Sun relatively quickly. Our Sun makes one rotation on its axis, measured at its equator, in 24 days, 16 hours (Baugher, 1988, p.415). This slow rotation means the Sun possesses only about 2 percent of the total angular momentum of the solar system (Baugher, 1988, p.375). So the distribution of angular momentum doesn't fit the Nebula models well. In order to make it work, scientists have suggested magnetic processes that would slow down the Sun and accelerate the matter that became the planets. This is a very difficult problem for solar system theories. Since this problem has been worked on for years, one would think that it had been solved. But, a well known solar system scientist wrote that, “The ultimate origin of the angular momentum of the solar system remains obscure” (Taylor,1992, p.53).

http://www.biblicalcreation.org.uk/scientific_issues/SpencerSolarSystem.pdf

The recession of the Lunar orbit proves a young age for the Earth:

Friction by the tides is slowing the earth’s rotation, so the length of a day is increasing by 0.002 seconds per century. This means that the earth is losing angular momentum. The Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum says that the angular momentum the earth loses must be gained by the moon. Thus the moon is slowly receding from Earth at about 4 cm (1½ inches) per year, and the rate would have been greater in the past. The moon could never have been closer than 18,400 km (11,500 miles), known as the Roche Limit, because Earth’s tidal forces (i.e., the result of different gravitational forces on different parts of the moon) would have shattered it. But even if the moon had started receding from being in contact with the earth, it would have taken only 1.37 billion years to reach its present distance. (This is the maximum possible age—far too young for evolution, and much younger than the radiometric ‘dates’ assigned to moon rocks – not the actual age.)

http://www.trueorigin.org/moonjs.asp

The Creation of Animal Life

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. 24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

The discovery of undecayed and biochemically “live” soft tissue within dinosaur bones proves that animal life was created less than 30,000 years ago:

Secondly, in May of this year, a team of paleontologists led by Dr. Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University completed their laboratory testing and DNA sequencing of intact, unfossilized soft tissue recovered from various dinosaur bone marrow samples. Dr. Schweitzer caused quite a stir in 2005 when she reported the discovery of the first of these soft tissues inside an allegedly 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex femur, as it is universally acknowledged that unfossilized soft tissue cannot survive for more than a maximum of 100,000 years.(2)

Obviously, you don't have to have an advanced degree in biology to understand the problem this creates for evolutionists -- put simply, dead meat rots away, in a lot less time than tens of millions of years. Intent upon explaining away these inconvenient facts, many evolutionists resorted to the claim that these tissues were nothing more than "biofilms": biological muck which had seeped into the dinosaur bones since their time of deposition. However, the recent completion of multiple, independent laboratory tests upon the Tyrannosaur and Hadrosaur tissues in question has blown away this flimsy objection -- confirming not only that the soft tissue in question is original saurian bone marrow, but also confirming the presence of collagen protein within some of the tissues. Now, collagen protein begins to break down within weeks of the death of an organism, and even if hermetically sealed will completely break down due to simple thermodynamic effects within a maximum of 30,000 years.(3) Yet not only has intact, undecayed collagen protein been discovered within the soft tissues under study, but some of the cell samples recently recovered from allegedly 120-million-year-old Iguanodon bone marrow were still chemically "live" enough to produce an immune reaction!(4)

Unlike the Theory of Evolution (which has never been provably observed, tested, or reproduced in a laboratory), the breakdown of proteins in a dead organism is a known, measurable fact. So given that we now know, as a proven fact, that it is chemically impossible for these dinosaur bones to be more than 30,000 years old -- well, the only logical conclusion is that they aren't more than 30,000 years old! Furthermore, if the iron laws of chemistry tell us that these dinosaurs must have existed upon the earth within the last 30,000 years (rather than tens of millions of years ago, as claimed by evolutionists), then that leaves only one rational explanation for their presence: Recent Creation by an Intelligent Designer.

And, unlike the evolutionists, the creationists have the cold, hard facts to prove it.

http://libertariantheonomy.blogspot.com/2010/01/when-truth-is-forbidden.html

The Creation of Man

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

The observed rate of mitochondrial DNA mutations proves an age of approximately 6000 years for the human race:

Age estimates are obtained by observing differences between the DNA of different individuals, and are calculated using estimates of mutation rates. Mitochondrial DNA is often used for this; it is separate from the bulk of the human DNA, which is found in the cell nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA has about 16,000 base pairs and mutates, apparently, much faster than the nuclear DNA. Human mitochondrial DNA has been completely mapped, and all the coding regions are known, and the proteins or RNA for which they code. Some of the mitochondrial DNA does not code for anything, and is known as a control region. This region appears to mutate faster than any other region, because the variation among humans is greatest here.

Recently, mitochondrial DNA mutation rates were measured directly (Parsons, Thomas J., et al., A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region, Nature Genetics vol. 15, April 1997, pp. 363-367). The mutation rate in a segment of the control region of mitochondrial DNA was directly measured by comparing mitochondrial DNA from siblings and from parents and their offspring. Mitochondrial DNA was found to mutate about 20 times faster than previously thought, at a rate of one mutation (substitution) every 33 generations, approximately. In this section of the control region, which has about 610 base pairs, humans typically differ from one another by about 18 mutations. By simple mathematics, it follows that the human race is about 300 generations old. If one assumes a typical generation is about 20 years, this gives an age of about 6000 years.

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/humanity.html

The rate of deleterious mutation in the human race proves that the human race cannot have been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years (we would have already gone extinct):

A recent study examined the mutation rate for humans. Using "conservative assumptions" the authors found that the overall mutation rates was 4.2 mutations per person per generation, with a deleterious rate of 1.6. When using more realistic assumptions the overall mutation rate for humans become 6.7 with a deleterious rate of 3.1. Such a high rate should have resulted in extinction of our species long ago. They stated in their conclusion:

"The deleterious mutation rate appears to be so high in humans and our close relatives that it is doubtful that such species, which have low reproductive rates, could survive if mutational effects on fitness were to combine in a multiplicative way."

The authors must rely upon a rare association of mutations, termed synergistic epistasis to explain why the numerous hypothesized deleterious mutations have not overwhelmed our genome. Instead of postulating the obvious (that the human genome is not as old as evolution would teach), evolutionists again are relying upon the improbable to retain the evolutionary paradigm.

http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/evol1999.html#Deleterious%20mutation%20rate

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Nuclear Agates in a Marbles World

by Gary North

With one exception, the hydrogen bomb is for show.

Possessing a nuclear bomb is the way to enter an exclusive club. It indicates that a central government possesses power – not merely the power to kill enemy civilians but power over its own citizens. It has both the power to tax and the power to destroy. For a nation-state, possessing a nuclear weapon is something like owning a Mercedes in the Soviet Union in 1985.

In his 1999 book, The Rise and Decline of the State, military historian Martin van Creveld argues that after 1945, the existence of the bomb made its use an all-or-nothing gamble. No nation wanted to play the nuclear card. This fundamentally changed military strategy, Creveld says. It took away the military advantage of technological supremacy. The ultimate ace in the hole for any nuclear-possessing nation has become too risky to play.

With one exception.

Van Creveld believes that this strategic standoff has undermined the legitimacy of the modern nation-state, which has had to spend too much money on conventional weapons, given the fact that an ultimate showdown is unthinkable. He sees that a new form of warfare has passed the strategic initiative to non-nuclear powers. The nuclear powers cannot defeat and occupy non-nuclear states that adopt guerilla warfare.

William Lind and the other post-1989 theorists of fourth-generation warfare have taken this argument to the next level. The inability of any nation to use the bomb has transferred the strategic initiative to non-state military forces. They can undermine the legitimacy of any invading state by inflicting the death of ten thousand cuts. They can also undermine the legitimacy of any state that cannot successfully resist the invading state and which makes peace with the invader.

Meanwhile, the more widespread that nuclear weaponry becomes, the higher the risk of a nuclear exchange due to a tactical or strategic mistake. Complexity increases the leverage of the unexpected. The classic example is the outbreak of World War I. With nuclear weapons, this threat also changed military strategy. The key strategy today is to restrict the spread of these weapons. Complexity theory demands this.

The spread of nuclear weapons is a threat to stability. It produces too many unpredictable factors that could lead to a nuclear exchange. This also increases the cost of pretending that the weapons will be used. They might actually get used. The risk of a nuclear exchange rises as the number of separate national arsenals grows.

Each nation wants to hold down costs while staying in the game. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is basically a tool of an oligopoly to restrict entry.

Yet in a democratic world, voters do not want their nations to be left out of the club. They feel cheated. If the national rival enters the club (e.g., India), then the voters demand a response domestically (e.g., Pakistan).

Possessing the bomb is a matter of bragging rights today. Voters like their leaders to brag on their behalf.

NORTH KOREA

Consider North Korea. The country is small. It has a million troops, yet it cannot attack China. It could overrun Seoul in hours. But why would it want to? It may soon be able to nuke Seoul. But why would it want to?

The bomb for North Korea is clearly not a strategic weapon that it will actually use. Then why has it been built? Bragging rights. Kim Jong-Il wants to stand tall, which is not easy when you are five feet three. The bomb is his version of lifts.

President Bush's response – "This is unacceptable" – is also a form of posturing. Through diplomacy, he might be able to use tax money to pay off Kim, but that would put him personally on eye level with Kim. He is not about to do this. Going eye to eye with a shrimp is not the President's style. This is why he demands multi-nation diplomacy. This is exactly what Kim-Lifts-Il is not going to accept.

Kim is like a little kid in a school yard who wants into the marble game with the big boys. To get in, you have to have at least one agate. A million conventional marbles do not get you in.

So far, the agate game has not started. Nobody wants it to start. But every leader wants to be eligible. If you are not eligible, you are not considered a big boy.

Kim says he now has an agate, and the other boys are running around looking for evidence. They have agate residue-sniffing planes. They have agate bounce-detecting earphones. The boys are frantic. "Is he is? Is he really in?"

They don't care about the low-budget agate as such. They care only about the agate as a ticket into the club. They do not want a five-foot three-inch kid in the club. But an agate gets you in.

Possessing the bomb is about bragging rights. It gets you into the big boys' club.

THE ONE EXCEPTION

For one nation, the bomb is not a bragging right. It has agates – a lot of agates – but it says nothing. "Agates? What agates?" It does not demand entry into the club.

There is a possible reason for this. Here, I merely speculate. See if my speculation makes strategic sense, in contrast to public relations success.

This nation is concerned about another game of marbles, where the boys with no agates challenge each other for supremacy.

In this game, one boy has control over the most precious marble of all. But it is vulnerable. It can be taken out of the game with a handful of agates – or even one. The other boys will then go home.

The nation with the agates isn't interested in taking home the marbles. It is interested in ending the game. Permanently.

That nation is the State of Israel.

Israel does not brag about its nuclear arsenal, because Israel really does have a strategic use for its bombs. For Israel, and Israel alone, nuclear weapons are part of an operational defensive strategy against any strategically threatening attack across its borders.

I have known about this strategy ever since a specialist in Islamic studies pointed it out to me. This man has a network of informants inside the Middle East. He knew that a major attack was imminent two weeks before 9/11, and said so publicly. He just did not know what it would be or where it would be.

What I am about to say here is never mentioned in public by any government official. This is because it is obvious, once you are told about it. Whenever you discover something that is obvious, but which no one ever discusses in public, you are approaching a highly sensitive matter for all concerned parties.

There is one target with such enormous strategic importance that for it be taken out is so unthinkable that literally everything hinges on it – not just today but permanently. This target is ground zero of a balance of power strategy that has been operational for 1400 years. It is a granite cubicle called the Kaaba. Inside it is a black stone, which Muslims believe was found by Abraham and Ishmael. For hundreds of millions of Muslims, this is the holiest of relics. If these two religious objects inside Mecca were ever obliterated, the survival of Islam might be called into question. On the other hand, it might not – which is the supreme strategic risk.

A nuclear hit would be necessary to guarantee the destruction of the Kaaba. This is today technically possible. It was not in 1948, 1967, and 1973.

Israel is believed to possess several hundred nuclear weapons. But it only needs a half dozen, plus ways to deliver them, in order to be certain that one bomb will reach a specific target, after which the conflict would end, permanently. Maybe.

Nuclear weapons are all-or-nothing weapons. They invite retaliation. This retaliation is strategically unthinkable for most nation-states. The stakes are too high. But if one's opponent does not possess a nuclear weapon, and if there is a target – a single target – from which one's enemies derive the will to fight, then a nuclear strategy is militarily rational in a world that does not honor the principle of civilian immunity.

Because of the nature of the target, neither side dares mention publicly what the strategists on both sides of a deeply religious conflict have to take into consideration. The target is exclusively religious. It is surrounded by 1.4 million civilians, plus visitors from all over the world.

No Israeli strategist would dare to mention that its generals have long targeted a religious site. This is a religiously pluralistic world. There would be too much political fallout. It would mean that a non-attacking nation – Saudi Arabia – would suffer a pre-emptory strike for an invasion of Israel that it officially had nothing to do with.

Similarly, no Islamic leader would dare to mention that the Israelis possess the technological ability to destroy God's geographical contact point with the faithful. That would make the bomb more powerful than Allah. That would make the Israelis more powerful than Allah. This is theologically inconceivable for Muslims, or at least ritually unmentionable.

The military leaders of the regional enemies of the Israelis are not blind. They understand the nature of Islamic society's supreme vulnerability.

In only one major world religion does geography have fundamental consequences. This fact is the strategic ace in the hole for the nation of Israel. But, for obvious reasons, both sides have adopted a policy: Don't ask, don't tell.

This ace in the hole will become a deuce the day a regional Islamic state has just one nuclear weapon and the ability to deliver it inside the borders of the State of Israel. Again, this strategic reality is never mentioned in public, precisely because everyone in power knows this.

The general public knows none of this, any more than I did before it was pointed out to me. Once it was pointed out, things became clearer almost instantly.

This is why the State of Israel is determined to keep any regional Islamic power from building a nuclear weapon. For the Israelis, this is not about bragging rights. This is about a specific strategy of survival.

THE GENIE IS OUT OF THE BOTTLE

Hydrogen bombs are horrible weapons. They are inherently anti-civilian weapons. After the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the West decided to return to its medieval concept of war's limits. It concluded, once again, that wars involving a tactic of targeting civilians are destructive and immoral. Until Lincoln authorized Sheridan to burn civilian properties in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, and also authorized Sherman's march to the sea, the West generally honored this conclusion.

Strategic bombing in World War II put Lincoln's strategy into the air. Civilians have been in harm's way ever since.

The United States and the Soviet Union jointly adopted a Cold War policy called MAD: mutually assured destruction. The military of each nation held the rival civilian populations as captives. This was a technological extension of the joint World War II strategy regarding biological weapons. Chemical weapons got out of the bottle in World War I. The fear was that biological weapons, with a far wider swath of devastation, would get out in World War II. They didn't.

If we take the theory of fourth-generation warfare seriously – and I do – then there remains a further level of its implementation: the adoption by fourth-generation forces of the technology of biological weaponry. World War II's standoff was possible because only nation-states were involved. Mutual assured destruction was believable. When a non-state force gains the technology, "mutually" drops out.

What is to prevent this from being done to Israel? I contend that there is a strategy of response technically available to Israel's generals that could give the non-state aggressor pause, even though his forces are not geographically identifiable and therefore vulnerable to a direct nuclear response.

The strategic problem with this response is the problem of the doomsday weapon in Dr. Strangelove: It does the possessor no good if no one else knows about it. Complexity theory indicates that unwanted genies tend to get out of bottles.

The admitted strategic reality today is the asymmetrical nature of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The nuclear genie is not yet out of the Islamic bottle. This has led to Israel's strategy of pre-emption, which was used in 1981 against Iraq. This attack did not require nuclear weapons. The question is: Will it be implemented again in Iran?

The widespread assumption is that it will not. But this assumption is made in terms of an analysis that does not consider the centrality of the Kaaba in Islam. There is a supreme target for a supreme defensive strategy.

CONCLUSION

From the day that Abraham Lincoln abandoned the strategic concept of the immunity of civilians, the strategic genie was once again of the bottle. That bottle and that genie are now back where they were in the stories of the thousand and one nights.

So are 130,000 American troops.

October 16, 2006

Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 17-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

Monday, January 25, 2010

When the Truth is Forbidden

When the Truth is Forbidden
June 7, 2009

Recent months have seen two momentous developments in American public education.

Firstly, as reported by Christian NewsWire(1), the Southern Baptist Convention is finally throwing in the towel on government education, and is considering a resolution "urging Baptists to remove their children from government schools and, instead, give them a Christian education."

Secondly, in May of this year, a team of paleontologists led by Dr. Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University completed their laboratory testing and DNA sequencing of intact, unfossilized soft tissue recovered from various dinosaur bone marrow samples. Dr. Schweitzer caused quite a stir in 2005 when she reported the discovery of the first of these soft tissues inside an allegedly 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex femur, as it is universally acknowledged that unfossilized soft tissue cannot survive for more than a maximum of 100,000 years.(2)

Obviously, you don't have to have an advanced degree in biology to understand the problem this creates for evolutionists -- put simply, dead meat rots away, in a lot less time than tens of millions of years. Intent upon explaining away these inconvenient facts, many evolutionists resorted to the claim that these tissues were nothing more than "biofilms": biological muck which had seeped into the dinosaur bones since their time of deposition. However, the recent completion of multiple, independent laboratory tests upon the Tyrannosaur and Hadrosaur tissues in question has blown away this flimsy objection -- confirming not only that the soft tissue in question is original saurian bone marrow, but also confirming the presence of collagen protein within some of the tissues. Now, collagen protein begins to break down within weeks of the death of an organism, and even if hermetically sealed will completely break down due to simple thermodynamic effects within a maximum of 30,000 years.(3) Yet not only has intact, undecayed collagen protein been discovered within the soft tissues under study, but some of the cell samples recently recovered from allegedly 120-million-year-old Iguanodon bone marrow were still chemically "live" enough to produce an immune reaction!(4)

Unlike the Theory of Evolution (which has never been provably observed, tested, or reproduced in a laboratory), the breakdown of proteins in a dead organism is a known, measurable fact. So given that we now know, as a proven fact, that it is chemically impossible for these dinosaur bones to be more than 30,000 years old -- well, the only logical conclusion is that they aren't more than 30,000 years old! Furthermore, if the iron laws of chemistry tell us that these dinosaurs must have existed upon the earth within the last 30,000 years (rather than tens of millions of years ago, as claimed by evolutionists), then that leaves only one rational explanation for their presence: Recent Creation by an Intelligent Designer.

And, unlike the evolutionists -- the creationists have the cold, hard facts to prove it.

Louis Pasteur's Law of Biogenesis -- one of the oldest and best-established Laws of Science known to man -- teaches us that "Life does not arise from Non-Life". Clearly, the ultimate implication of this scientific axiom is that the existence of Life on Earth owes its origin to the work of a Creator. By contrast, the evolutionist claim that Life on Earth arose by spontaneous generation from the random mixing of non-living chemicals stands in direct opposition to this Scientific Law -- and so evolutionists must continue to place blind faith in their unscientific belief in the random, spontaneous generation of Life, despite the fact that there has never been even one laboratory example of a single living cell produced by the random mixing of non-living chemicals which would provide them with any evidence to contravene the creationist implications of the Law of Biogenesis.

However, there's one place in which you certainly won't hear these facts presented for discussion -- and that's your children's public school science classes. Unfortunately, due to wrong-headed decisions like Edwards v. Aguillard, government-sponsored science education in this country is crippled by a legal prohibition which prevents science educators from even mentioning the possibility of Recent Creation by an Intelligent Designer -- even when it's the only logical explanation that fits the evidence.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical." When science educators in this country are legally prohibited from telling our kids the truth, it's no wonder that Baptist parents are questioning why they should still support the Public Schools.

Indeed, the larger question is -- why should any of us?

References:
(2) -- "Soft Tissue Discovered in Bone of a Dinosaur", Robert Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2005; see also "Dinosaur soft tissue: Biofilm or Blood Vessels?", Brian Thomas, Institute for Creation Research
(3) -- "Hadrosaur Soft Tissues Another Blow to Long-Ages Myth", Brian Thomas, Institute for Creation Research, May 12, 2009
(4) -- Embery G. et al., "Identification of proteinaceous material in the bone of the dinosaur Iguanodon", Connect Tissue Res. 44 Suppl 1:41–6, 2003; as cited in "Dinosaur soft tissue and protein -- even more confirmation!", Carl Wieland, Creation.com, May 6, 2009