Michael Carley of Porterville is director of institutional research at Porterville College. He wrote an editorial complaining about the Iraq War. I was amazed to see it published in the online version of the Porterville Recorder.
If Porterville is a representative example then small town America is fed a steady diet of the most extreme right wing propaganda in its local newspapers. Dissenting voices are not usually allowed. In Porterville the local newspaper is the Porterville Recorder. It is owned by something called the Freedom Newspapers which advocates for anything but freedom of thought and freedom of action.
Patrick Greene was a local resident who wanted the Protestant cross removed from the main city park where it had been erected in the 1960's. He no longer lives in Porterville.
Dear Dr. Carley:
You are a man of great courage. I can only imagine how unpopular you will become now that you have written an editorial something other than the typical right wing propaganda of Kathleen Parker, et. al., so popular in the Recorder. How a “freedom” newspaper would allow your opinion to be published puzzles me. Was the regular editor out of town?
I applaud and agree with everything you wrote. I would add an item about the “Saddam in his underwear” photos published by the London Sun and the New York Post. Both “newspapers” are owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns FOX “news.”
Do you suppose there will be days of outrage on cable news and radio talk about the riots and deaths caused by the underwear photos? Will Rupert Murdoch be condemned by any of the hypocrites on the right? Will we hear from Parker, Limbaugh, Lars or the screaming quartet of chicken hawk patriots on Fox--O’Reilly, Hannity, Cavuto and the San Joaquin’s own, Jim Gibson? I think not.
Anything the right wing propaganda machine does is fine even when they lie about potential presidents of our country like Al Gore and John Kerry. The Machine destroyed any and all of the people who revealed inner secrets of the Bush administrations, such as the administration’s lack of diligence in protecting our country from the 9/11 disaster and the pre-war WMD lies told with intent to deceive the American public. Imagine if a Democratic president told lies to take us into a war. He would be destroyed. (Oh yeah he was—Lyndon Baines Johnson).
It seems that lies which further the right wing agenda aren’t lies at all. In fact they are even better than truth. They make such good sound bites.
Good luck with the angry phone calls. You are the true patriot. Real Americans speak up and speak out when our country is on the wrong track. True Americans fought slavery. True Americans defended Indians from genocide. True Americans rallied for a woman’s right to vote. True Americans spoke up against the internment Japanese Americans.
The Kathleen Parkers and Rupert Murdochs, and Rush Limbaughs in our early history did their best to work for the wrong and immoral side on each of those issues. Lucky for America their hate, cons and lies were limited to one newspaper at a time. Today we are not so fortunate.
If infiltration of our homes with right wing radio and Fox News had been around since 1776 instead of just the last 15 or twenty years, we would still have slaves, all the Indians would be dead, all women would be barefoot and pregnant including Kathleen Parker, and the Japanese ancestry Americans would still be in camps if not dead or deported.
The Germans thought they had a great civilization before WWII, but it turned out that the good people of Germany could be killed or beaten into submission by “patriotic” German crowd. More than twenty million people died because not enough Dietrich Bonhoeffers spoke up. I pray the same disaster does not happen to us in America.
I wish you the very best of luck. You and Patrick Greene are the real Patriots in Porterville.
Sincerely,
Peter Welch—darwindad@cox.net
Former resident and subscriber to what we then fondly called the Porterville Distorter.
PS—I came to Porterville as a brand new starry-eyed middle school teacher proud of what I was doing. One of the first editorials in the Recorder that I read sticks with me still. It informed me and all public school teachers in the city that we were pigs eating at the public trough and we should be eternally grateful for any scrap of pay or benefit we were tossed. We should remember that all of our salaries came out of the pockets of those who “really” worked for a living.
I remember being shocked, hurt, and depressed that anyone could feel that way about such a noble giving profession that I had worked hard to join, let alone print such nastiness in our local paper. It was even worse that the person who wrote the vitriol was the editor of the paper no less.
Today with your editorial “the world has turned upside down” and momentarily a different viewpoint was on the pages of the Porterville Recorder. May today’s King Georges and their Cornwallish henchman always be defeated by words and actions of brave patriots like you.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Stem Cell research, Insurance problems
An email I wrote to Stacy and Scooter who are the weekday morning hosts of KLSD AM 1360.
----------------------------
Dear Stacy and Scooter,
Thanks you for discussing stem cell research on the radio today.
And thank you Scooter for talking with me off air. You asked what you could do for us. You even offered money. Thank you for the offer. Your offer was very compassionate, but unless I had enough money to fund the research that is needed, money will not help.
You two have a megaphone that those of us who are sick do not have. Use that megaphone to:
(1) promote all forms stem cell research,
(2) answer all the right wing talking points on stem cell research
(3) losen up the tight regulations that the FDA has in place that are slowing revolutionary new cures for people.
(4) advocate for universal health care.
Promote all forms of stem cell research—embryonic, fetal and adult. No matter the stem cell source, cures could be found. The fewer restrictions on research the sooner Star Trek like cures would be available to all.
A word on fetal cell research, my wife miscarried between our two sons. If some of the cells from that child (fetus) could have been used for a cure, we would have donated them. It is compassionate to donate organs, right? Why not fetal cells?
Up to six weeks or so a mammal fetus has no immune system. For some unknown reason this allows fetal cells to be transplanted to any other member of a species with no rejection whatsoever. In fact early mammal fetal cells can be transplanted into virtually any other different mammal species with no rejection.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis took primordial kidney tissue from pig fetuses and transferred it into rat abdomens. In the rat abdomen, the tissue developed into tiny rat sized kidneys (made of pig tissue) that filtered the rat’s blood and put out urine. This experiment was done over three years ago! Other similar experiments have been done with other mammal fetal cells as well and even earlier. http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom/Site1339/mainpageS1339P1sublevel70.html
Think how many dialysis patients have died in the last three years. How many could have been saved if my middle child’s primordial kidney fetal cells could have been transplanted into those patients! My wife and I would have felt better as well somehow part of our child was still alive. Of course her miscarriage was twenty six years ago, those fetal cells are long gone. But why not use fetal cells from others today who miscarry.
(2) Answer all right wing talking points. Embryonic stem cell research must be done because currently only ESC’s can divide indefinitely. A researcher can grow as many as he/she needs, for as long as he/she needs.
Adult stem cell are genetically limited to as few as seven division and then they are done and they die.
Eventually research on ESCs will yield information on how to get adult stem cells to continue to divide but until the research is done adult stem cell lab work is limited by numbers and by the amount of time a line of adult stem cells can be kept alive.
Another point on adult stem cell research, one of the CON talking points is that there are seventy cures for adult stem cells none for embryonic. The adult stem cell cures they are talking about are mostly bone marrow transplants that happen to have a few blood and immune forming stem cells in and among the bone marrow.
Bone marrow transplants have been done for more than thirty years, only five or six years ago researchers discover that there were a few blood and immune forming stem cells (hematopoietic) in among the rest of the bone marrow. The CONS immediately started mis-labeling bone marrow transplants as adult stem cell cures. The seventy adult stem cures are not new. It is old technology given a new name by the CONS.
The second CON talking point is that ESCs treatments cause cancer. True there have been problems with early experiments with undifferentiated ESC’s but now that researchers have discovered some of the cues for differentiating the ESC’s, the problem is closed to being solved. Besides the idea was never to use ESC directly to cure patients, it was to understand them and their differentiation process. Once the process is well understood, cures using any kind of cell would come.
[The differentiation process takes one fertilized egg cell and makes every tissue and organ in an adult human. Researchers are now at the very beginning of learning how that process works. ESC’s are crucial for understanding it. Star Trek type cures will happen when researchers fully understand it.]
(3) Advocate for the loosening up of FDA regulations
Right now there are forty revolutionary therapies, virtual cures and full blown complete cures for autoimmune disease in mice. Only a couple are currently in human trials.
Each set of human clinical trials is estimated to cost one billion dollars under current FDA guidelines. Due to the cost risk exposure, Big Pharma sets draconian exclusion criteria for clinical trials to try to eliminate the sickest patients.
If they allow all patients to try new therapies, some of the sickest will have adverse reactions or die. Their deaths or reactions must be reported to FDA. The deaths or reactions are counted against the company when they apply for FDA approval to sell the new medicine or therapy. A billion dollars in clinical trials could be lost if too many of the sickest patients die. (Not that they weren’t going to die of their diseases anyway.)
We need Blind Compassionate Use FDA regulations. Negative results for any Compassionate Use patient who failed to qualify for the trial due to exclusion criteria should be blinded. The results should have no bearing on FDA approval process.
(4) Advocate for transferable universal health insurance. When my autoimmune disease worsened, I had to quit work. No work, no medical insurance. There are no private insurance companies that would now insure me with a pre-existing condition. My son was a brilliant student. He worked hard at school. He had scholarships and jobs which fully paid for his first two years in college. He never got in any trouble (not one bad report in his entire scholastic career). Suddenly he is hit with a genetic time bomb. He cannot work. He cannot get health insurance. Medications costs thousands of dollars a month.
If my wife could not work, we would have no insurance whatsoever. How would we pay the $3000 a month for his medications? As it is now, because he is only covered by one parent, we have to pay between $3-5,000 a year more than if I still had health insurance. On top of the forty thousand dollar a year hit we take in the difference between my disability pay and what my working salary would be.
Every year in October when health insurance is renewed we have to worry will he still be covered as a disabled dependent? How much more will “our contribution” to his health care be this year? Every year the rules change unilaterally and we have to “contribute” more.
----------------------------
Dear Stacy and Scooter,
Thanks you for discussing stem cell research on the radio today.
And thank you Scooter for talking with me off air. You asked what you could do for us. You even offered money. Thank you for the offer. Your offer was very compassionate, but unless I had enough money to fund the research that is needed, money will not help.
You two have a megaphone that those of us who are sick do not have. Use that megaphone to:
(1) promote all forms stem cell research,
(2) answer all the right wing talking points on stem cell research
(3) losen up the tight regulations that the FDA has in place that are slowing revolutionary new cures for people.
(4) advocate for universal health care.
Promote all forms of stem cell research—embryonic, fetal and adult. No matter the stem cell source, cures could be found. The fewer restrictions on research the sooner Star Trek like cures would be available to all.
A word on fetal cell research, my wife miscarried between our two sons. If some of the cells from that child (fetus) could have been used for a cure, we would have donated them. It is compassionate to donate organs, right? Why not fetal cells?
Up to six weeks or so a mammal fetus has no immune system. For some unknown reason this allows fetal cells to be transplanted to any other member of a species with no rejection whatsoever. In fact early mammal fetal cells can be transplanted into virtually any other different mammal species with no rejection.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis took primordial kidney tissue from pig fetuses and transferred it into rat abdomens. In the rat abdomen, the tissue developed into tiny rat sized kidneys (made of pig tissue) that filtered the rat’s blood and put out urine. This experiment was done over three years ago! Other similar experiments have been done with other mammal fetal cells as well and even earlier. http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom/Site1339/mainpageS1339P1sublevel70.html
Think how many dialysis patients have died in the last three years. How many could have been saved if my middle child’s primordial kidney fetal cells could have been transplanted into those patients! My wife and I would have felt better as well somehow part of our child was still alive. Of course her miscarriage was twenty six years ago, those fetal cells are long gone. But why not use fetal cells from others today who miscarry.
(2) Answer all right wing talking points. Embryonic stem cell research must be done because currently only ESC’s can divide indefinitely. A researcher can grow as many as he/she needs, for as long as he/she needs.
Adult stem cell are genetically limited to as few as seven division and then they are done and they die.
Eventually research on ESCs will yield information on how to get adult stem cells to continue to divide but until the research is done adult stem cell lab work is limited by numbers and by the amount of time a line of adult stem cells can be kept alive.
Another point on adult stem cell research, one of the CON talking points is that there are seventy cures for adult stem cells none for embryonic. The adult stem cell cures they are talking about are mostly bone marrow transplants that happen to have a few blood and immune forming stem cells in and among the bone marrow.
Bone marrow transplants have been done for more than thirty years, only five or six years ago researchers discover that there were a few blood and immune forming stem cells (hematopoietic) in among the rest of the bone marrow. The CONS immediately started mis-labeling bone marrow transplants as adult stem cell cures. The seventy adult stem cures are not new. It is old technology given a new name by the CONS.
The second CON talking point is that ESCs treatments cause cancer. True there have been problems with early experiments with undifferentiated ESC’s but now that researchers have discovered some of the cues for differentiating the ESC’s, the problem is closed to being solved. Besides the idea was never to use ESC directly to cure patients, it was to understand them and their differentiation process. Once the process is well understood, cures using any kind of cell would come.
[The differentiation process takes one fertilized egg cell and makes every tissue and organ in an adult human. Researchers are now at the very beginning of learning how that process works. ESC’s are crucial for understanding it. Star Trek type cures will happen when researchers fully understand it.]
(3) Advocate for the loosening up of FDA regulations
Right now there are forty revolutionary therapies, virtual cures and full blown complete cures for autoimmune disease in mice. Only a couple are currently in human trials.
Each set of human clinical trials is estimated to cost one billion dollars under current FDA guidelines. Due to the cost risk exposure, Big Pharma sets draconian exclusion criteria for clinical trials to try to eliminate the sickest patients.
If they allow all patients to try new therapies, some of the sickest will have adverse reactions or die. Their deaths or reactions must be reported to FDA. The deaths or reactions are counted against the company when they apply for FDA approval to sell the new medicine or therapy. A billion dollars in clinical trials could be lost if too many of the sickest patients die. (Not that they weren’t going to die of their diseases anyway.)
We need Blind Compassionate Use FDA regulations. Negative results for any Compassionate Use patient who failed to qualify for the trial due to exclusion criteria should be blinded. The results should have no bearing on FDA approval process.
(4) Advocate for transferable universal health insurance. When my autoimmune disease worsened, I had to quit work. No work, no medical insurance. There are no private insurance companies that would now insure me with a pre-existing condition. My son was a brilliant student. He worked hard at school. He had scholarships and jobs which fully paid for his first two years in college. He never got in any trouble (not one bad report in his entire scholastic career). Suddenly he is hit with a genetic time bomb. He cannot work. He cannot get health insurance. Medications costs thousands of dollars a month.
If my wife could not work, we would have no insurance whatsoever. How would we pay the $3000 a month for his medications? As it is now, because he is only covered by one parent, we have to pay between $3-5,000 a year more than if I still had health insurance. On top of the forty thousand dollar a year hit we take in the difference between my disability pay and what my working salary would be.
Every year in October when health insurance is renewed we have to worry will he still be covered as a disabled dependent? How much more will “our contribution” to his health care be this year? Every year the rules change unilaterally and we have to “contribute” more.
Intelligent Design is neither
What follows is an email to a local radio host on KLSD 1360 AM San Diego. He is the host for a two hour Saturday show. He calls himself Scooter. His show is entitled, The Rant.
--------------------------
Dear Scooter,
I called you shortly before your show on Saturday. I wanted to talk about Intelligent Design but you got started on such a great rant about Cindy Sheehan and the George Bush boot lickers that I decided not to interrupt. I was enjoying your rant way too much.
I thought I would email you instead.
ID and creation scientist and their attack on the way science represent a huge health threat to you and all your listeners. There is a contagious condition spreading rapidly across our country today that can kill a matter of days, sometimes in hours, by devouring a person's body. It is like a super fast cancer. And it is totally out of control. Thousands of Americans are dying each year from this horror and the numbers are growing by the day. This horror is upon us as a direct result of the dual attack of Intelligent Design and its cousin Creation Science on the ability of the public to understand evolution. Virtually no evolutionary theory is taught in middle school or high schools any where in America today. Biology teachers are too afraid to mention the “E-word.”
The condition is multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. In the 1930's the son of an American president died from an infected blister. There was no treatment for infections. People were far more terrified of infections than cancer. Sinus infections ate away people's faces before those poor victims died in agony.
We are again at a time when there is no way to stop many infections. We are at the end of the era of antibiotics due to the complete inability of the American public to understand the basics of evolution. I have a nephew in law whose career as a deputy sheriff was ended by a resistant bacterial infection he acquired during surgery for an on the job injury. He has had two additional surgeries—losing 2/3 of one lung and then his spleen in the next operation to try to remove infected tissues. Even on IV antibiotics the best that can be done for him is to halt the spread of the infection not to kill it. He faces a third operation in the fall if he survives. It has been two years of hell for him, my niece and their two small children.
We use more antibiotics as daily growth promoters for chickens, pigs and cows than we do for all human and animal disease combined. Low levels of antibiotics are in the feed every single day for every single farm animal in America. If an evolutionary scientist was paid to come up with a method of developing antibiotic resistance, no better method than feeding low constant levels to farm animals could be conceived of. Today MRSA and other resistant bacteria are always found on the clothes and skin of workers in factory meat farms and routinely found on the clothes of their family members and friends and surfaces in their homes and cars.
Until 15 or twenty years ago these kinds of bacteria infections were incredibly rare. MRSA and other resistant bacteria might appear occasionally in hospitals. Huge expensive sterilization procedures (equipment replaced, all surfaces sterilized and painted over, bed linens burned, etc.) were put in place to eliminate them. In the nineties whole wings of hospitals were permanently shut down. But today no hospital even tries to stop the infections. The infections are completely out of control and ubiquitous in hospitals. All hospitals in the United States have MRSA and other resistant bacterial strains at all times in all parts of the hospitals. The only reason deaths have not yet been higher is most of these bacteria need a break in the skin to get started. And there is one dangerous IV antibiotic that usually kills the bacteria. But even this antibiotic is becoming useless. When it does work, side effects from the antibiotic are frequent and terrible.
In Europe the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals simply to promote growth is outlawed because Europeans teach and accept the principles of evolution. They as a public and their government agencies understand the dangers of soliciting drug resistance evolutionary adaptations to antibiotics.
If you haven’t been personally affected yet by antibiotic resistance, you will. At the current rate of spread, in less than five years every Americans will either personally have been a victim or someone close to them will be.
Do not think that new antibiotics will come on the seen. There have been no new antibiotics discovered since 1985. All the hundreds of “kinds” of antibiotics on the market are really slight variations of only five basic kinds (penicillin, cephalosporin, tetracycline, erythromycin, and quinolones). The differences among the hundreds of variations of these five kinds are tiny inert chemical side groups that allow big pharma to patent “new” antibiotics and increase profits. The new antibiotics are identical in efficacy to the old ones. The FDA which gets ¾ of its operating funds from big pharma continues to license these “me too” antibiotics as if they were “new” and more effective then the nearly identical ones they imitate.
Three of the existing five kinds of antibiotics are made from just one species of microbe (Streptomycetes). The search for new antibiotics has been known to be an almost hopeless search since the seventies. Antibiotics are kill bacteria but not mammals (like people) are exceedingly rare in nature. And resistance genes evolved by natural selection for one antibiotic usually gives resistance to other antibiotics.
Neither the CDC site or the NIH site (since W’s men took control of CDC and NIH) any longer mention antibiotics fed daily to farm animals as a problem (talk about censorship!), the following is an independent site (medscape) that is used by health care professionals in the United States for continuing education (CME) purposes:
www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410617 - 37k (posted in 2000, pre W)
Increasing prevalence of resistance to antibiotics has been recognized in microbial pathogens causing community-acquired and hospital-acquired infections. The most important factor responsible for the appearance and spread of antibiotic resistance has been increasing antibiotic use. Antibiotic supplementation of animal feed has contributed to the rise of some antibiotic resistance in community-acquired infections.
The site <> posted the following two days ago on August 11, 2005:
…the situation has now become alarming, with the emergence of pathogenic strains that show multiple resistance to a broad range of antibiotics. One of the most important examples concerns multiple-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus in hospitals (MRSA). Some of these strains cause serious nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections and are resistant to virtually all the useful antibiotics, including methicillin, cephalosporins and other beta-lactams that target peptidoglycan synthesis, the macrolide antibiotics such as erythromycin and the aminoglycoside antibiotics such as streptomycin and neomycin, all of which target the bacterial ribosome. The only compound that can be used effectively against these staphylococci is an older antibiotic, vancomycin, which has some undesirable effects on humans. Recently, some clinical strains of S. aureus have developed resistance to even this compound.
As bad as the above sounds the situation is worse in America. In the UK, antibiotic resistance is much better handled and more under control than here.
The thousands perhaps millions of deaths that will begin to take place routinely in the United States in the next few years can all be laid at the feet of ID and Creation Scientists. These anti-science charlatans have confused the public over this growing danger. We in the United States have not even begun to take steps to slow down the tremendous natural selection pressure towards resistance that feeding low levels of antibiotics to farm animals causes. The science charlatans have gotten rich and famous and have enormous power in the short term, but the long term consequences for them and the rest of us are extremely dire. The trends guarantee that in less than five years every individual American or his/her loved one will be tragically impacted by antibiotic resistant bacteria.
The majority of Americans have been successfully deceived by ID and Creation Science purveyors. Religious Americans have been told that accepting evolution means a rejection of their faith, of God himself. This is the first and greatest lie of the Anti-evolutionists. Once there target audience accepts this lie, the audience starts to accept all the other deceptions of ID and creation science as well.
--------------------------
Dear Scooter,
I called you shortly before your show on Saturday. I wanted to talk about Intelligent Design but you got started on such a great rant about Cindy Sheehan and the George Bush boot lickers that I decided not to interrupt. I was enjoying your rant way too much.
I thought I would email you instead.
ID and creation scientist and their attack on the way science represent a huge health threat to you and all your listeners. There is a contagious condition spreading rapidly across our country today that can kill a matter of days, sometimes in hours, by devouring a person's body. It is like a super fast cancer. And it is totally out of control. Thousands of Americans are dying each year from this horror and the numbers are growing by the day. This horror is upon us as a direct result of the dual attack of Intelligent Design and its cousin Creation Science on the ability of the public to understand evolution. Virtually no evolutionary theory is taught in middle school or high schools any where in America today. Biology teachers are too afraid to mention the “E-word.”
The condition is multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. In the 1930's the son of an American president died from an infected blister. There was no treatment for infections. People were far more terrified of infections than cancer. Sinus infections ate away people's faces before those poor victims died in agony.
We are again at a time when there is no way to stop many infections. We are at the end of the era of antibiotics due to the complete inability of the American public to understand the basics of evolution. I have a nephew in law whose career as a deputy sheriff was ended by a resistant bacterial infection he acquired during surgery for an on the job injury. He has had two additional surgeries—losing 2/3 of one lung and then his spleen in the next operation to try to remove infected tissues. Even on IV antibiotics the best that can be done for him is to halt the spread of the infection not to kill it. He faces a third operation in the fall if he survives. It has been two years of hell for him, my niece and their two small children.
We use more antibiotics as daily growth promoters for chickens, pigs and cows than we do for all human and animal disease combined. Low levels of antibiotics are in the feed every single day for every single farm animal in America. If an evolutionary scientist was paid to come up with a method of developing antibiotic resistance, no better method than feeding low constant levels to farm animals could be conceived of. Today MRSA and other resistant bacteria are always found on the clothes and skin of workers in factory meat farms and routinely found on the clothes of their family members and friends and surfaces in their homes and cars.
Until 15 or twenty years ago these kinds of bacteria infections were incredibly rare. MRSA and other resistant bacteria might appear occasionally in hospitals. Huge expensive sterilization procedures (equipment replaced, all surfaces sterilized and painted over, bed linens burned, etc.) were put in place to eliminate them. In the nineties whole wings of hospitals were permanently shut down. But today no hospital even tries to stop the infections. The infections are completely out of control and ubiquitous in hospitals. All hospitals in the United States have MRSA and other resistant bacterial strains at all times in all parts of the hospitals. The only reason deaths have not yet been higher is most of these bacteria need a break in the skin to get started. And there is one dangerous IV antibiotic that usually kills the bacteria. But even this antibiotic is becoming useless. When it does work, side effects from the antibiotic are frequent and terrible.
In Europe the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals simply to promote growth is outlawed because Europeans teach and accept the principles of evolution. They as a public and their government agencies understand the dangers of soliciting drug resistance evolutionary adaptations to antibiotics.
If you haven’t been personally affected yet by antibiotic resistance, you will. At the current rate of spread, in less than five years every Americans will either personally have been a victim or someone close to them will be.
Do not think that new antibiotics will come on the seen. There have been no new antibiotics discovered since 1985. All the hundreds of “kinds” of antibiotics on the market are really slight variations of only five basic kinds (penicillin, cephalosporin, tetracycline, erythromycin, and quinolones). The differences among the hundreds of variations of these five kinds are tiny inert chemical side groups that allow big pharma to patent “new” antibiotics and increase profits. The new antibiotics are identical in efficacy to the old ones. The FDA which gets ¾ of its operating funds from big pharma continues to license these “me too” antibiotics as if they were “new” and more effective then the nearly identical ones they imitate.
Three of the existing five kinds of antibiotics are made from just one species of microbe (Streptomycetes). The search for new antibiotics has been known to be an almost hopeless search since the seventies. Antibiotics are kill bacteria but not mammals (like people) are exceedingly rare in nature. And resistance genes evolved by natural selection for one antibiotic usually gives resistance to other antibiotics.
Neither the CDC site or the NIH site (since W’s men took control of CDC and NIH) any longer mention antibiotics fed daily to farm animals as a problem (talk about censorship!), the following is an independent site (medscape) that is used by health care professionals in the United States for continuing education (CME) purposes:
www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410617 - 37k (posted in 2000, pre W)
Increasing prevalence of resistance to antibiotics has been recognized in microbial pathogens causing community-acquired and hospital-acquired infections. The most important factor responsible for the appearance and spread of antibiotic resistance has been increasing antibiotic use. Antibiotic supplementation of animal feed has contributed to the rise of some antibiotic resistance in community-acquired infections.
The site <
…the situation has now become alarming, with the emergence of pathogenic strains that show multiple resistance to a broad range of antibiotics. One of the most important examples concerns multiple-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus in hospitals (MRSA). Some of these strains cause serious nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections and are resistant to virtually all the useful antibiotics, including methicillin, cephalosporins and other beta-lactams that target peptidoglycan synthesis, the macrolide antibiotics such as erythromycin and the aminoglycoside antibiotics such as streptomycin and neomycin, all of which target the bacterial ribosome. The only compound that can be used effectively against these staphylococci is an older antibiotic, vancomycin, which has some undesirable effects on humans. Recently, some clinical strains of S. aureus have developed resistance to even this compound.
As bad as the above sounds the situation is worse in America. In the UK, antibiotic resistance is much better handled and more under control than here.
The thousands perhaps millions of deaths that will begin to take place routinely in the United States in the next few years can all be laid at the feet of ID and Creation Scientists. These anti-science charlatans have confused the public over this growing danger. We in the United States have not even begun to take steps to slow down the tremendous natural selection pressure towards resistance that feeding low levels of antibiotics to farm animals causes. The science charlatans have gotten rich and famous and have enormous power in the short term, but the long term consequences for them and the rest of us are extremely dire. The trends guarantee that in less than five years every individual American or his/her loved one will be tragically impacted by antibiotic resistant bacteria.
The majority of Americans have been successfully deceived by ID and Creation Science purveyors. Religious Americans have been told that accepting evolution means a rejection of their faith, of God himself. This is the first and greatest lie of the Anti-evolutionists. Once there target audience accepts this lie, the audience starts to accept all the other deceptions of ID and creation science as well.
Timelines for Iraq
I wrote the following to the Porterville Recorder newspaper in response to an editorial that Republican Representative Devin Nunes wrote in early May of 2007. I read the paper on line. My children were born in Porterville and we still have many friends there.
---------------------------------------------------
So Devin Nunes (Member of Congress-San Joaquin Valley, California) wants to bring the troops home, but the Democrats are 'emboldening' the enemy by putting suggested timelines in a bill that gives more money to the military than the president asked for. The timelines are not mandates. There are no de-funding or automatic withdrawal provisions in the bill. Yet President Bush vetoed it and Representative Nunes supports that veto—of a massive funding bill with toothless timelines.
Suggesting to the Iraqi government that perhaps they should police their own country “is helping terrorists to win.” Over 90% of the Iraqis polled want us out of their country. Do we have to kill all of them before we leave?
The war will cost one trillion dollars. None of that money has been paid. It is all on our children's tab. How much more debt will we pass on to our children?
One of my former students died in Iraq. He was quiet and respectful in class and a good student. Now at age twenty, he lies dead. For what? Did he die to protect us from weapons of mass destruction? Oh yeah? Where are they? Except for a few unusable, rusty, twenty-some year, buried in the sand artillery shells with deteriorated mustard gas; there were no WMD. None. Not one usable WMD and certainly no WMDs capable of making a mushroom cloud. But Jeff is still dead.
Was it because of 9/11? Those terrible Iraqis in the planes that flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we had to fight them. Oh wait! No! They were mostly Saudi citizens from a country south of Iraq. They were Sunni Muslims. They were religious fanatics. Iraq is a majority Shiite Muslim country. Shiites hate Sunnis. Shiites do not cooperate with Sunnis. Saddam Hussein was a secularist. The Bath Party was a secular party. Saddam hated Al Qaeda. He suppressed them in Iraq every where he had control. The only Al Qaeda in Iraq before the war were in the north protected by our no-fly zone. So if the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11, why did Jeff die?
Did he die to keep the terrorists "over there?" Ridiculous! If they wanted to come here they could hop on any commercial jet and be here in hours. They have not done it so far. What makes Rep. Nunes think they will be more likely to do that if we leave them alone? All the Iraqis want is their country back. Let’s give it to them. I want no more dead former students.
Let’s call Representative Nunes and tell him. I am one life-long Republican who will not be voting Republican for Congress in the next election, unless elected representatives of my party start to wake up.
Former resident of Porterville
---------------------------------------------------
So Devin Nunes (Member of Congress-San Joaquin Valley, California) wants to bring the troops home, but the Democrats are 'emboldening' the enemy by putting suggested timelines in a bill that gives more money to the military than the president asked for. The timelines are not mandates. There are no de-funding or automatic withdrawal provisions in the bill. Yet President Bush vetoed it and Representative Nunes supports that veto—of a massive funding bill with toothless timelines.
Suggesting to the Iraqi government that perhaps they should police their own country “is helping terrorists to win.” Over 90% of the Iraqis polled want us out of their country. Do we have to kill all of them before we leave?
The war will cost one trillion dollars. None of that money has been paid. It is all on our children's tab. How much more debt will we pass on to our children?
One of my former students died in Iraq. He was quiet and respectful in class and a good student. Now at age twenty, he lies dead. For what? Did he die to protect us from weapons of mass destruction? Oh yeah? Where are they? Except for a few unusable, rusty, twenty-some year, buried in the sand artillery shells with deteriorated mustard gas; there were no WMD. None. Not one usable WMD and certainly no WMDs capable of making a mushroom cloud. But Jeff is still dead.
Was it because of 9/11? Those terrible Iraqis in the planes that flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we had to fight them. Oh wait! No! They were mostly Saudi citizens from a country south of Iraq. They were Sunni Muslims. They were religious fanatics. Iraq is a majority Shiite Muslim country. Shiites hate Sunnis. Shiites do not cooperate with Sunnis. Saddam Hussein was a secularist. The Bath Party was a secular party. Saddam hated Al Qaeda. He suppressed them in Iraq every where he had control. The only Al Qaeda in Iraq before the war were in the north protected by our no-fly zone. So if the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11, why did Jeff die?
Did he die to keep the terrorists "over there?" Ridiculous! If they wanted to come here they could hop on any commercial jet and be here in hours. They have not done it so far. What makes Rep. Nunes think they will be more likely to do that if we leave them alone? All the Iraqis want is their country back. Let’s give it to them. I want no more dead former students.
Let’s call Representative Nunes and tell him. I am one life-long Republican who will not be voting Republican for Congress in the next election, unless elected representatives of my party start to wake up.
Former resident of Porterville
The making of Arrogance--Dr. James Dobson
I sent this letter from the Focus on the family web site on January 25, 2005. On the web site they had a link to inudate five hand picked Dobson scapegoats who did not show him enough respect about his Sponge Bob square pants comments. Maureen Dowd, Matt Lauer, Keith Oberman, James Carville, and Michael Ventre were the five that a mass mailing was being sent to. I wrote the following to let those five know that many Christians supported them and not James Dobson. Here is my email:
Thank you for your courage in standing up to the arrogant ego of James Dobson. He does not speak for all Christians and he does not speak for me. His ridiculous attack on Sponge Bob has degenerated into hate filled missives about the homosexual life style and its supposed threat to our children.
I once supported him. But his ego and arrogance and nastiness have led me to oppose him. I have even met him in person when he came to speak at the Nazarene Church in Porterville where his former tennis partner at Pasadena Nazarene College, Wil Spaite, was our pastor. That was in 1980 or 81.
Since that time Dobson has seen Pistol Pete Maravich die of a heart attack in front of him, suffered his own heart attack, been on the Presidential Commission on Pornography (where he viewed hundreds of hours of porn), moved his base of operations from Southern California to Colorado Springs. Each of those events has changed him for the worse.
He was once a voice of moderation and tolerance in the Nazarene Church, but no more. He is surrounded by “yes men” in Colorado Springs who treat him like a deity. He hears only one viewpoint over and over. That repetition has reinforced the nastiest, increasingly strident and mean version of Christianity that he now advocates with the same charming voice he was blessed with by God. He used that voice for good in the seventies and eighties.
The death of Pistol Pete scared him witless especially when he suffered his own heart attack shortly after. The fear he felt seemed to drive him to become ever more extreme in his religious views.
The porn he viewed he apparently found both appealing and repugnant. I think it is safe to assume he felt deep revulsion at his interest in the materials he viewed. After his time on the Commission he became much more intolerant, mean, nasty and full of his own self righteousness.
Please accept my apologies for the hundreds or thousands of emails that his faithful are sending you. Those Christians just want to feel like they are part of a cause. That they are making a difference by attacking a scape goat (you) that he has identified. He is using them and their Love of the Lord for revenge because he feels you made fun of him. His actions in using good people to do evil on his behalf is something he will have to answer for at the Throne of Christ.
Continue exposing Dr. Dobson for the ridiculous, mean and arrogant things he keeps saying. How can he continue to call himself a Christian when he misuses those who trust him? How can his organization be tax exempt when he threatens senators? If he is going to run a political organization shouldn't he as a Christian obey the rules or start paying taxes? What would Jesus do?
Thank you for your courage in standing up to the arrogant ego of James Dobson. He does not speak for all Christians and he does not speak for me. His ridiculous attack on Sponge Bob has degenerated into hate filled missives about the homosexual life style and its supposed threat to our children.
I once supported him. But his ego and arrogance and nastiness have led me to oppose him. I have even met him in person when he came to speak at the Nazarene Church in Porterville where his former tennis partner at Pasadena Nazarene College, Wil Spaite, was our pastor. That was in 1980 or 81.
Since that time Dobson has seen Pistol Pete Maravich die of a heart attack in front of him, suffered his own heart attack, been on the Presidential Commission on Pornography (where he viewed hundreds of hours of porn), moved his base of operations from Southern California to Colorado Springs. Each of those events has changed him for the worse.
He was once a voice of moderation and tolerance in the Nazarene Church, but no more. He is surrounded by “yes men” in Colorado Springs who treat him like a deity. He hears only one viewpoint over and over. That repetition has reinforced the nastiest, increasingly strident and mean version of Christianity that he now advocates with the same charming voice he was blessed with by God. He used that voice for good in the seventies and eighties.
The death of Pistol Pete scared him witless especially when he suffered his own heart attack shortly after. The fear he felt seemed to drive him to become ever more extreme in his religious views.
The porn he viewed he apparently found both appealing and repugnant. I think it is safe to assume he felt deep revulsion at his interest in the materials he viewed. After his time on the Commission he became much more intolerant, mean, nasty and full of his own self righteousness.
Please accept my apologies for the hundreds or thousands of emails that his faithful are sending you. Those Christians just want to feel like they are part of a cause. That they are making a difference by attacking a scape goat (you) that he has identified. He is using them and their Love of the Lord for revenge because he feels you made fun of him. His actions in using good people to do evil on his behalf is something he will have to answer for at the Throne of Christ.
Continue exposing Dr. Dobson for the ridiculous, mean and arrogant things he keeps saying. How can he continue to call himself a Christian when he misuses those who trust him? How can his organization be tax exempt when he threatens senators? If he is going to run a political organization shouldn't he as a Christian obey the rules or start paying taxes? What would Jesus do?
Global Warming-letter and Internet comments/responses
Published May 13, 2007 in North County Times
All CO2 is not the same
Conservative radio personalities and Fox News hosts tell us global warming is a hoax. They use the following false argument. "We all breathe out CO2. Since CO2 is the greenhouse gas problem that the environmental wackos whine about, then they must want us to all stop breathing." Keep breathing. The CO2 you exhale is part of the normal carbon cycle. You remember the carbon cycle from elementary school. Animals breathe out CO2; then plants, in the presence of sunlight, absorb and combine it with water to make carbohydrates (food). Animals then eat those plants, converting the carbohydrates back to CO2 to be breathed back into the atmosphere. ...
At least that was the case until about 150 years ago, when we started burning fossil sources of carbon. First coal was burned and then oil. Today fossil carbon is being released into the atmosphere in massive, unprecedented quantities. This fossil carbon from coal and oil has been sequestered in deposits in the Earth since the Carboniferous age that ended 280 million years ago. ...
The only CO2 to be worried about is the CO2 produced from this long-buried fossil carbon. It is adding huge new amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. It is the culprit in the global warming problem.
Peter Welch
former science teacher
Vista
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Global warming skeptic wrote on May 13, 2007 6:00 PM:
" Peter Welsh (retired science teacher) says today that the CO2 we exhale is different from the CO2 coming from combustion engine exhaust and burning of fossil fuels. I don't believe it. Is Welsh talking about carbon monoxide (CO)? If this is true, what business does the U.S. Supreme Court have to claim that CO2 is a pollutant that must be regulated? How Orwellian. Snow is black, peace is war and CO2 is not CO2 because that only depends on "what is, is." "
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To global warming skeptic, of course all CO2 is chemically the same. The American Petroleum Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have made lovely commercials to say this. But this is a fact meant to deceive. The source of CO2 is different. This difference has led to an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere that is at least 1/3 higher than at any time in the last 600,000 years during the warmest of warm interglacial periods.
Both the API and the CEI are well aware that we have actually physical samples of atmosphere trapped in Greenland and Antarctic ice going back over 600,000 years.
Air is trapped by snowflakes that then freeze permanently entombing the air sample. Another layer of snow falls, more air is trapped. There are changes in the deposits over a single year resulting in annual layers. Coring those deposits allows one to not only sample old air, but one can actually see the annual layers in the core just like one can see annual tree rings in a core from an ancient tree.
Using these samples we can demonstrate by direct physical testing of old atmosphere samples that there is a third more CO2 in the atmosphere now than at any time in the last 600,000 years. Those years encompass warm times and ice ages.
The point of my letter is that silly oil industry’s campaign about CO2 all being the same is misleading. CO2 from ordinary sources like breathing and plant decay and even volcanoes has been relatively stable until recently. The huge increase in CO2 in our present day atmosphere is as a direct result of burning FOSSIL CO2 that has not been in the atmosphere for more than 280,000,000 years since before the age of the dinosaurs. (It was taken from the atmosphere during the carboniferous age by plants now extinct and deposited in swamp sediments that have after much aging turned into coal and oil.)
It is the burning of this fossil carbon and releasing it as CO2 in our atmosphere which is changing the climate.
About your other question, Carbon Monoxide is a potent greenhouse gas but is not nearly as important as CO2 because it is chemically unstable and does not last in the atmosphere for anywhere near the length of time that CO2 does.
---------------------------
global warming skeptic wrote on May 16, 2007 7:16 AM:
" To former science teacher: Your article leads the reader (or student) to believe their are two kinds of CO2. You need to clarify because it is misleading. You argue that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, not because of "ordinary sources" such as breathing, etc., but due to the burning of fossil fuel. Considering (as you say) all CO2 is chemically the same, you need to show how you can tell the difference and how you determine the source. It is my belief that "prehistoric" temperatures can not be extracted from tree rings or ice cores. Only estimates of wet-dry or warm-cold periods. Scientific analysis of ice cores can only be taken where ice exists which is only a small portion of the earth's surface, therefore I don't believe an accurate estimate can be obtained to make accurate conclusions about the cause and effects of global warming. "
-------------------------------------
to global warming skeptic
You understand that air is trapped between snowflakes? That should be easy to visualize. Big soft irregular flakes of snow plop down and bits of air are trapped. That air is from our atmosphere. Therefore bits of atmosphere are trapped. The snow freezes on the surface. More snow falls. It also traps more air giving more samples of atmosphere.
There is no need to have ice on every inch of the earth to get good ancient air samples. The atmosphere is made of many gases. Gases mix. They mix uniformly. It does not matter where an atmosphere sample is taken, the percentages of gases will be very similar.
However perhaps a local volcano spewing gases or forest fire could skew the results a little bit, so scientist compare the samples of air in the cores at the South Pole to samples of air found in Greenland cores near the North Pole. There are also glaciers at ever latitude including the equator if one climbs high enough.
Core samples from glaciers in the Andes (South America) have also been compared to those polar samples as have samples from many other latitudes, where the cores overlap they all agree. The farthest back in time one can go is in the oldest glaciers which are found in Antarctica (South Pole). The Greenland samples are nearly as old. Even the glaciers at the equator are tens of thousands of years old.
Because snow does not fall equally year around, annual layers are formed. During a part of the year more snow falls, during part of the year there is more dust. The temperature, at which the snow falls and freezes, changes during the year. Different temperatures alter the size and structure of the snow/ice particles. Coring through the snow and holding it up to strong light shows repeating annual layers of big and small ice particles and more snow compared to more dust. The layers are visible to the naked eye. They can be counted. They are annual layers. New annual layers can be seen to be formed on top at research stations where long term observations have been done. Counting the layers is one way to determine how old the air in the snow is.
Counting thousands of layers that get ever smaller (due to compression) the deeper one looks down the core is a bit tedious. Another way to determine the age of the air is by measuring a radioactive isotope of carbon called carbon 14. C14 is constantly being produced in the top of the atmosphere by solar radiation. But it disappears over time (radioactive decay). Because C14 is unstable, measuring the percentage of C14 left in the ancient air samples and comparing the amount in the current atmosphere, tells us the age of the ancient air. The less C14, the older the air sample.
Remember the air is made of many gases. Gases unrestrained by boundaries mix uniformly. The amount of C14 in the lowest layer of the atmosphere is virtually the same at every place on earth due to the uniform mixing.
The only source of C14 on earth is the production of C14 from solar radiation at the top of our atmosphere. (It takes massive amounts of radiation to produce C14, there is no other source of the kind of radiation needed to make C14 on the surface of the earth other than the sun.) The rate that C14 breaks down is steady. The rate of breakdown does not change with heat or cold or pressure. It provides a clock which goes back thousands of years. Measure the C14 and find out the age of the air.
I hope that answers your questions.
Former science teacher
All CO2 is not the same
Conservative radio personalities and Fox News hosts tell us global warming is a hoax. They use the following false argument. "We all breathe out CO2. Since CO2 is the greenhouse gas problem that the environmental wackos whine about, then they must want us to all stop breathing." Keep breathing. The CO2 you exhale is part of the normal carbon cycle. You remember the carbon cycle from elementary school. Animals breathe out CO2; then plants, in the presence of sunlight, absorb and combine it with water to make carbohydrates (food). Animals then eat those plants, converting the carbohydrates back to CO2 to be breathed back into the atmosphere. ...
At least that was the case until about 150 years ago, when we started burning fossil sources of carbon. First coal was burned and then oil. Today fossil carbon is being released into the atmosphere in massive, unprecedented quantities. This fossil carbon from coal and oil has been sequestered in deposits in the Earth since the Carboniferous age that ended 280 million years ago. ...
The only CO2 to be worried about is the CO2 produced from this long-buried fossil carbon. It is adding huge new amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. It is the culprit in the global warming problem.
Peter Welch
former science teacher
Vista
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Global warming skeptic wrote on May 13, 2007 6:00 PM:
" Peter Welsh (retired science teacher) says today that the CO2 we exhale is different from the CO2 coming from combustion engine exhaust and burning of fossil fuels. I don't believe it. Is Welsh talking about carbon monoxide (CO)? If this is true, what business does the U.S. Supreme Court have to claim that CO2 is a pollutant that must be regulated? How Orwellian. Snow is black, peace is war and CO2 is not CO2 because that only depends on "what is, is." "
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To global warming skeptic, of course all CO2 is chemically the same. The American Petroleum Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have made lovely commercials to say this. But this is a fact meant to deceive. The source of CO2 is different. This difference has led to an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere that is at least 1/3 higher than at any time in the last 600,000 years during the warmest of warm interglacial periods.
Both the API and the CEI are well aware that we have actually physical samples of atmosphere trapped in Greenland and Antarctic ice going back over 600,000 years.
Air is trapped by snowflakes that then freeze permanently entombing the air sample. Another layer of snow falls, more air is trapped. There are changes in the deposits over a single year resulting in annual layers. Coring those deposits allows one to not only sample old air, but one can actually see the annual layers in the core just like one can see annual tree rings in a core from an ancient tree.
Using these samples we can demonstrate by direct physical testing of old atmosphere samples that there is a third more CO2 in the atmosphere now than at any time in the last 600,000 years. Those years encompass warm times and ice ages.
The point of my letter is that silly oil industry’s campaign about CO2 all being the same is misleading. CO2 from ordinary sources like breathing and plant decay and even volcanoes has been relatively stable until recently. The huge increase in CO2 in our present day atmosphere is as a direct result of burning FOSSIL CO2 that has not been in the atmosphere for more than 280,000,000 years since before the age of the dinosaurs. (It was taken from the atmosphere during the carboniferous age by plants now extinct and deposited in swamp sediments that have after much aging turned into coal and oil.)
It is the burning of this fossil carbon and releasing it as CO2 in our atmosphere which is changing the climate.
About your other question, Carbon Monoxide is a potent greenhouse gas but is not nearly as important as CO2 because it is chemically unstable and does not last in the atmosphere for anywhere near the length of time that CO2 does.
---------------------------
global warming skeptic wrote on May 16, 2007 7:16 AM:
" To former science teacher: Your article leads the reader (or student) to believe their are two kinds of CO2. You need to clarify because it is misleading. You argue that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, not because of "ordinary sources" such as breathing, etc., but due to the burning of fossil fuel. Considering (as you say) all CO2 is chemically the same, you need to show how you can tell the difference and how you determine the source. It is my belief that "prehistoric" temperatures can not be extracted from tree rings or ice cores. Only estimates of wet-dry or warm-cold periods. Scientific analysis of ice cores can only be taken where ice exists which is only a small portion of the earth's surface, therefore I don't believe an accurate estimate can be obtained to make accurate conclusions about the cause and effects of global warming. "
-------------------------------------
to global warming skeptic
You understand that air is trapped between snowflakes? That should be easy to visualize. Big soft irregular flakes of snow plop down and bits of air are trapped. That air is from our atmosphere. Therefore bits of atmosphere are trapped. The snow freezes on the surface. More snow falls. It also traps more air giving more samples of atmosphere.
There is no need to have ice on every inch of the earth to get good ancient air samples. The atmosphere is made of many gases. Gases mix. They mix uniformly. It does not matter where an atmosphere sample is taken, the percentages of gases will be very similar.
However perhaps a local volcano spewing gases or forest fire could skew the results a little bit, so scientist compare the samples of air in the cores at the South Pole to samples of air found in Greenland cores near the North Pole. There are also glaciers at ever latitude including the equator if one climbs high enough.
Core samples from glaciers in the Andes (South America) have also been compared to those polar samples as have samples from many other latitudes, where the cores overlap they all agree. The farthest back in time one can go is in the oldest glaciers which are found in Antarctica (South Pole). The Greenland samples are nearly as old. Even the glaciers at the equator are tens of thousands of years old.
Because snow does not fall equally year around, annual layers are formed. During a part of the year more snow falls, during part of the year there is more dust. The temperature, at which the snow falls and freezes, changes during the year. Different temperatures alter the size and structure of the snow/ice particles. Coring through the snow and holding it up to strong light shows repeating annual layers of big and small ice particles and more snow compared to more dust. The layers are visible to the naked eye. They can be counted. They are annual layers. New annual layers can be seen to be formed on top at research stations where long term observations have been done. Counting the layers is one way to determine how old the air in the snow is.
Counting thousands of layers that get ever smaller (due to compression) the deeper one looks down the core is a bit tedious. Another way to determine the age of the air is by measuring a radioactive isotope of carbon called carbon 14. C14 is constantly being produced in the top of the atmosphere by solar radiation. But it disappears over time (radioactive decay). Because C14 is unstable, measuring the percentage of C14 left in the ancient air samples and comparing the amount in the current atmosphere, tells us the age of the ancient air. The less C14, the older the air sample.
Remember the air is made of many gases. Gases unrestrained by boundaries mix uniformly. The amount of C14 in the lowest layer of the atmosphere is virtually the same at every place on earth due to the uniform mixing.
The only source of C14 on earth is the production of C14 from solar radiation at the top of our atmosphere. (It takes massive amounts of radiation to produce C14, there is no other source of the kind of radiation needed to make C14 on the surface of the earth other than the sun.) The rate that C14 breaks down is steady. The rate of breakdown does not change with heat or cold or pressure. It provides a clock which goes back thousands of years. Measure the C14 and find out the age of the air.
I hope that answers your questions.
Former science teacher
Hate filled "christians"
Dear Ms. Parker
I have read many of your "editorials" where you unquestioningly printed the lies and cons of those who call themselves conservative and Christian. In my view those people were neither.
Yesterday patriotic Americans who support the principles in our Constitution repudiated those who claim to love Christ but seem far more to be hate filled then Christ centered. Today you have decided to publish a column saying you have been uncomfortable with them all along.
Sure would have been nice if you decided to be an American patriot first and an obsequious republic-CON second, before the results of this election came in. Your conversion now seems a bit forced.
The hate filled “christians” demand, contrary to all physical evidence, that the earth and God is only six thousand years old and all public school teachers and politicians must accept their delusions.
If we do not, we are pillared in our communities. Our neighbors and friends are told we are perverts because we expose our students to evidence that the earth may be a bit older. (for instance six million annual layers of sediment, varves, found in one cliff in the Green River Valley of Utah, or a half million annual layers of snow deposited on Antarctica plains.
I was called a pervert not for any sexual impropriety with any dog, man, boy or whatever but simply because I knew why the scientific community thought the world was old and I told others what I knew.
So if God left six million layers of yearly sediments in a cliff that exactly match the same kind annual sediments laid down in lakes today, is he a trickster or a liar?
If a person can cut into a glacier in Greenland or the Antarctica and count back hundreds of thousands of annual snow layers starting with the one laid down last year and finishing with those laid down 500 thousand years ago, does claiming the earth is six thousand years old make the Bible wrong or your eyes wrong?
Could it be neither? Maybe it is just your interpretation of Genesis that is wrong? Ask that question to the new Christian mobs now running our churches and you are told you cannot be a real Christian if you bring up such information.
After twenty years as a Sunday School teacher and Christian Scouting director, I was driven from my church because of what I taught in my public school science classroom. In the Sunday School classroom, I taught only what was in the Sunday School literature and teacher’s manual. What I taught in Sunday School did not matter. All that mattered was what I taught in my public school classroom.
Because of that teaching, I was no longer a real Christian. I exposed my seventh and eighth grade public school students to the overwhelming physical evidence of the old age of the earth. How evil! I also exposed those students to the evidence that natural selection drives change in life on earth. My personal religious view (that I never shared with any student at public school or Sunday School) is that we are seeing God’s creative force when we see natural selection. This view made me even more evil. Beyond hope evil.
It used to be that we, Protestants, had an ethic called the "priesthood of the individual". Each person of good character was encouraged to read the Bible for themselves and come to their own conclusions especially about the beginning and ending of the Bible. Good people could come to differing views and still be good Christians.
But no more, the hate filled, the Christians who know everything even what cannot be known, these are the “christians” who now fill our churches and run the Republican party. They are the ones who are absolutely certain of what they believe even if what they believe is not written in the Bible. Their beliefs can be based on a popular novel series (Left Behind) without any basis in the historic beliefs of the church. These are the Christians who now control our churches the Republican party. They are not the Christians of my childhood. To paraphrase an ad for Oldmobile, they are not my Father’s Christians.
The first RINO hunts were done in the churches long before these hate filled, uncompassionate monsters took the Republican party and started conducting their hunts in the party as well.
As long as the Republican party is run by people who "know everything" before they ever look at facts we will continue to get the likes of Bush and his cronies who knew in their gut what was right for Iraq, but never did any book learning to see it their gut was correct.
The party deserves the defeat it was dealt yesterday.
I am the fifth generation Republican in my family. My great grandparents and their in laws ran the last house on the Underground Railroad in Ashtabula Ohio. John Brown was a house guest as was Ben Wade and Joshua Giddings. My family helped found the Republican Party in the mid west.
I remain a registered Republican because of family history but it will be a long time before I vote that way again.
darwindad
I have read many of your "editorials" where you unquestioningly printed the lies and cons of those who call themselves conservative and Christian. In my view those people were neither.
Yesterday patriotic Americans who support the principles in our Constitution repudiated those who claim to love Christ but seem far more to be hate filled then Christ centered. Today you have decided to publish a column saying you have been uncomfortable with them all along.
Sure would have been nice if you decided to be an American patriot first and an obsequious republic-CON second, before the results of this election came in. Your conversion now seems a bit forced.
The hate filled “christians” demand, contrary to all physical evidence, that the earth and God is only six thousand years old and all public school teachers and politicians must accept their delusions.
If we do not, we are pillared in our communities. Our neighbors and friends are told we are perverts because we expose our students to evidence that the earth may be a bit older. (for instance six million annual layers of sediment, varves, found in one cliff in the Green River Valley of Utah, or a half million annual layers of snow deposited on Antarctica plains.
I was called a pervert not for any sexual impropriety with any dog, man, boy or whatever but simply because I knew why the scientific community thought the world was old and I told others what I knew.
So if God left six million layers of yearly sediments in a cliff that exactly match the same kind annual sediments laid down in lakes today, is he a trickster or a liar?
If a person can cut into a glacier in Greenland or the Antarctica and count back hundreds of thousands of annual snow layers starting with the one laid down last year and finishing with those laid down 500 thousand years ago, does claiming the earth is six thousand years old make the Bible wrong or your eyes wrong?
Could it be neither? Maybe it is just your interpretation of Genesis that is wrong? Ask that question to the new Christian mobs now running our churches and you are told you cannot be a real Christian if you bring up such information.
After twenty years as a Sunday School teacher and Christian Scouting director, I was driven from my church because of what I taught in my public school science classroom. In the Sunday School classroom, I taught only what was in the Sunday School literature and teacher’s manual. What I taught in Sunday School did not matter. All that mattered was what I taught in my public school classroom.
Because of that teaching, I was no longer a real Christian. I exposed my seventh and eighth grade public school students to the overwhelming physical evidence of the old age of the earth. How evil! I also exposed those students to the evidence that natural selection drives change in life on earth. My personal religious view (that I never shared with any student at public school or Sunday School) is that we are seeing God’s creative force when we see natural selection. This view made me even more evil. Beyond hope evil.
It used to be that we, Protestants, had an ethic called the "priesthood of the individual". Each person of good character was encouraged to read the Bible for themselves and come to their own conclusions especially about the beginning and ending of the Bible. Good people could come to differing views and still be good Christians.
But no more, the hate filled, the Christians who know everything even what cannot be known, these are the “christians” who now fill our churches and run the Republican party. They are the ones who are absolutely certain of what they believe even if what they believe is not written in the Bible. Their beliefs can be based on a popular novel series (Left Behind) without any basis in the historic beliefs of the church. These are the Christians who now control our churches the Republican party. They are not the Christians of my childhood. To paraphrase an ad for Oldmobile, they are not my Father’s Christians.
The first RINO hunts were done in the churches long before these hate filled, uncompassionate monsters took the Republican party and started conducting their hunts in the party as well.
As long as the Republican party is run by people who "know everything" before they ever look at facts we will continue to get the likes of Bush and his cronies who knew in their gut what was right for Iraq, but never did any book learning to see it their gut was correct.
The party deserves the defeat it was dealt yesterday.
I am the fifth generation Republican in my family. My great grandparents and their in laws ran the last house on the Underground Railroad in Ashtabula Ohio. John Brown was a house guest as was Ben Wade and Joshua Giddings. My family helped found the Republican Party in the mid west.
I remain a registered Republican because of family history but it will be a long time before I vote that way again.
darwindad
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