timeimmortal

Jay Currie has been busy, and deserves a ton of credit for breaking this story. Assists, as I understand it, go to Dr. Dawg and The Black Rod.

Briefly, what has transpired is this. Yesterday, Jay broke the story of Liberal Party of Canada candidate Lesley Hughes, who had for years been publishing Twin Towers conspiracy theories of an anti-Semitic nature on the internet. In one such writing, she asserted that Jewish businesses vacated the World Trade Centre in the days prior to the 2001 attacks.

(The “Jews were Warned!” meme is a fairly common one in the circles of those who insist that the most devastating act of Islamic terror perpetrated yet in North America was, in fact, an inside job or the work of the Israeli Mossad.)

Not twenty-four hours later, after initially defending his candidate and refusing to take action, Stephane Dion asked for, and received, her resignation from the electoral race in the Manitoba riding of Kildonan-St. Paul. This was a story that emerged, and was carried, almost entirely in the blogosphere — the mainstream media has been struggling to play catch-up.

And in a somewhat ironic twist, the Liberal Party’s “Team BC” website yesterday ran a story about an NDP candidate who is also a “troother” (e.g. a 9/11 conspiracy theorist), one Bev Collins by name.

Methinks that Jay has opened himself a rather large can of worms here. If you ever needed to see a quick demonstration of the power of the blogs, O Reader, look no further than this example.

Also: very sweet…I haven’t used the “Conspiracy nonsense” category in a while!

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Andrew Lamb writes in with a response to this article.

Hi (Kenneth ?)

In your posting on the biblical Flood you briefly mentioned geological evidence.

The sedimentary strata of the world have features that are highly consistent with rapid deposition by a global Flood, but hard to reconcile with slow-and-gradual scenarios.

These features include deep cross-bedding, uneroded interfaces between strata, the regional and even continental extent of some strata, the presence of fossils (without deep rapid burial dead organsims are scavenged and decay), the roughness of the constituent grains in many sandstones, etc.

One especially telling feature is the tightly bent yet still parallel strata in many mountain ranges. This indicate that the thick layers of sediment were wet and soft at the time they were deformed.

Other geological evidences for a global Flood include the ubiquitous phenomena of ‘water gaps’ and ‘underfit rivers’.

For details on these are other geological evidences of the global Flood, see the articles listed under the topic “Geology” in the Frequently Asked Questions index on the Creation Ministries International website, at http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/21.

Andrew Lamb

With apologies to both Andrew and Inigo Montoya, let me begin by saying: this evidence does not mean what you think it means. The plain fact is, while Andrew has furnished us with a wealth of evidence, he has ultimately furnished us with evidence that supports the conclusion that the Earth is old; it is only by twisting, misrepresenting, or misunderstanding the evidence presented that we can arrive at the conclusion that the Earth is young.

Let’s look at the different pieces of evidence provided, and see if they actually demonstrate what Andrew asserts that they do.

Extent of Strata

I’m not sure how the fact that some geological strata are very expansive is supposed to help the Young Earth position — if there were only one such layer, then that might be an argument for a flood deposition layer depending on the composition of it. Or, it might be an argument for, say, a fallout layer from a meteor impact long ago, again depending on the composition of it.

That more than one layer exists, however, and that these layers are often separated by other, more localized layers, actually argues against a global flood theory.

Fossils

The presence of fossils certainly doesn’t prove that the Earth is young. While it is more or less true that fossils can only form when creatures are rapidly and deeply buried, this hardly implies that a global flood is the cause of all or most fossils. Local mudslides would have a similar effect, as would other catastrophes in which large amounts of earth were suddenly shifted about. Many environmental catastrophes can set up the necessary conditions for fossilization.

What is more, other Young Earth arguments are imperiled by the argument Andrew makes above. If, for instance, the many dinosaur fossils we have discovered are the result of rapid sediment deposition during a global flood, then why do we not find human fossils in the same geological layers, apart from a handful of intances where a burial ceremony has resulted in a body being embedded, much later, in an ancient geological layer?

The fossil evidence argues — strongly — against the Young Earth position, and Young Earth fossil theories are often mutually contradictory.

Water Gaps

Water gaps are narrow openings or notches in mountain ranges through which a river once flowed.

A water gap is usually an indication of a river that is older than the current topography. The river likely established its course when the landform was at a low elevation, with a very low stream gradient and a thick layer of unconsolidated sediment. The river therefore established its channel without regard for the deeper layers of rock.

A renewed period of uplift caused increased erosion, removal of the overlying sediments and exposure of the underlying rock layers. Rejuvenated drainage caused streams to follow weaker layers of rock, but larger watercourses, as long as the uplift did not exceed the rate of erosion, were able to cut through the harder rocks which generally became ridges. Water gaps are common in the Ridge-and-valley Appalachians of eastern North America.

Alternatively, a water gap can be formed through headward erosion of two streams on opposite sides of a ridge, ultimately resulting in the capture of one stream by the other.

This is a process that would play out over a long period of time. As I previously noted: the evidence of water gaps does not mean what Andrew thinks it means. The presence of these gaps — the products of millions of years of erosion — is actually an argument for a very old Earth. A quickly-receding global flood could not have carved these gaps; there is simply no means by which water could displace that much rock and sand in such a short amount of time, unless we are to assume that the entirety of the world’s surface was essentially loose soil and sand a few thousand years ago.
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The little guy is still an infant still, but he has become the focal point for a lot of seething rage and hatred from various quarters of the Left. I just learned that Bill Maher — supposedly a funny man — has taken to referring to Trig as “it,” a rather hateful polemic. And then, of course, there is this cretinous website.

Why is this? Why all this rage and animosity directed toward a simple infant?

I think, at some level, seeing Trig Palin up there, loved by his siblings and celebrated simply for the fact of his being alive, fills many on the Left with shame. After all, the Left is caught up in a contradiction. While they obviously support the rights of the disabled, and cheer things like the Special Olympics, they also support a woman’s right to on-demand abortion for any reason whatsoever. And one very common reason for abortion is the discovery that the unborn baby is less than perfect, thanks to some manner of genetic defect .

90% of Down’s babies get aborted. Ninety percent! As Michael Gerson notes:

This is properly called eugenic abortion — the ending of “imperfect” lives to remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence. And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities. By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens. A tragic choice becomes a presumption — “Didn’t you get an amnio?” — and then a prejudice. And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.

Most pro-abortion/pro-choice sorts tend to shy away from the reality of that which they support, but it’s the ugly reality of abortion. In other countries around the world (and in North America to a certain extent as well), abortion is being used for a different, but no less ugly, eugenic purpose: the elimination of female children because of social pressures which give preference to male children. In India, Pakistan, China, and many other nations, the birth rate for boys is unnaturally higher than that of girls…and it’s not hard to fathom the reason why.

Indeed, only a handful of dedicatedly pro-choice people can honestly admit the ethical dilemma that supporting abortion presents. Camille Paglia is one of these, and her summary of the issue is at once revealing and damning:

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

Paglia also notes that there is both room, and a need, in modern feminism for the pro-life perspective, contrary to all the naysayers who are busily crucifying Sarah Palin — Trig’s mother — simply because she is unabashedly pro-life, in word and in action.

To which, Vox Day adds this analysis:

This was my position before I became a Christian. I always believed abortion was murder, but then, murder is the way of the world. This is why the feminist position has to hide behind a whole host of specious reasons that aren’t capable of standing up to even the most cursory examination — there is, for example, no such thing as a right to one’s body or the government would not collect DNA evidence — and why Democrats consistently lose on this issue. Nearly every left-liberal blog I’ve read since Palin was nominated has blathered on about how her pro-life stance politically dooms her, despite the fact that she has 80 percent approval ratings in Alaska. Since her pro-life position is presumably well known to Alaskans [and since we can probably assume, in safety, that Alaskans have a fairly normal distribution of political opinions, and that they are not abnormally right-leaning -- Ken], we can safely conclude that, as usual, these left-liberals have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

It is their guilty knowledge of their immorality when judged by traditional and historical standards that lies behind the drive of the Enlightenment 2.0 crowd to attempt creating a new and better moral system.

And it’s that same guilt that drives this fanatical hatred not only of Sarah Palin, but of baby Trig as well, and then perhaps even more viciously.

I think this also explains why 17-year old Bristol Palin took so much flack from the Left when it was revealed that she was pregnant and would a) be keeping the baby, and b) would be marrying the father, Levi Johnston. The Left expected Palin to “reveal her true colours” and to act as they themselves would; they expected Palin to be mortified. They hoped that she would either cave in and insist that Bristol abort the pregnancy, or else that she would withdraw herself and her family from the spotlight until the “mistake” had been born and its mother duly married off.

In other words, the Left hoped to expose Palin as either a hypocrite or a narrow-minded bigot where women’s sexuality was concerned (a little bit of projection there, methinks?).

But Palin didn’t do that, nor did her family. Nor did the Republicans — instead, they applauded Bristol’s decisions, applauded Bristol herself, and applauded her husband-to-be who had summoned the courage to “man up” and accept his responsibility for the child he fathered.

And the Left ended up looking like the misogynistic troglodytes that they have spent the last umpteen years warning us all that the Right is comprised of.

I wasn’t aware that the Japanese had a law requiring a child’s parents to be married in order for said child to obtain citizenship in Japan. And now it appears that said law is being struck down — evidently, it’s unfair to deny citizenship to children born out of wedlock.

And in what could possibly be considered “true to form” for the Japanese, the proposed solution: “Japanese fathers’ acknowledgement of paternity will be the sole requirement for children to obtain Japanese citizenship, removing the requirement for parents’ marital status from the provision.”

I don’t know about you, good Reader, but I get the strange sense that this change won’t really solve much of anything. If nothing else, it presents men with an interesting way to “get back” at a “baby mama” with whom they have had a falling out: her child could be permanently denied citizenship in Japan.

But then, perhaps I’m being too cynical — could it be that Japanese men have a more responsible attitude toward children they father out of wedlock than do North American men?

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

At the end of Revelations, the mid-season cliffhanger of Battlestar Galactica’s fourth and final season, the Colonial fleet and their renegade Cylon allies find and land on a planet that all involved believe to be Earth, the legendary home of the 13th Tribe of Kobol.

The planet itself appears blue from space, but is quickly discovered to be a nuclear wasteland, devoid of life and marked only by decimated buildings and burnt-out ruins. The immediate conclusion that the producers of the show likely wanted us to jump to was that yes, this was Earth, and that the 13th colony had somehow destroyed itself. As a lesson in human concupiscence, that wouldn’t be a bad ending in and of itself, but there are a few questions left unanswered if one simply assumes that one can take the show at face value as to the identity of this ruined planet.

First off, there’s the issue of how vague and masked the shots of the planet from orbit are. I mentioned this before, but I just found a handy comparison image (as well as a reasonable theory about who the final Cylon might just be) on another blog that tells the tale better than before:

Now, there’s been a fair bit of argument that the ruins themselves tell the tale. In particular, a number of people have made the association between the ruined bridge seen at the end of Revelations and the Brooklyn Bridge. Personally, I’m not convinced; this show has been marked by repeated examples that what the characters think they see is not necessarily what is (e.g. Starbuck’s seeing a gas giant that was thought to be Jupiter, but turned out not to be, or her seeing a comet that turned out to be the damaged rebel basestar). I certainly think that the ending scene was composed so as to make us think of New York, but I won’t say for certain whether that’s what was being depicted.

At the end of the third season, the CGI was unambiguous: Earth was easily recognized, and the shape of the North American continent was distinct. As the comparison photos above tell, in this discovery of Earth there is nothing about the planet itself which obviously suggests that it is Earth. No continents are visible, and much of the world is dark. Ron Moore et. al. are far too “tricksy” (apologies to Smeagol) for this to be a mere coincidence, or simple artistic license. There is some meaning to the sudden lack of clarity.

There is also the matter of pretty much every main character, including Laura Roslin (supposedly the “dying leader” who will not live to see the proper end of the journey of humanity across the stars), being on the surface of the planet. Unless the producers are setting us up for some kind of “actually, it was this dead character all along” sort of letdown, it seems that a second objection to the probability that this devastated planet is actually Earth must be raised¹.

On the other hand, there is the matter that Felix Gaeta did match the various constellations when the fleet first arrived into orbit of this ruined planet. Initially, I remarked that “it would be very nearly impossible to find another point in the galaxy in which all those stars appeared to align in just that way.” However, in making that statement, I forgot to take three things into account, which I was reminded of when I read this article at The Science of Battlestar Galactica:

1. How accurate were the images of the constellations that Gaeta was working from?
2. How many of the constellations were visible to Gaeta when he made his checks (e.g. were any of them occluded by the planet or the system’s Sun)?
3. Is it actually impossible that the stars might not line up in more or less the same manner from some other point?

The answer to the third question has actually already been given to us in a subtle way by BSG’s producers: the constellation Orion appears, more or less properly configured, in the episode The Ties that Bind, in the backdrop of the ambush on the rebel basestars by the pro-Raider-lobotomy Cylon faction. Surely the Cylons would have noticed whether or not there was a habitable world in reasonably close proximity to the location of said fracas?

Of course, one constellation lining up could just be a coincidence — in theory, so long as the Cylons were on a more or less straight-line path between Earth and the approximate middle of Orion’s shape, the alignment of the stars would remain the same — one would expect to see the constellation get “larger” in one’s view, perhaps, and one might also reasonably expect to note changes in the apparent brightness of the various stars themselves. The shape of the constellation, though, would be essentially unchanged.

That by no means implies that the shape of eleven other constellations visible from Earth would likewise remain constant. This illustration demonstrates how different Orion would look to us were we viewing it from a position situated roughly 90 degrees counter-clockwise from Earth’s present location.

However, the distances we are talking about in such a hypothetical situation are immense; were we fairly close to Earth, would the constellations look drastically different, or would they appear somewhat similar?

It turns out that “similar” is the correct answer (and it further turns out that this brings us to the second question):

If Gaeta was checking the position of the zodiacal constellations with a sketch made from the Temple of Athena data, he’s out of luck. As seen from Alpha Centauri, those constellations would be virtually identical to those seen from Earth, the chief difference being that Castor and Pollux, the Heads of the Gemini Twins, don’t quite line up with their bodies. If Gaeta had incomplete data, or if the constellation Gemini was not visible for some reason (being occulted by Alpha Centauri, for example), he’d be absolutely correct in reporting that all “visible” constellations are a match, even though the fleet would be in the wrong place.

In the same way, the fleet could have arrived at Tai Ceti or Epsilon Eridani, two other type G sunlike stars in our local neighborhood. The zodiacal constellations as seen from those systems would be more distorted, especially around the cancer-Leo and Aries-Taurus regions. But again, if Gaeta’s data are sketchy and the local star is blocking out the appropriate regions of the zodiac, the rest of the constellations should pass muster.

This issue of distorted constellations leads us back to the first question. The data set Gaeta would be working from would be some manner of representation of the constellations seen by those few who entered into the Tomb of Athena and saw the holographic projection therein. As far as we, the viewer, know, nobody took any kind of recording of the images displayed therein, and it is reasonable to assume that any reproduction of the positions of the stars would be hand-drawn sketches made while the memory of what was seen was reasonably fresh. That’s all well and good, but it is by no means an assurance of accuracy.

Lt. Gaeta, when checking to see whether the fleet had jumped to the right spot, said that the visible constellations are a match. But a match with what set of data? Lee said that they had “projected a course to the signal” and that it would probably take some revising. That tells me the Colonial beacon signal did not include a 3-d starmap. Is Gaeta checking the constellations with what the jump calculations predicted the resulting constellations should look like? That would only prove that they jumped to where they expected to jump — it wouldn’t prove that they had jumped to Earth.

Or is he comparing the visible constellations with the constellations they saw in the planetarium show back at the Temple of Athena on Kobol? It’s hardly likely — the display in the temple focused on the twelve constellations of our Zodiac. Lee spotted the Lagoon Nebula, and his father backed him up by calling it “M8” — but did we see either of them record those constellations? (If it was a shared hallucination, was it even possible to have recorded the constellations? ) And if they did record the constellations, to what level of precision did they do so? I think it’s much more likely that the pilots come out of the planetarium and, at best, drew the stick figures from memory. And if that’s that happened, then Gaeta’s comparison data are going to be literally sketchy.

To this point in the series, we’ve seen or heard of over a dozen human-habitable worlds: the Twelve Colonies, New Caprica, the algae planet, Kobol, and now this newly-discovered ruined world. That’s a fairly substantial chunk of real estate that the humans have discovered simply by jumping from place to place.

In the original series, there was an instance of an Earth-like planet being found, and for which several hints were dropped suggesting that it might be Earth. That planet was Terra, home of two warring factions that nearly wiped each other out in a nuclear confrontation. Indeed, they were saved only by Galactica’s timely arrival.

It’s possible, then, that in this iteration of BSG, Galactica has arrived too late, and has discovered a wiped-out Terra. But perhaps, in the ruins somewhere, will be found the final pointers toward Earth. This would certainly be a good reason for the show’s producers to make the planet so ambiguous when viewed from orbit as in Revelations — an unfamiliar continental form would give things away far too quickly².

At any rate, we know this show must go on from here³, and a big part of where it goes come 2009 is likely going to be caught up in the exact identity of this ruined world that the Colonials and Cylons have now come to. There’s plenty of good reason, based both in fact and in the idea of dramatic, message-driven storytelling, to think that the planet that was found was, in fact, Earth. But there’s also plenty of room for doubt. This season especially, BSG’s writers have pulled off one act of sleight-of-hand after another, and it’s entirely possible that they’re doing it to us again.

In fact, I think it’s probably likely.

Notes — mind the spoilers:

1. Admittedly, in the case that this planet is actually Earth, and the “promised land” which the dying leader shall not see is another planet (e.g. Terra or its equivalent), this objection is pretty much null and void.

2. Edward James Olmos asserted that there would be a dark end to the series, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this blogger’s counter-theory regarding Earth/Terra: perhaps this really is Earth, and the Fleet moves on to find the Thirteenth Tribe on Terra (or some analogous world).

3. Scenes for the final episodes of the series were shot in and around Kamloops, British Columbia, and involved lots of physically fit extras with crop-cut hair or dreadlocks. Scenes were also evidently shot in the city of Kamloops proper, which would imply that the series ends on some manner of inhabited world. Whether this is the Colonials realizing that they are the 13th tribe — itself perhaps a product of the twelve tribes united into one — and accepting that it is their bitter fate to be the ones to re-settle the Earth, or whether this is the Colonials finding their bretheren on another planet is yet to be seen.

Also, it should be noted that other scenes of the series finale were shot at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, in the area that had previously been used for the Riverwalk district on Caprica. The scenes apparently involved Laura Roslin. This would suggest either a return to Caprica (now that would be dark!) by the remnants of the Fleet, or perhaps various persistent visions/hallucinations on the part of some of the characters (William Adama, perhaps, pining for Roslin?).

Then too, perhaps my theory that BSG is an eschatological tale for our time will pan out, and the closing scenes of the series will be like those in Roslin and Emily’s dreams in the episode Faith. Certainly, there is a religious metaphor (and possibly more than just a metaphor — one would not be surprised to see humanity come into a confrontation with the divine in this show) at work within the plot of the series, and it has more or less been confirmed that God is an active, present force within the BSG universe.

More than a few people have suggested that there is a “creation myth” element to the series, and while many of these appeal to the significance of Hera Agathon, I think they miss something. Assuming I am wrong — that is, assuming that Karl Agathon — Helo — is not the final Cylon, and assuming that Hera is the humano-Cylon child who is exclusively significant (in keeping with everything we’ve seen on the series to date), then in her and Nicholas Tyrol there is not to be found a parallel in Adam and Eve.

There is, however, a parallel to be found in Joseph and Mary, in the Blessed Virgin and her carpenter husband.