Continued from Part II

TADA!

BWAHAHA!

Continued from Part I

Rearranging terms, using the Eigenfunction relations, and then factoring out the Eigenvalue E, and noting E’s independence from x:

Stay tuned for the final result!

[UPDATE: the continuation is here:
Bwahaha! My alternate derivation of the Feynman-Hellmann theorem Part III]

Note: the product rule implies

Given the following assumptions:

It follows that:

To be continued! Stay tuned!

[UPDATE: the continuation is here:
Bwahaha! My alternate derivation of the Feynman-Hellmann theorem Part II]

Just disocovered a possible missing link between pigs and humans: Wasmanius Nostrilitus

Waxman could almost persuade me to become an evolutionist.

At some point a scientific discipline ought to get some things right. Paleoantrobozos (ahem, paleoanthropologists) recently got skewered again:

Recently Analyzed Fossil Was Not Human Ancestor As Claimed, Anthropologists Say

March 2, 2010

Share this story: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

AUSTIN, Texas — A fossil that was celebrated last year as a possible “missing link” between humans and early primates is actually a forebearer of modern-day lemurs and lorises, according to two papers by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

In an article now available online in the Journal of Human Evolution, four scientists present evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a haplorhine primate like humans, apes and monkeys, as the 2009 research claimed.
They also note that the article on Darwinius published last year in the journal PLoS ONE ignores two decades of published research showing that similar fossils are actually strepsirrhines, the primate group that includes lemurs and lorises.

“Many lines of evidence indicate that Darwinius has nothing at all to do with human evolution,”

Glenn Beck at CPAC pt 1

http://tinyurl.com/ykbondh

Glenn Beck at CPAC pt 2

http://tinyurl.com/ykkvbce

Glenn Beck at CPAC pt 3

http://tinyurl.com/ykqor92

Glenn Beck at CPAC pt 4

http://tinyurl.com/ykpj2es

Glenn Beck at CPAC pt 5

http://tinyurl.com/yh33ns2

Glenn Beck at CPAC pt 6

http://tinyurl.com/yh2rlyg

I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement”

Charles Darwin

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/01/all_is_well.php

For everyone writing to me concerned about the status of the stranded Trophy Wife™: she’s fine. She was going to be stuck in a gas station in Hancock, Minnesota for a night, and a local minister stepped up and offered her a place to stay…and when the weather cleared a bit, helped her get back home to Morris. So she has survived the storm, is doing fine, and is even going to work today.

After an illustrious career as a mathematician resulting in the famed theorem known as “Zorn’s Lemma”, coach Jim Zorn is facing a dilemma as coach of the Washington Redskins.

Jim Zorn Gives Up

On Sunday, the Redskins hit rock bottom, losing at home to the winless Chiefs and scoring just six points against one of the worst defenses in football. After the game, coach Jim Zorn was stripped of his play-calling duties, which were handed to Sherm Lewis, an offensive consultant who has been with the team for two weeks.

Essentially, all Cerrato’s endorsement does is solidify Jim Zorn as the coach for maybe the next few weeks. The questions will stop temporarily. But if the team loses a couple more games in a row, it’s hard to believe Cerrato and Snyder won’t once again start to contemplate firing Zorn mid-season. Regardless, he’s gone after this season, so — as Reid wrote — it will continue to be an uncomfortable situation for Zorn.

Hatred of Religion By Materialists More Virulent Than Previously Thought Possible

There you have it. Our opponents count among their number a man who would rather see a young woman live in sexual slavery if that’s what it takes to insulate her from the influence of Christians who would try to help her. After I picked myself up from the floor, my first inclination was to delete the comment and ban this moral monster from the site. Then, I thought better of it. Instead, of deleting the comment, I will put it out there for everyone in the world to see. And I say this to our opponents who appear at this site: How do you answer Dembski’s question? Do you agree with Seversky? If not, will you remain silent or will you come on here and distance yourself from the views he expressed?

My view is that beautiful, intelligent women like Jamie Colby (juris doctor by age 22) should not become slaves:

Neither should the less attractive ones like be made slaves like Janet Reno.

Isn’t the some science scibling by the name of “Aferensis”? Shouldn’t he be ashamed that his collegues blew it again:

A Skull ReWrites Hisory

The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries

Talk about a discipline defined by gaffes and yet still commands respect as some sort of “science”.

http://barackobamajokes.googlepages.com/

A woman applying for a job in a Florida lemon grove seemed to be far too qualified for the job.

The foreman frowned and said, “I have to ask you this; “Have you had any actual experience in picking lemons?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I have!” she replied.
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A remake of the the famous Sammy Davis, Jr. Classic: The “Government Can”. This is as good as a broadway musical!

HT Mike Gene

This is what life will be like under the Obarfma Healthcare Proposals

JJS PE at Telic Thoughts

Let me tell you what I want:

1. Quality - sorely lacking under our system since specialists go where the money is (U.S. and Europe come to mind).

2. Choice - I want to have the ability to go for a second opinion, something that is currently very difficult under the public system we have (again, lack of specialists). Also, if I have to pay, I’ll pay. I would like to have that choice available. Choice in doctors also drives down the cost of doctors. In order to compete, doctors would have to cut fees.

3. Accessability - I don’t want to wait 5 hours in the emergency room to be treated. This is due to lack of doctors (again, going where the money is) and abuse of the system (people going to ER for a sniffle or scrap). In fact, the public systme violates the Accessability criterion of the CHA, something that didn’t escape the notice of the SCOC in 2005.

4. Efficiency - when government pays the bills, apathy sets in. This happened in Alberta before King Ralph Klein cleaned house (it was not rare for nurses to be standing around like a bunch of teamsters high school students). The system is mismanaged.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

It is not well known, but the Intelligent Designer was honored the moment man landed on the moon.

Aldrin is a Presbyterian, and is known for his statements about God. After landing on the moon, Aldrin radioed earth with these words: “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” He received Communion on the surface of the Moon, but kept it secret because of a lawsuit brought by Madalyn Murray O’Hair over the reading of Genesis on Apollo 8.[13] Aldrin, a church elder, used a pastor’s home Communion kit given to him by Dean Woodruff and recited words used by his pastor at Webster Presbyterian Church. [14][15] Webster Presbyterian Church, a local congregation in Webster, Texas (a Houston suburb near the Johnson Space Center) possesses the chalice used for communion on the moon, and commemorates the event annually on the Sunday closest to July 20.[16]

Available at Amazon:

The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin

The boy [Darwin] developed very slowly: he was given, when small, to inventing gratuitous fibs and to daydreaming

Sir Gavin de Beer

His childhood fantasies were concerned with fabulous discoveries in natural history; to his schoolmates he boasted that he could produce variously colored flowers of the same plant by watering them with certain colored fluids
….

Lies-and the thrills derived from lies-were for him indistinguishable from the delights of natural history or the joy of finding a
long-sought specimen

Browne

George Matheson began to lose his sight before he was a year old; at 17 he was almost completely blind. A brilliant student in spite of this handicap, he gained his B.A. at the University of Glasgow in 1861, his M.A. in 1862, and a B.D. in 1866. He was ordained in 1868 and appointed as parish minister at Innelan, Argyll, on the Firth of Clyde. In the manse there on June 6, 1882, he was, he says, “Suffering from extreme mental distress and the hymn was the fruit of pain.” This pain was not caused by a broken engagement, as that had happened about 20 years earlier, but it might have been a bereavement or his concern over the inroads that Darwinism was making in the church.

The Story of Hymn

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The dissident physcists and creationists join for an Einsteing bashing:

See: http://blog.conference.worldnpa.org

by Greg Volk

It’s like a family reunion. If you’ve never been to an NPA conference, you’ve missed the joy of connecting with the very heart of dissidence, the comrodary of the family of alternative science, the ‘aha’ experience of meeting people known only through the website… the frustration from STILL not convincing your neighbor on your views of the nature of reality.

After a morning of arrivals and renewed friendships and a few obligatory technical difficulties, Dr. Domina Spencer welcomed everybody to Storrs, assuring us that his was not her farewell address.

This first speaker, Pal Asija put his money where his mouth is by offering a $1000 challenge on each of 20 different topics. Recognizing dissidents as ants compared with the elephants of mainstream, Asija proposed a debate with anyone on any of these topics. Walter Babin followed with a critique of logical methods, in keeping with Monday’s theme, the Development of Science. With praise for Occam’s Razor, Bernard Feldman rounded out the first session with his list of “Razors”, simple common-sense notions in conflict with mainstream science.

After an all-too-short break, the marathon began with Peter Marquardt’s attempt to climb several molehills. Declaring himself the “slowpoke” of the NPA, Marquardt believes the mountain of physical understanding is best apprehended by conquering molehills such as kinematics, reference frame, and existence itself. After an exchange in German with Marquardt, Marin Muller added to his already formidable list of errors in mainstream science, this time focusing his attack on Hubble’s Doppler interpretation of redshift.

Emphasizing the need to separate data from interpretative, Richard Moody shared many sordid details of Eddington’s famous expedition during the 1919 eclipse that lead to the acceptance of general relativity. Henry Linder criticized relativity and subjectivism infavor of an aetheric cosmos andobjectivism. With her characteristic vivacity, Dr. Spencer spoke for a spontaneous 10 minutes in praise of relative motion, with scorn for Lindner’s aether.

With a spirited and undeniably controversial presentation on reference-frame-independent dynamics, Greg Volk challenged everyone on topics of motion, finite versus infinite space, and total time derivatives. Exhausted but ready for more, a unique group of scientists departed to battle for their own ideas over dinner.

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Dirac suggested it. It seems Olegt makes passing mention of it. Otherwise I misinterpreted his comments (sorry in advance if I did Olegt):

Olegt at Telicthoughts

Wintery Knight doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The first clue is that there is no “law of conservation of mass and matter” in physics. There are conserved quantities, such as energy and electric charge, but not mass. But that’s a minor transgression.

A major flaw in WK’s argument is the omission of a third possibility: the theory that extrapolates today’s values of “universal” constants all the way into the past is wrong. This is, in fact, the prevailing view in physical cosmology.

The strength of physical interactions are not really fixed constants: they may change with energy of interacting particles. We have solid evidence that this happens to the electromagnetic and weak forces: their coupling constants, different at low energies, become equal at the energies of order 100 GeV. That has been verified experimentally (see electroweak force). Likewise, there are good reasons to believe that the electroweak and strong interactions become equal in strength around 10^14 GeV (see grand unification theory).

The fine-tuning problem in cosmology is this: our timespace has a very, very small curvature on the scale of the Universe. If one extrapolates Einstein’s equations of general relativity to the moment of the big bang, today’s flatness requires a very precise amount of mass in the early, dense Universe. It looks finely balanced.

But that is old news. Cosmologists have already found a theoretical solution to this problem: cosmic inflation, a short period of very rapid expansion around the time of the big bang. It is not a stopgap solution: inflation manages to solve three cosmological puzzles at once (see cosmic inflation). Furthermore, it makes certain predictions that have been confirmed by astronomical observations of the early Universe. So this fine tuning is not evidence for a creator carefully weighing matter prior to the big bang. This puzzle has been resolved and the creator can move on to the next gap.

There is another fine-tuning problem in physics: theorists have been unable to derive the value of the cosmological constant that would agree with current astronomical measurements. They are off by 120 orders of magnitude. They can get the right answer by fine-tuning some constants in their theories to the same degree of precision. If you think this gap is a place for the creator, be my guest.

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When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music….

A.N. Wilson

The grace of the Intelligent Designer be with you!

Mike Elzinga and Dale Husband are getting whupped in debate. They are getting beaten like Darwin’s puppy:

Another Honest Creationist

The question came up about the distance which CMBR photons travelled.

Mike Elzinga wrote:

Wow; those damned photons come with distance labels on them? That’s funny as hell.

How far away would you say the CMBR photons come from?

From Wiki on CMBR:

photons that were around at that time have been propagating ever since

So these CMBR photons have been propagating ever since. If they have been propagating for around 13.7 Billion years, how far away would you say their point of origin is from us.

Or are you going to say the photons we see as CMBR have originated from points a few million light years way.

Wiki on the time when CMBR photons originated:

The CMB gives a snapshot of the Universe when, according to standard cosmology, the temperature dropped enough to allow electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms, thus making the universe transparent to radiation. When it originated some 380,000 years after the Big Bang

If the age of the universe is 13,700,000,000 years 380,000 is drop in the bucket, so the CMBR photons we see now are roughly 13.7 Billion years old. So mike, how far away is the point of origin for these photons?

Why don’t you show some expertise in first semester physics.

D = V T

D = distance

V = Velocity

T = Time

V = speed of light

T = 13.7 Billion years

Solve for D.

AN Wilson Skewered But Now Recoverted? Can One Love God and Darwin?

from wiki:

The Battle of Puebla took place on May 5, 1862 near the city of Puebla during the French intervention in Mexico. The battle ended in a victory for the Mexican Army against the occupying French forces. The victory is celebrated today during the festivities of Cinco de Mayo (5th of May).
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Thomas M English proved a fundamental theorem which Bob Marks and Bill Dembski use. Bob told me English’s result was the most important breakthrough in their work. Tom English was a member of Mark’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Tom is higlhly critical of Bill and Bob’s work.

There is a good exchange at UD between Thomas M English and Bill Dembski’s crowd. See: Life’s Conservation Law

I wandered over to PandasThumb Sadly Another Honest Creationist

raging bee: “Sal is a liar, he knows he’s lying, he knows we know it”

stanton: “Salvador Cordova is an idiot in the disguise of a religious fanatic.”

John Kwok: “Sal is a delusional twit “

phantomreader42 said: “Sal Cordova = Lying Sack of Shit”

and

Ichthyic wrote:

You insubstantial, tiny minded, pusillanimous fucking slimeball.

that you are tolerated here at all makes me wanna puke my guts out.

You should not only NOT be tolerated here, but your ability to post on the internet should be removed permanently under the charges of being a demented, abusive, lying, sociopath.

Gee, do you think these guys don’t like me?

Paul Mirecki disguises himself as Ricky Hatton, and then goes to la la land after Pacquiao lands a wide left hook to Mirecki’s chin.

Poor Mirecki.

Much is learned through the process of Knockout experiments. Tonight was one example. Ouch!

From ESPN:

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=4129461

LAS VEGAS — Manny Pacquiao was dominating. Ricky Hatton was left helpless.

Pacquiao cemented his claim to being the best pound-for-pound boxer Saturday night with a spectacular performance that ended with Hatton sprawled out on the canvas after a devastating left hand to the head late in the second round.

Coming off an overwhelming win over Oscar De La Hoya, Pacquiao was even better against Hatton, knocking him down two times in the first round before finally stopping him with a vicious left hand that dropped Hatton for good in the 140-pound title bout.

Referee Kenny Bayless took one look at Hatton and declared the fight over at 2:59 of the round.

“I didn’t have to count,” Bayless said.

Pacquiao needed less than half a round to figure out the onrushing Hatton, hitting him with a flurry of punches midway through the first round before putting him down for the first time with a right hook to the head. Hatton got up at the count of eight but Pacquiao landed another flurry and dropped him again just before the end of the round.

Hatton attempted to carry the fight to Pacquiao in the second round but was mostly ineffective as Pacquiao sized him up for a big punch. It finally came at the end of the round when he landed a left cross that flattened the English fighter.

“I’m surprised the fight was so easy,” Pacquiao said. “He was wide open for the right hook. I knew he would be looking for my left.”

Pacquiao was a 2-1 favorite, but few thought Hatton would go easily. His only loss came when he was stopped in the 10th round by Floyd Mayweather Jr., and he built a career and a reputation as a tough and aggressive fighter who wore his opponents down.

But he stood no chance against Pacquiao, whose punches came straight down the middle and landed with increasing frequency as the fight went on.

“I was just doing my job,” said Pacquiao, who is a national hero in the Philippines and is fast becoming a hero among boxing fans. “I always try to do my best in the ring.”

Pacquiao’s best on this night quickly quieted a boisterous crowd of 16,262 at the MGM Grand arena, many of them who came over from England to sing and chant Hatton’s praises. They didn’t even get a chance to warm up, though, before Hatton was on the canvas for the first time of the night.

“The fight was no surprise to me,” Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, said. “We know he always pumps his hands before he throws a punch. He’s a sucker for the right hook.”

Hatton finally rose from the canvas after several minutes as doctors tended to him and Pacquiao’s corner celebrated. He walked from the ring with a wry grin on his face, while his fans serenaded him with one last verse of “Winter Wonderland.”

“That’s boxing,” said Floyd Mayweather Sr., Hatton’s trainer.

On the same day Mayweather announced his return to the ring with a July 18 fight against Juan Manuel Marquez, Pacquiao stole the undefeated former champion’s thunder with a performance that was so lopsided it looked like a sparring session. The southpaw easily got away from Hatton’s wild advances and just as easily hit him with punches that shouldn’t come from a fighter who was fighting above 130 pounds for only the third time.

Pacquiao weighed 138 pounds for the fight to 140 for Hatton, and was fighting a bigger man for the second time in a row. But nothing seems to bother the boxer who is so popular at home that there is talk of him running for president some day.

Pacquiao (49-3-2, 37 knockouts) earned $12 million for the fight, while Hatton (45-2) was paid $8 million.

Buy 1000 shares of BGZ. Current Ask 44.35 as of 15:58 pm 4/30/09.

[I posted this at PandasThumb: here the comment section below contains some of my subsequent posts at PandasThumb]:

jfx wrote to registered user:

You prefer a caricature of religion. This is easier for you. It makes an easier target. If you can avoid acknowledging religion as a complex, naturalistic phenomenon, with perhaps historical, physical, forensically detectable and maybe even heritable components, it becomes something that can be conveniently demonized, scorned, and crushed.

That view is echoed by a respected Bright (who looked really cool when he wore a Pimp hat in “Beware the Believers”):

Religions are among the most powerful natural phenomena on the planet, and we need to understand them better if we are to make informed and just political decisions. Although there are risks and discomforts involved, we should brace ourselves and set aside our traditional reluctance to investigate religious phenomena scientifically, so that we can come to understand how and why religions inspire such devotion, and figure out how we should deal with them all in the twenty first century.

Daniel Dennett
Breaking of the Spell
page 28.

But the answer for religion’s persistence is obvious: Natural Selection!

From an evolutionary stanpoint. One might suppose those with inclination toward religion and heterosexual relations are reproductively advantaged. It is possible religion can be explained by other Darwinian mechanisms, but the fundamental reason for religions persistence is Natural Selection!

Religions might turn out to be a species of cultural symbionts that manage to thrive by leaping from human host to human host. They may be mutualists — enhancing human fitness and even making human life possible just as the bacteria in our gut do. Or Commensals–neutral, neither good for us nor bad for us, but along for the ride. Or they might be parasites: deleterious replicators that we would be better off without–at least so far as our genetic interests are concerned–but that would be hard to eliminate, since they have evolved so well to counter our defenses and enhance their own propagation. We can expect that cultural parasites, like microbial prasites, exploit whatever preexisting sytems come in handy. The sneezing reflex, for instance, is in the first place an adaptation for ridding the nasal passages of foreign irritants, but when a germ provokes sneezing, it is typically not the sneezer but the germ that is the principal beneficiery, getting a high-energy launching into a neighborhood where other potential hosts can take it in. Spreading germs and spreading memes may exploit similar mechanisms, such as irresistible urges to impart stories or other items of information to others, enhanced by traditions that heighten the length, intensity, and frequency of encounters with others who might be likely hosts…

When we look at religion from this perspective…its is not our fitness (as reproducing members of the species Homo sapiens) that is presumed to be enhanced by religion, but it is fitness (as a reproducing–self-replicating–member of the symbiont genus Cultus religiousus)…it may thrive as a parasite even thought it oppresses its hosts with a virulent affliction that leaves them worse off but too weak to combat its spread.

Daniel Dennett

So whether religion enhances human reproductive fitness or whether religion is a highly successful parasitic meme, natural selection will prevail, and empirical evidence suggests what evolution has perfected through the process of natural selection will remain, namely religion. Thus, natural selection favors the persistence of creationists.

Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.

The Borg
Star Trek

Richard Dawkins on being Prickly

should we continue to go along with the appeasers and be all nice and cuddly, like Eugenie

Eugenie is nice and cuddly.

In contrast Dawkins, Myers, Harris, and Moran embody what it means to be big pricklies versus cute cuddlies.

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Matthew Parris

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it’s Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

Background
British missionaries plead guilty to sedition in Gambia
Soulgasms of the Christian Right
Have Pentecostalism, will travel
PROFILE: warlord who kills in name of Christ
But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There’s long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don’t follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It’s… well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary’s further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Feel free to visit the Tri-Cities IDEA club: IDEAClubTCW.org

Darwinist Paul Mirecki got national attention after claiming he got beat up by unidentified creationists in 2005. The case of Mirecki’s beating remains officially unsolved. Most speculate Mirecki’s wounds were self-inflicted in order to distract from his embarrassing attempt to teach a class critical of Intelligent Design.

But I found the real explanation. And there was a major cover up.

The real story is that Mirecki posed as Roberto Duran and fought Thomas Hearns at Caesar’s palace in Las Vega. Hearns won the fight againt Mirecki (posing as Duran) in 2 rounds. Listen to the audio, turn up the volume!! I could hear that final punch by Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns a thousand miles away when it landed on Mirecki’s cheek. Ouch!

Still, we’ve got to credit Mirecki as a master of disguise. Mirecki’s disguise made him a dead ringer for Duran.

Commentators have pointed out that Mirecki invited Hearns to keep punching by raising his glove and touching his own face and even smiling. Hearns obliged. That last right-hand punch by Hearns could have decapitated Mirecki, Mirecki is lucky to still be alive. Ouch!

And then Mirecki decided to pose as Mike Tyson in Tokyo to fight James “Buster” Douglas. Douglas fought an inspired fight after unexpectedly losing his mother to an illness only 23 days earlier. Mirecki really took it on the chin. Watch the slow motion at the end. Wow.

And then Mirecki poses again as Mike Tyson and takes on Lennox Lewis. Crank up the audio and hear the Japanese!

Beating of men is brutal. But so is beating of puppies.