Arkansas Blog

It's fun to watch the faith-based folks wrestle with science. However, it's sad now, because they are in control of the levers of government. In essence, rather than using science to open doors for better medicine and a better society, they tell us to let the power of prayer comfort you when you are sick and/or dying . Remember what John Kerry said,"...what if we had a President who believe in science..."

Sometimes I think America could fairly easily declining into a period of "dark ages".
If/when we do, the rest of the world will clean our clocks.

OK, time out. I have a gripe. I DO NOT like the new format which replaces the blog window with the suggested reading articles. If they are lengthy, you end up trudging back through a couple of windows to get back to the blog. With a slow connection, it's a pain in the rear.

Now, some of you who are awake and have all your cogs working, let's come up with a more appropriate name for the FDA. Faith is good for the F. The only thing I can come up with is Faith Destroying Atheism Administration, FDAA.

Anonymous time out caller --

(1) My browser has preferences that allows me to select "Open a new window" when I click a link. Perhaps you can look for something like that.

(2) As for changing the name reference for "FDA" -- No!

Please don't.

Let's just hold their feet to the fire and INSIST that they evaluate food and drugs scientifically, not through faith and ideology.

During the next campaigns, candidates need to be asked their position on this subject. Would they substitute faith and prayer for science? Would they consider Christian Science to be an answer? What about prayer healing? How about using astrology and numerology? Grapho-analysis? Rattlesnakes and scorpions?

My God! If ideology is so important to those clowns, let's serve them a cup of Hemlock and ask them to pray over it before they drink it!

Just let me study some tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, and I'll do my own evaluating

--Reductio ad Absurdum..

Fake Alchemists Abound

Future Dealers of America

Fat Dittoheads Assemble

Fool Da Americans (I know, I know...)

...that was fun.

F*ck Democratic Advice

"F*ck Democratic Advice

Posted by: hunkahillbilly | April 30, 2006 12:23 PM"

Hey Hunkachunk-
I hope that if someone in your family gets seriously ill, you do consider taking some of the modern medicine. Leeches have only a few uses now and most modern pharmaceutical science involves "designer": molecules that were created to block the disease molecules specifically.

Oh my goodness, creating a drugs using real knowledge and computer techniques. Hey, all of the food companies are playing with gene replacement and if you want anything made with corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, etc., the actual seeds have been modified by injecting genes of other species into their DNA. Even pharmaceuticals are being created in fields of crops or with in the blodstream of animals using these techniques.

Do you think that God gave man the ability to learn and explore so that we couldn't do it.

Go join your flat earth friends.

I think they should have sanctioned prayer-ers in the FDA.

The New Yorker had a great article a couple of months ago about this very subject and how no one has ever seen anything like this. One pundit even suggested that the religious right is sitting on science discoveries to hasten the end of the world. These idiots have to go.

Bubba wrote:
"...that the religious right is sitting on science discoveries to hasten the end of the world."

. . . .
Bill Moyers reported this more than a year ago, but took heat when some right wing bloggers reported hopping mad that he had relied on a phony source.

They pointed to Moyers as proof of Liberal bias among journalists, PBS, etc. -- "can't trust those Liberal bastards" -- whine, howl, grumble, .... etc.

Nevertheless, his premise may have been correct.

--Fiat Lux.

Religion is afraid of the reality of science and the scientific method. I am not surprised they are still trying to bring idealogy and theology into places it has no business. I do not have much interest in anyone using a two thousand year old book like the Bible to sell some quackery that is not supported by factual material.

Well luckily for the international community, there are still countries that uphold science (China, Europe, Japan, India, etc.) These countries will not have their religious wackos trying to stifle science, so they will progress much faster (that is, only if the idiotic religious right continues this charade).

With or without us, the international community as a whole will progress technologically and scientifically.

Faith Destroying America, that is a good acronym to describe the FDA. I've said this a million times. Religion and politics need to stay as far apart as possible. To every idiot politician out there who is agains scientific advances, we should put your name on a list and when discoveries are made that would reverse diseases and conditions that kill or destroy lives, you would be blacklisted, and would not benefit from the "benefits of science".

Reality has a huge liberal bias. So does science.

I just blows me away that they think that religion and ideology should have any part of what should be a scientifically based department.

These right wingers really are NOT reality based people, and shouldn't be allowed to run anything as far as I can see.

What happened to the conservatives that were scientific? When I was growing up they were everwhere, with their horn-rimmed glasses and slide rules, talking about scientific proof and fact.

It was the liberals that were into all the metaphysical and spiritual stuff. Not necessarily the orthodox religious things, but the other unprovable unseen and unusual things.

Somewhere along the way, the world flipped over.

A few days ago you ran an article about --

Faith-Based Medicine
EDITORIAL DESK | April 11, 2006
By RAYMOND J. LAWRENCE
RESPONSIBLE religious leaders will breathe a sigh of relief at the news that
so-called intercessory prayer is medically ineffective. In a large and much touted
scientific study, one group of patients was told that strangers would pray for
them, a second group was told strangers might or might not...

Some of your readers might find it an interesting re-read. If you can't retrieve it I saved the article but figured it to long to repost and clog the system.

From Glamour magazine:

The new lies about women's health

By Brian Alexander

Political groups tell them, the government buys themâ?"and worst of all, your doctor may pass them on to you. Alarmed? You should be.

...Dr. Shaber tries hard to separate fact from fiction because, she says, "rumor and hearsay can start to seem real." In the past, she'd sometimes refer patients to government websites and printed fact sheets, or rely on those outlets to help create her own materials. Not anymore. "As a physician, I can no longer trust government sources," says Dr. Shaber. She is not a political activist or a conspiracy theorist; in addition to her own practice, she's Kaiser Permanente's director of women's health services for northern California and head of the HMO's Women's Health Research Institute. Yet this decidedly mainstream doctor and administrator says, "I no longer trust FDA decisions or materials generated [by the government]. Ten years ago, I would not have had to scrutinize government information. Now I don't feel comfortable giving it to my patients."

Such doctor mistrust represents a major change. For the past 100 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been the world's premier government agency ensuring drug safety. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have similarly stellar track records. But recently, Dr. Shaber charges, the government has lost its most precious asset: credibility.

How did it happen? Many prominent figures in science and public health think they know the answer. "People believe that religiously based social conservatives have direct lines to the powers that be within the U.S. government, the administration, Congress, and are influencing public-health policy, practice and research in ways that are unprecedented and very dangerous," says Judith Auerbach, Ph.D., a former NIH official who is now a vice president at the nonprofit American Foundation for AIDS Research. In fact, Glamour, has found that on issues ranging from STDs to birth control, some radical conservative activists have used fudged and sometimes flatly false data to persuade the government to promote their agenda of abstinence until marriage. The fallout: Young women now read false data on government websites, learn bogus information in federally funded sex-education programs and struggle to get safe, legal contraceptives?all of which, critics argue, may put them at greater risk for unplanned pregnancies and STDs.

"Abstinence is a laudable goal," says Deborah Arrindell, vice president of health policy for the nonpartisan American Social Health Association, an STD-awareness group. "But it is not how young women live their lives?the reality is that most women have premarital sex. Our government is focusing not on women's health but on a moral agenda." Consider this a wake-up call...

http://www.glamour.com/features/healthandbody/articles/060403fewohe

My, I didn't know that having an abortion put women at a higher risk for breast cancer. Or, that HIV might be able to penetrate a latex condom. Or, that 'condoms offer no protection against HPV infection.' Or that there is 'no scientific evidence that condoms reduce the risk of becoming infected with the other 23 major STDs.'

The answer to this is grisly & not for the squeamish left; the right would have no problem were it reversed: all persons of majority must declare if they favor religion or science. If said person were injured, a religious believer would get prayer & a science person would get medicine. I would hate to force someone who was anti-science to put up with: electricity, telecommunications, computers, lamps, candles or roofs. That'll learn 'um!

"English was good enough for Jesus Christ and it's good enough for the children of Texas." Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas, 1924

Iwant an outgoer

Have you seen this before? It's a number guessing game: http://www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/mentalmaths/guessthenumber.html. I guessed 61727, and it got it right! Pretty neat.