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“Political evolutionists, by ignorance or intent, use only a portion of the title of Charles Darwin’s book. The full title is “The Origin of Species and The Superiority of the Races.” Whoops...that doesn’t fit the liberal agenda.”

Sorry, but no. The full title of the first edition of the book was: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” Darwin doesn’t even talk about human beings in the book. The word “Race” in the title is used in the 19th Century Victorian English sense, as in a group of animals that can interbreed. Modern readers who obviously haven’t read the book and regard Darwin as some kind of comic-book super-villain see the word “race” and point and sputter, but Darwin wasn’t referring to what we now term human races.
For the sixth edition of 1872, the short title was changed to “The Origin of Species.”

By coincidence, I recently saw a video of a 1990 concert Madonna gave in Nice. She was doing the shock and offend stuff back then, and had quite the potty mouth in her stage banter between sets. She even told a fairly naughty joke (the one that ends, “Oh no! Now the fish are going to smell like that!”) Thing was... this was Nice, France. She told the joke in English. Came to the punchline. Absolute silence. The thousands upon thousands of people in the crowd hadn’t understood a word of it. She recovered by saying “I knew you’d like that,” probably in the script anyway, and went on to the next song. The audience liked her songs well enough (music the universal language and all that), but only when she tossed out a few words in French now and then between sets did the audience respond to her stage gab. Didn’t somebody on staff wonder why they were leaving in the English bits in the script when they were doing a concert in France?

Here’s a good one, too.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_neands.html

“There is also a school of thought that says they were fully human...with rickets.”

Please provide a source. As I understand it, this “school of thought” stems from a certain learned Dr. Virchow — who died in 1902! — and is based on his comments made over forty years before that when the first scant few Neanderthal remains were discovered in 1856. My 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica states that the “rickets” theory was exploded in the following years when more fossil material was discovered, showing that the Neanderthal body type was characteristic and not the result of disease. Besides, rickets wouldn’t produce the robust bone structure and brow ridges. To put it gently, this “rickets” idea to explain Neanderthals was already long obsolete a hundred years ago when the Britannica dismissed it.

There is no scene in the movie like that depicted in the poster. The poster is far better than anything in the movie. Tacky special effects, very cheap..., out in the middle of nowhere setting to keep expensies down... The poster could be an ad for ATTACK OF THE 140 FT. WOMAN. Relative to the lady, the cars are about the size of those AMT model car kits we built as kids, which were 1/25 scale. The lady is probably between five and six feet tall in normal times, so 25 times 5 and a half feet is just about 140 feet. The movie itself sure didn’t deliver on that promise...

“Nobody throws an event like the Norks. Food, Fun, Freedom.”

And bad spelling. Look at the word “Republic” in the poster!

“We should make the Mammoth the mascot of the Tea party.
Hell of a lot more intimidating than an ole elephant.”

I’m old enough to remember the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. Some editorial cartoonists at the time did use mammoths as the symbol of Goldwater Republicans, a sort of sneer at them for being supposedly “old-fashioned.”

I can imagine Prince Charles thinking, “Where’s Jack Ryan when you need him?”

I mean, this is practically a scene from the movie PATRIOT GAMES, only without the gunfire. For that matter, the movie made the ambushed member of the royal family something ridiculously remote — “the Queen Mother’s cousin” — but in the original Tom Clancy novel, it was definitely Prince Chuck and Lady Di whom Jack Ryan rescued.

“And after working hours, they pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It's like Wal-Mart in American stores on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits.”

Carter clearly didn't read the book UTOPIAS ELSEWHERE by Anthony Daniels (Crown, 1991). (Daniels also writes under the name Theodore Dalrymple.) The book is an account of Daniels’ trips to the various remaining hard-core Communist regimes of the time, including a chapter on his impressions of North Korea. He went to a department store in Pyongyang much as Carter did... and discovered it was a bizarre sham. The store was crowded, but no one was buying anything. “Shoppers” milled aimlessly, ignoring the displays, like illiterates in a library filled with books they couldn't read (as Daniels put it). There was no interaction between “shoppers” and clerks. Everyone in the store was a participant in some kind of mock simulation of a department store, staged for some inscrutable propaganda purpose by the regime. Then again, maybe it did have a purpose. It certainly fooled Jimmy.

Is there any official explanation for the dynasty? That is, I’ve been reading the NK’s own English-language news page (handy link on Drudge) for some years, and the Kims are very nearly credited with having super-powers, but I’ve never seen it explained how all this magic collected in one family. A genetic fluke? A mutation? The next step in human evolution? Favored by Heaven? Is there some sort of explanation given in North Korean schools, say, that isn’t for outsiders to know, that accounts for why this marvelous family has the right to rule and nobody else does? Or is this something that no one dares even think about too much?

What’s with all the stuff about caves and “cavemen”? Reading the article itself shows they’re talking about huts with stone walls. “Cavemen” for early man is kind of a misnomer anyway — there aren’t that many caves to go around and never one when you need it while following the herds. People wouldn’t have lived exclusively in caves (though they would have certainly taken advantage of a nice dry one as opportunity permitted). But temporary shelters like huts, lean-tos, wigwams, etc. weren’t preserved, while caves did preserve human artifacts (most spectacularly the cave wall paintings in France). So there was a selection effect. Artifacts in caves were preserved and thus found, while everything else was lost or harder to find, and so the impression got into the popular mind of “cavemen.”

“I did not say there were 2 versions of creation, I said there were 2 versions of the creation of man and woman. Read Genesis, don’t have a Bible here so cannot give chapter and verse, but it is in there.”

I think that’s Genesis 1:27, on the sixth day: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Then, in Genesis 2:7, apparently sometime *after* the seventh day: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” A woman isn’t formed until verse 22.

There seem to be two separate accounts of man’s creation, not quite the same. I’ve seen arguments about this before, with literalists claiming the first creation in 1:27 is merely a poetic summary of the same event described in more detail in 2:7 and there’s no contradiction, while another school of thought (the Documentary Hypothesis) holds that Genesis as we know it is the result of two not quite identical accounts of Creation having been edited together at some point in the past.

Wasn’t it Winston Churchill who said this :

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, you have no head.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
When would have Winston have said that? I’m not challenging your statement, just trying to fit it in to Churchill’s career. I’m wondering because I’ve seen H. P. Lovecraft quote the saying in a letter written in 1929, and it sounds like it was old then.

“You may have heard the epigrammatic saying— ‘If a man isn’t a socialist before he’s 25, he has no heart; & if he is a socialist after he’s 25 he has no head!’”
(Lovecraft, Selected Letters, Volume III, Arkham House, 1971, pg. 3)

To add a layer of irony, Lovecraft actually did that progression the wrong way around — he was the rare bird who started out as an ultra-conservative neo-Tory and ended up a squishy Roosevelt-sympathizing sort-of socialist by the time of his death in 1937.

“Sounds interesting, but...
Interferon, monoclonal antibodies, redirected T-cells, fetal stem cells...

“Long history of false hopes. I hope this one works out. At the very least, it may add to the body of knowledge and bring the day of triumph that much closer.”

******************************

I saw an optimistic piece several years ago on the subject, though the tone was more that there were a number of promising avenues opening up than that any specific one was due to lead to the cure very soon. Then the article considered what a successful treatment for cancer would mean for human longevity in general. The immediate prospect was an enormous increase in the number of people with Alzheimer’s in assisted care homes because elderly people wouldn’t be dying of cancer before Alzheimer’s could get them. The implication was that if cancer can be treated, a preventive treatment for Alzheimer’s or a treatment for other age-related dementia due to strokes had better be found as well, or the social welfare system would be catastrophically overloaded by mid-century.

I live in Northlake and this has been in the news here, of course, as well as the incident itself being long remembered. (There’s a park here named after the two policemen who died in that robbery.) The item reproduced above doesn’t go into what a piece of work the individual involved is (his criminal record goes back to his teens in the ‘40s, and after he was sent to prison for the bank robbery/mudrder, he briefly escaped in the ‘70s and carjacked a vehicle belonging to an elderly couple).

On the other hand, I guess there’s the problem of what to do with elderly prisoners. Sending somebody to prison for life has consequences forty years later — not only does he still have to be fed and housed, but he’s probably got all the infirmities of old age as well. Do prisons even have geriatric wards? There may be a push to move elderly prisoners out of the prison system to avoid having to pay for expensive medical care, but it just shoves the problem onto somebody else.

“Flanders would go to Holland and Wallonia to France and perhaps part to Germany and Luxembourg as well.”

As a practical matter, Dutch and Flemish are the same language (they’re indistinguishable on paper, though the local dialects and accents vary), so you’d think merging Flanders and Holland would be easy. It would make more sense than the present jury-rigged arrangement of French and Dutch-speaking regions pretending to be one happy country. From what people who live there have told me, however, the Flemish nationalists want their own country and do not want to join Holland. There are local resentments, grudges, and religious differences, not to mention historic reasons (Belgium came about as a revolt for independence from Holland in the 1830s in the first place). And Holland has enough trouble balancing its own array of political and religious factions to want to absorb millions of new voters. Supposedly, studies have shown that Flanders has the economic potential for sustaining itself as an independent nation. Wallonia, on the other hand, is poorer and landlocked, and union with France might be its best option.

First off, Tiger, you’re one of my favorite Freepers. Any time I see a posting by TigerLikesRooster, it becomes a top priority for reading. Your combination of interesting stories and intelligent commentary have made me far more interested in Korean affairs than I ever would have been otherwise.

I do have a question, though. I’ve read an awful lot of North Korean News stories (Drudge has a handy link), almost to the point that I could write an article in that screwy English myself. So many articles seem to be about Kim going to this or that factory or military base or farm and giving “field guidance.” It sounds as though Kim spends half his time on tour. This might actually be a useful policy for a totalitarian despot, as he gets some idea of conditions out in the country and he doesn’t have to depend on getting his information from yes-men who don’t dare tell him any bad news. But do these tours accomplish even that much?

I get the idea that the Chollima Arduous March Fish Farm is informed that Kim is coming. The panic-stricken managers clean the place up fast, splash paint on all visible surfaces, and rehearse the employees for what to do. Then Kim comes, he gets a carefully staged tour of the place, the manager tells him what they do there, he pretends to be interested, then, at the end of the tour, he gives “field guidance,” mainly consisting of setting impossible or absurd goals or tasks to be accomplished concerning an industry he knows nothing about, maybe on how to run the fish farm according to the principles of Juche, which the managers know full well that if actually implemented would result mainly in a lot of dead fish since it’s hard to instill fish with revolutionary do-or-die spirit. Then he leaves with his entourage, the manager and employees breathe a sigh of relief, they put up a plaque in the employee recreation room saying the Dear Leader had been there, and things slowly revert to normal. Meanwhile, the official North Korean news services writes up a report about Kim’s visit to the fish farm in terms making it sound like another glorious feat in the spirit of the generals of Mount Paektu that will contribute to the cause of sounding the advance in the march to making the DPRK a prosperous nation.

And production of fish actually sinks by 40%.

Uhm... something like that, anyway?

A little off-topic, maybe, but... Back in the ‘90s and a little into the present century, I was working free-lance for a company in Denmark and going over to Europe just about every year. Before the Euro, I’d have to change my Amerikanski dollars into several different currencies as I went from country to country. Usually, by the end of the trip, I’d have some of each currency left over, but it wasn’t enough to be worth changing back to $$, so I just kept it for my next trip. Then came my last trip before the various countries were to change to the Euro. On my next trip, any left-over German marks, Dutch guilders, and French francs would be difficult or impossible to spend, so I spent them while I still could to get rid of them.

Then I realized — “My gosh! I’m spending money like it’s going out of style!”

I enjoyed the Thera book, too. And my jaw about hit the floor when I read his Titanic book a while back and saw him referring to the possibility that Saturn’s moon Enceladus had a liquid ocean of water beneath the ice — written about two decades before the Cassini probe spotted evidence strongly suggesting it. Maybe Pellegrino has a bad rep for being somewhat sensationalistic in his writing for a popular audience, I dunno.

Some of the best footage of cargo cults I’ve seen was in — of all things — the “Chariots of the Gods” documentary. Erich von Däniken had the idea that ancient myths of gods descending to Earth and temples built to worship them were an ancient version of cargo cults involving actual aliens from space, and drew a parallel with modern cargo cults. World War II-era GIs from America would seem to natives of remote Pacific islands about as stunningly super-advanced as aliens from Alpha Centauri would to us. Okay, you don’t have to buy von Däniken, but the people who made the documentary based on his book did come up with some pretty amazing footage of actual cargo cults in operation circa 1970, with things like replicas of airplanes made with sticks (in the hope of luring the real things back by sympathetic magic). In a way, because it was genuine, it was more astonishing than the speculative stuff about aliens.