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Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design --snip-- (CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon. Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that...

Bicentennial celebrations have portrayed Darwin as a kindly old gentleman pottering around an English house and garden. What that misses is the way his ideas were abused in the 20th century and the way in which Darwin was wrong about certain key issues. He asserted that different races of mankind had traveled different distances along the evolutionary path - white Caucasians were at the top of the racial hierarchy, while black and brown people ranked below. [Racism] was a widespread prejudice in British society at the time, but he presented racial hierarchy as a matter of science. He also held...

Today, November 24, it is exactly 150 years since Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. The world has been gearing up for this “second echelon” of celebrations for this international “Year of Darwin”, following on from the 200th anniversary of his birth this last February. Atheists and humanist groups in particular have seemed to be relishing the thought of giving further prominence to the ideas of their patron saint. Their adulation is heightened by their knowledge that...

Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock. Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms. However, such research opens up strange and perhaps even disturbing possibilities once considered only the...

Should the “greatest good for the greatest number” be the guiding principle behind health care? As I have said before on Breakpoint, much of the hype and even hysteria surrounding the H1N1 flu strain is unwarranted. That’s not to say that the swine flu’s potential impact isn’t devastating—it is, but not in the way cable news would have us think. And now the Florida Department of Health has issued a set of guidelines that instructs hospitals on what to do “if the state is overwhelmed by [H1N1] cases.” The guidelines recommend that hospitals bar “patients with incurable cancer, end-stage multiple...

Concentrating on three Latin American countries but also the UK, Germany and the United States, he looked at books used to teach national history, citizenship, and English literature. It was no coincidence, he said, that in all the countries he examined, similar nationalist messages - though in different contexts - changed at similar times over the past 150 years.

  I awoke this morning in Edinburgh, jet lagged but looking forward to a productive time of debating and discussing assisted suicide.  Stumbling down to breakfast, I was sharply awakened into my usual state of concern for society by a front page headline in the Independent: Do I love my daughter? With all my heart. Will it be a relief when she dies?  Without question: Life and Death Issues with a Disabled Child The article is written by a woman named Tussie Myerson, the mother of eighteen-year-old Emmy, a young woman with severe seizure disorder and profound cognitive disabilities.  Myerson complains bitterly–and righteously–about the lack of services...

Three Babies Aborted Every Day Due To Down's Syndrome Three babies are being aborted every day due to Down's syndrome, according to a study which shows the number of terminations has more than trebled in the last 20 years. By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor and Chris Irvine 26 Oct 2009 An increasing number of pregnant women are being told their babies have the condition because of a growing number of women putting off having children until their 30s and 40s and improvements in screening, doctors say. And around nine in ten women who are told they are going to have...

Josie Romero loves the colour pink, braiding her hair and having her fingernails painted. But life has not always been easy for this sweet and charming eight-year-old, who was born in the body of a boy. The transgender youngster, then called Joseph, knew at the age of four that she was the wrong sex and even told her parents: 'I am really a girl.' At five, she was refusing to have her hair cut and only wore colours like orange which were nearest to girly pink. By the time she reached six, Josie had been diagnosed as transgender and was...

When a sonogram showed that Stephanie Lewis, a writer and party planner living in San Diego, was expecting boy-girl twins, she was ecstatic. Lewis, already the mother of a two-year-old son, had always longed for a girl. “From an early age, I just remember wanting a daughter,” says Lewis, an effervescent brunette who recalls a Pleasantville childhood filled with mother-daughter fashion shows, ballet recitals, and tea parties. “Now, finally, I was getting her. I was just in heaven.” Not that the sonographer’s revelation had come as a shock. For this, her second pregnancy, the 28-year-old Lewis had done everything in...

Want to have Ben Affleck’s baby? While that appears to be the exclusive domain of Jennifer Garner, women can now at least give themselves a fighting chance of having a child who looks like a movie star, sports hero or world leader.

Last Wednesday, to great applause and accolades from the politicians and dignitaries in attendance, a bronze statue of Helen Keller was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol. “The story of Helen Keller inspires us all,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added that: “Helen Keller ignited a century marked by progress for people with disabilities.” Most of us think we know her story: Born in 1880, Helen Keller lost her eyesight and hearing before the age of two after contracting an illness. Shut off from the world because of her disabilities and unable to communicate even with...

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

The development of prenatal diagnostic technologies presents a constellation of moral issues -- with the diagnosis of Down syndrome front and center. Over the past several years, a marked decrease in the number of babies born with Down syndrome has been both observed and widely reported. This decrease can be traced directly to the decision to abort after prenatal diagnosis.As Science Daily reports, a new leading article to be published in Archives of Disease in Childhood points to developments in the near future that will likely increase the diagnosis of Down syndrome [DS] during pregnancy. "New tests expected to...

In a recent congressional hearing, Senate Commerce Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D.-W.V.) told John P. Holdren, President Barack Obama’s science czar, that he sometimes refers to Holdren as “walking on water.”

Sarah Palin ignited a political firestorm when she worried that "death panels" would deny end-of-life treatment to her son with Down syndrome. In fact, ObamaCare would more likely see to it that people like Trig never even make it out of the womb. The outlook for children found to have disabilities in utero is bleak now -- because the medical-ethics establishment has spent decades pushing for their abortion. Thanks to advances in prenatal testing, it's now far easier to detect conditions like cystic fibrosis and spina bifida -- and our "best and brightest" overwhelmingly counsel parents to destroy the unborn...

Shell-shocked liberals have taken to dubbing conservatives as "Ku Klux Klan folks" and "neo-fascists" toting swastikas to town hall meetings. But ironically, turns out it's liberals who have engaged in a century-long pas de deux with fascistic ideology. Take Margaret Sanger — public health nurse, rabid feminist, and avowed socialist. Doing her rounds in New York City's immigrant ghettos, she became enamored of the biological and political possibilities of birth control. A prolific writer, she churned out numerous books and articles. In Women and the New Race, Sanger ominously expounded: "No Socialist republic can operate successfully and maintain its ideals...

See the previous parts in this series:Beck to the Future: Glen Beck Exposes Dangerous Link Between Nazi Eugenics and ObamaCare Reform Experts  Beck to the Future II: Three Scary ObamaCare "Czars"WASHINGTON, D.C., August 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Glen Beck says that Germany went terribly wrong from two things: the nation "ran out of money" and it had "crazy people" - the National Socialists - running a centralized bureaucracy that extended its reach into all corners of German society, and particularly in the nation's universal health-care system.For Beck, the list of Obama advisors behind health-care reform certainly seems to fit the...

See Part I Beck to the Future: Glen Beck Exposes Dangerous Link Between Nazi Eugenics and ObamaCare Reform Experts By Peter J. SmithWASHINGTON, D.C., August 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Germany's experience with National Socialism is one of the darker moments of human history. FOX News host Glenn Beck has taken on the challenge of applying the lessons of Nazi Germany (government-controlled health care, combined with the principle of valuing human beings based on "quality of life" and a severe economic crisis) to "question with boldness" the direction American health-care is heading under President Barack Obama and his policy advisors.Beck hosts...

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "Question with boldness." That is the motto of radio host and FOX News television host Glenn Beck, who says he asks questions no different than ordinary Americans - he just has an army of researchers to help him explore these questions. But what the question explores is the disturbing relationship between eugenics, Nazism, and the imposition of Obama's health care plan upon the United States.Like the old adage "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," Beck has looked back to the past to get a glimpse of the future....

Madison, Wis., Aug 23, 2009 / 02:13 am (CNA).- The bishops of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference (WCC) have issued a statement to the state’s Catholic faithful expressing their “deep concern” about a state provision that requires providers of health insurance include contraceptive services. The rule will force Catholic dioceses and other agencies to pay for a “gravely immoral” service, the conference says.A provision in the new state budget mandates the coverage as a “benefit.”Signatories of the August 20 WCC letter were Bishop of Green Bay David L. Ricken, Bishop of Madison Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of La Crosse Jerome...

From what surely must vie for the title of "Dingiest Gorge in Hell", the perdition bound soul of Margaret Sanger, posthumous Queen of the radical feminist movement, was unbeknownst summoned -- and just as quickly retired to the infernal pit where it likely makes its eternal home -- by a very artless and candid response from Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during a recent, hardly publicized, New York Times Magazine interview. Billed as a serious enquiry into the psyche of the esteemed judge, the interchange consisted primarily of a whole lot of tedious bewailing the female gene's perennial struggle...

In the July-August 2009 issue of New Oxford Review, Michael V. McIntire, a 1957 graduate of Notre Dame and former Associate Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, writes:In the early 1960s, promotion of the eugenics agenda of John D. Rockefeller III and Planned Parenthood was being frustrated by the Church's stubborn moral opposition to contraception. Rockefeller and Planned Parenthood considered public acceptance of contraception to be the key to public acceptance of eugenics by abortion, euthanasia, and genetic manipulation, and they actively sought a prominent Catholic voice to assist them in successfully opposing the strength of the Church's...

Barney Frank, Eugenics Death Panels, and a Dining Room Table It’s too bad the woman in the video below confronting Barney Frank over Obamacare didn’t come with facts instead of slinging the word “Nazi” around. The corporate media loves it when people compare Obama to Hitler and accuse the administration of Nazism. It makes it easier to dismiss the opposition as mental patients. Kurt Nimmo August 19, 2009 Lately the corporate media have spent a lot of time and energy roasting former VP candidate Sarah Palin for her comments on Obama’s proposed death panels. Palin didn’t provide a lot of...

Were you taken back by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg's recent admission that Roe v. Wade was decided because persons were worried about "populations that we don't want to have too many of"? Ginsburg's atavistic views can be traced back to the pioneering work of Margaret Sanger, the celebrated American feminist who later founded Planned Parenthood. Beyond her feverish crusade to convince women to use birth control, Sanger was an unapologetic eugenicist. In her book The Pivot of Civilization she wrote, "More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control." In...

In what can fairly be described as an admission that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin knew what she was talking about, the Senate Finance Committee Thursday dropped language from its bipartisan healthcare reform package that Palin and others had suggested would eventually lead to mandated end-of-life counseling sessions for seniors. Supporters of Obamacare, including President Barack Obama, had accused Palin and others of being dishonest in suggesting the counseling sessions would somehow lead to the government encouraging euthanasia as a cost-cutting measure as part of rationed care. "The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow...

All the "best people" like Peter Singer, the bioethics professor from Princton who, a few short years ago, was advocating POST-NATAL ABORTIONS! praise Obama's Shovel-Ready Healthcare! Please read his article. You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? The costs of the current health care system are becoming increasingly clear, and public sentiment for a more systematic approach may be...

(Several Years from now...) Dear Grandma, I am writing you this email from my blackberry. I have been standing online here at the Department of Health and Human Services appeals office for the last 3 hours. My feet are killing me. I can't believe I am missing the Hanson reunion tour just so I can try for the fifth time to get the government to pay for your pain medication. It didn't work the first four times and it isn't going to work this time. You know how I know this is pointless? There is a guy on line with...

We've seen all of this before; a modern nation brought to its knees by a political agenda driven by racial politics and fueled by a state-controlled manufacturing and finance sector, obsessed with population control, eugenics, and gun control, aided by a compliant and controlled media, pitting one segment of society against another, and crushing their domestic opposition by strangling their rights gradually- and all underpinned by a phony "science". We've fought this battle before and it's time to stand together now and say - NEVER AGAIN!

As Sonia Sotomayor was readying for her confirmation hearings, The New York Times Magazine cast a loving gaze toward the lone female Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In so doing, the Times inadvertently shed light on some remarkable thinking by Justice Ginsburg. Those thoughts are so bracing that they ought to upstage the abortion questions surrounding the Sotomayor nomination. Ginsburg long ago declared her support for Roe v. Wade. Now, however, she has declared something more. When the subject in her interview with the Times’ Emily Bazelon turned to abortion, Ginsburg said, “Reproductive choice has to be straightened out....

A campaign on conservative talk radio – fueled unintentionally by President Barack Obama's calls to control exorbitant medical bills – has sparked fear among senior citizens that the massive health-reform bill moving through Congress will lead to end-of-life “rationing” and even “euthanasia.” The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions, such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or...

"Something's wrong with this baby," my ultrasound technician told me. She had just scanned Mrs. Jones (a fictitious name) at 20 weeks and went on to describe her findings, findings that surely meant little chance of survival for that baby. As I later spoke with Mrs. Jones to relay the findings, she wept. I arranged an appointment with a maternal-fetal medicine (MFM) specialist. The next day I received an urgent call from my patient. Through more tears, she described her visit in which the MFM doctor confirmed the grim prognosis. The baby would die, probably within a week or two....

An Open Letter to President Obama Regarding the Appointment of Science Advisor John Holdren Dear President Obama, I note with dismay your appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Although Dr. Holdren’s experience in academia and administration may be adequate, his publicly expressed views regarding population control disqualify him from holding office. I will set aside objections to Dr. Holdren’s scientific competence. Despite his strong scientific credentials, he advanced theories...

My wife, a physician for more than 30 years, just got off the phone with AARP (which should be called CRAP for its support of Obama's health care grab). She gave the woman who said the phone was ringing off the hook today with members canceling out because of the organization's support for Managed Death Noncare. It took my wife more than 15 minutes on hold to cancel. I urge anyone who is a member of AARP to cancel the membership and to tell them why they are canceling.

WHAT DO Richard Nixon and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have in common? Not much linked the former president, who died in 1994, and the associate justice now in her 17th year on the Supreme Court. But each was in the news recently with a cringe-inducing comment about abortion. Those comments are a reminder of the ease with which educated elites can decide that some people’s lives have no value. Nixon was meeting with an aide in the White House on Jan. 23, 1973, when the conversation - recorded on tapes newly released by the Nixon Presidential Library - turned to the...

History shows us that the field of eugenics, made famous in Europe by Hitler, is pretty much the exclusive province of socialists and other left wing detritus. What we didn't know was that socialismm and extreme leftism is starting to look more and more like the exclusive province of eugenicists, made famous in the USA by Planned Parenthood. In fact, whether it's remarks made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a book written by Science Czar John Holdren, or Obama's own Attorney General praising Margaret Sanger in a speech... it seems like eugenics is back on the move. All...

With John Holdren's proposals to take over the world with a mixture of eugenics and extermination, Americans are saying that Holdren is one of the few Obama czars who deserves the title. "It's about time we had a Czar who held the future of all the peoples of all the states in his hand," said Vladmir Rutonkov, Obama supporter, Czarist, and high school biology teacher. "We only learn to embrace the power of the Science Czar when we feel the might of his ecologically-friendly fist." Holdren considered ideas of forced abortions and compulsory sterilization programs to control population in his...

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There was a scandal this week concerning the Supreme Court, though it didn't concern the nomination of its newest member. (snip) Justice Ginsburg: "Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae -- in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion." A statement like this...

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone...

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently unburdened herself to the New York Times: “Yes, the ruling [in Harris v. McRae that the federal government does not have to pay for elective abortions] surprised me. Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Here, if ever there was one, is a smoking gun. Here is confirmation of what pro-lifers have long maintained—that liberal abortion is, in Jesse Jackson’s words, “black genocide.” Or did Justice Ginsburg simply mean the poor,...

"As United States taxpayers know, income tax laws have long implicitly encouraged marriage and childbearing...Such a pronatalist bias of course is no longer appropriate. In countries that are affluent enough for the majority of citizens to pay taxes, tax laws could be adjusted to favor (instead of penalize) single people, working wives, and small families. Other tax measures might also include high marriage fees, taxes on luxury baby goods and toys, and removal of family allowances where they exist. Other possibilities include the limitation of maternal or educational benefits to two children per family."

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone...

Here's what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "Frankly I had thought that at the time (Roe v. Wade) was decided," Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, "there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of." The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon or any further coverage from the New York Times — or any other major news outlet — was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer...

(CNSNews.com) - A Zogby poll commissioned by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute says more than three-quarters of Americans would like teachers to have the freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution, with an even higher number reported among Democrats...

WASHINGTON, July 12 (Reuters) - The United States will spend an another $1 billion for ingredients for an H1N1 vaccination, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Sunday. "There'll be another $1 billion worth of orders placed to get the bulk ingredients for an H1N1 vaccination. Congress has agreed with the president that this is the number one priority, keeping Americans safe and secure," Sebelius said on CNN. Sebelius has said plans were on track for a mid-October vaccination program, although it was not certain Americans would be offered the vaccine for the so-called swine flu.

On Friday, I spotlighted the devastating reporting on Obama “science czar” John Holdren posted at zombietime and featured it as the lead story all weekend. Refresher on Holdren’s eco-zealous views: • Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not; • The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food; • Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise; • People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can...

RALEIGH, N.C.- A movement to help North Carolina learn more about thousands of people who were sterilized under a state program in the mid-20th century is getting another chance to be heard. A House committee scheduled debate Tuesday on legislation that would order the public schools to teach about the eugenics program. Students at University of North Carolina campuses also would be directed to interview program victims so future generations know what happened. About one-third of the 7,600 people sterilized by choice or coercion are still alive. The program ended in the 1970s. The state unveiled a roadside marker in...

The mainstream media have been incredibly slow to pick up on a creepy comment by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a New York Times interview published today but flagged last week. In it, Ginsburg talks about on Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalised abortion: Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. What? You can find the full...