A VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READ

A VERY  HIGHLY  RECOMMENDED  READ ... Politics by Soros
FROM STEVE KROFT ("60 Minutes")

    … and when you read this, remember that George Soros is a major supporter and funder of Hillary Clinton's campaign.  Steve Kroft (born August 22, 1945) is an American journalist and a longtime correspondent for  "60 Minutes".  His investigative reporting has garnered him much acclaim, including three Peabody Awards  and nine Emmy awards, one of which was an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement.  You can understand what is happening to our America after reading this. May God have mercy upon our nation.   

   Glen Beck has been developing material to show all the ties that Soros has through the nation and world along with his goals.  This article is written by Steve Kroft from "60 Minutes".  It begins to piece together the rise of Obama and his behavior in leading the nation along with many members of Congress (in particular the Democrats, such as the election of Pelosi as the minority leader in Congress).

   If you have wondered where Obama came from and just how he quickly moved from obscurity to President, or why the media is "selective" in what we are told, here is the man who most probably put him there and is responsible.  He controls President Obama's every move. Think this is absurd?  Invest a few minutes and read this. You won't regret it. Who is Obama?  Obama is a puppet and here is the explanation of the man or demon that pulls his strings. Its not by chance that Obama can manipulate the world. After reading this and Obama's reluctance to accept help on the oil spill you wonder if the spill is part of the plan to destroy the US?  

"In history, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet someone planned it." ~ Franklin Roosevelt

Who Is George Soros?  He brought the market down in 2 days.  Here is what CBS' Mr. Steve Kroft's research has turned up.  It's a bit of a read, and it took 4 months to put it together.  "The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States of America."  ~ George Soros" 

   George Soros is an evil man.  He's anti-God, anti-family, anti-American, and anti-good."  He killed and robbed his own Jewish people.  What we have in Soros, is a multi-billionaire atheist, with skewed moral values, and a sociopath's lack of conscience.  He considers himself to be an elitist world class philosopher, despises the American way, and just loves to do social engineering and change cultures.

   GyÃrgy Schwartz, better known to the world as George Soros, was born August 12, 1930 in Hungary.  Soros' father, Tivadar, was a fervent practitioner of the Esperanto language invented in 1887, and designed to be the first global language, free of any national identity.  The Schwartz's, who were non-practicing Jews, changed the family name to Soros, in order to facilitate assimilation into the Gentile population, as the Nazis spread into Hungary during the 1930s. When Hitler's henchman, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary, to oversee the murder of that country's Jews, George Soros ended up with a man whose job was confiscating property from the Jewish population.  Soros went with him on his rounds . Soros has repeatedly called 1944 "the best year of his life."  70% of Mr. Soros's fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year , yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect.

   During an interview with "Sixty Minute's" Steve Kroft, Soros was asked about his "best year."  

KROFT:  My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson. 

SOROS:  Yes.  Yes.

KROFT:  Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from your fellow Jews, friends and neighbors. 

SOROS:  Yes.  That's right.  Yes.

KROFT:  I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many, years. Was it difficult?

SOROS:  No, not at all.  Not at all, I rather enjoyed it.

KROFT:  No feelings of guilt?

SOROS:  No, only feelings of absolute power.

    In his article, Muravchik describes how Soros has admitted to having carried some rather "potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble."  Be that as it may. After WWII, Soros attended the London School of Economics, where he fell under the thrall of fellow atheist and Hungarian, Karl Popper, one of his professors. Popper was a mentor to Soros until Popper's death in 1994.  Two of Popper's most influential teachings concerned "the open society," and Fallibilism. Fallibilism is the philosophical doctrine that all claims of knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. (Then again, I could be wrong about that. :-) )  The "open society" basically refers to a "test and evaluate" approach to social engineering.  Regarding "open society" Roy Childs writes, "Since the Second World War, most of the Western democracies have followed Popper's advice about piecemeal social engineering and democratic social reform, and it has gotten them into a grand mess."

    In 1956 Soros moved to New York City, where he worked on Wall Street, and started amassing his fortune. He specialized in hedge funds and currency speculation.  Soros is absolutely ruthless, amoral, and clever in his business dealings, and quickly made his fortune.  By the 1980s he was well on his way to becoming the global powerhouse that he is today.

   In an article Kyle-Anne Shiver wrote for "The American Thinker" she says, "Soros made his first billion in 1992 by shorting the British pound with leveraged billions in financial bets, and became known as the man who broke the Bank of England.  He broke it on the backs of hard-working British citizens who immediately saw their homes severely devalued and their life savings cut drastically, almost overnight."

   In 1994 Soros crowed in "The New Republic," that "the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire."  The Russia-gate scandal in 1999, which almost collapsed the Russian economy, was labeled by Rep. Jim Leach, then head of the House Banking Committee, to be "one of the greatest social robberies in human history. "The "Soros Empire" indeed. 

   In 1997 Soros almost destroyed the economies of Thailand and Malaysia. At the time, Malaysia's Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammad, called Soros "a villain, and a moron."  Thai activist Weng Tojirakarn said, "We regard George Soros as a kind of Dracula.  He sucks the blood from the people."

   The website Greek National Pride reports, "Soros was part of the full court press that dismantled Yugoslavia and caused trouble in Georgia, Ukraine and Myanmar [Burma].  Calling himself a philanthropist, Soros' role is to tighten the ideological stranglehold of globalization and the New World Order while promoting his own financial gain.  He is without conscience; a capitalist who functions with absolute amorality."

   France has upheld an earlier conviction against Soros, for felony insider trading.  Soros was fined 2.9 million dollars.  Recently, his native Hungary fined Soros 2.2 million dollars for "illegal market manipulation." Elizabeth Crum writes that the Hungarian economy has been in a state of transition as the country seeks to become more financially stable and westernized.  Soros deliberately driving down the share price of its largest bank put Hungary's economy into a wicked tailspin, one from which it is still trying to recover.

   My point here is that Soros is a planetary parasite.  His grasp, greed, and gluttony have a global reach. But what about America?  Soros told Australia's national newspaper "The Australian."  "America, as the center of the globalised financial markets, was sucking up the savings of the world.  This is now over.  "The game is out," he said, adding that the time has come for "a very serious adjustment" in American's consumption habits. He implied that he was the one with the power to bring this about."

Soros:  "World financial crisis was "stimulating" and "in a way, the culmination of my life's work." 

    Obama has recently promised 10 billion of our tax dollars to Brazil, in order to give them a leg-up in expanding their offshore oil fields.  Obama's largesse towards Brazil came shortly after his political financial backer, George Soros, invested heavily in Brazilian oil (Petrobras). Tait Trussel writes, "The Petrobras loan may be a windfall for Soros and Brazil, but it is a bad deal for the U.S.  The American Petroleum Institute estimates that oil exploration in the U S could create 160,000 new, well-paying jobs, as well as $1.7 trillion in revenues to federal, state, and local governments, all while fostering greater energy security and independence." 

   A blog you might want to keep an eye on is SorosWatch.com.  Their mission:  "This blog is dedicated to all who have suffered due to the ruthless financial pursuits of George Soros.  Your stories are many and varied, but the theme is the same:  the destructive power of greed without conscience.  We pledge to tirelessly watch Soros wherever he goes and to print the truth in the hope that he will one day be made to stop preying upon the world's poor, that justice will be served." 

   Back to America.  Soros has been actively working to destroy America from the inside out for some years now. People have been warning us.  Two years ago, news sources reported that "Soros [is] an extremist who wants open borders, a one-world foreign policy, legalized drugs, euthanasia, and on and on.  This is off-the-chart dangerous.  In 1997 Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote, "Soros uses his philanthropy to change or more accurately deconstruct the moral values and attitudes of the Western world, and particularly of the American people". His "open society" is not about freedom; it is about license.  His vision rejects the notion of ordered liberty, in favor of a PROGRESSIVE ideology of rights and entitlements.

    Perhaps the most important of these "whistle blowers" are David Horowitz and Richard Poe. Their book, "The Shadow Party", outlines in detail how Soros hijacked the Democratic Party, and now owns it lock, stock, and barrel. Soros has been packing the Democratic Party with radicals, and ousting moderate Democrats for years. The Shadow Party became the Shadow Government, which recently became the Obama Administration. Discover The Networks.org (another good source) writes, "By his [Soros'] own admission, he helped engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, Georgia, and Yugoslavia.  When Soros targets a country for "regime change," he begins by creating a shadow government, a fully formed government-in-exile, ready to assume power when the opportunity arises. The Shadow Party he has built in America greatly resembles those he has created in other countries prior to instigating a coup."

   November 2008 edition of the German magazine, "Der Spiegel," in which Soros gives his opinion on what the next POTUS (President of the U. S.) should do after taking office.  "I think we need a large stimulus package."  Soros thought that around 600 billion would be about right.  Soros also said that "I think Obama presents us a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence. The U.S. needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights." Although Soros doesn't (yet) own the Republican Party, like he does the Democrats, make no mistake, his tentacles are spread throughout the Republican Party as well. Soros is a partner in the Carlyle Group where he has invested more than 100 million dollars. According to an article by "The Baltimore Chronicle's" Alice Cherbonnier, the Carlyle Group is run by "a veritable who's who of former Republican leaders," from CIA man, Frank Carlucci, to CIA head and

ex-President George Bush, Sr. In late 2006, Soros bought about 2 million shares of Halliburton, Dick Cheney's old stomping grounds.  When the Democrats and Republicans held their conventions in 2000, Soros held Shadow Party conventions in the same cities, at the same time.  In 2008, Soros donated $5,000,000,000 (that's Five Billion) to the Democratic National Committee, DNC, to insure Obama's win and wins for many other Alinsky trained Radical Rules Anti-American Socialist.  George has been contributing a billion plus to the DNC since Clinton came on the scene. 

    Soros has dirtied both sides of the aisle, trust me. And if that weren't bad enough, he has long held connections with the CIA.  And I mustn't forget to mention Soros' involvement with the MSM (Main Stream Media), the entertainment industry (e.g. he owns 2.6 million shares of Time Warner), and the various political advertising organizations he funnels millions to.  In short, George Soros controls or influences most of the MSM.  Little wonder they ignore the TEA PARTY, Soros' NEMESIS. As Matthew Vadum writes,  "The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives." Richard Poe writes, "Soros' private philanthropy, totaling nearly $5 billion, continues undermining America's traditional Western values. His giving has provided funding of abortion rights, atheism, drug legalization, sex education, euthanasia, feminism, gun control, globalization, mass immigration, gay marriage and other radical experiments in social engineering." Some of the many NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) that Soros funds with his billions are: MoveOn.org, the Apollo Alliance, Media Matters for America, the Tides Foundation, the ACLU, ACORN, PDIA (Project on Death In America), La Raza, and many more.  For a more complete list, with brief descriptions of the NGOs, go to DiscoverTheNetworks.org. Poe continues, "Through his global web of Open Society Institutes and Open Society Foundations, Soros has spent 25 years recruiting, training, indoctrinating and installing a network of loyal operatives in 50 countries, placing them in positions of influence and power in media, government, finance and academia."

    Without Soros' money, would the Saul Alinsky's Chicago machine still be rolling?  Would SEIU, ACORN, and La Raza still be pursuing their nefarious activities?  Would big money and lobbyists still be corrupting government?  Would our college campuses still be retirement homes for 1960s radicals? America stands at the brink of an abyss, and that fact is directly attributable to Soros. Soros has vigorously, cleverly, and insidiously planned the ruination of America and his puppet, Barack Obama is leading the way.

    The words of Patrick Henry are apropos:  "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the

price of chains and slavery?  Forbid it, Almighty God!  I know not what course others may take, but as for me,

give me liberty, or give me death!" 

            Above information researched by CBS' Steve Kroft

I was on my morning walk between 7:00 and 8:30 this AM and some things caught my eye, that I just had to photograph. I love living in Tucson, although it's not everyone's cup of tea ... I have loved Arizona the entire 46 years that I have lived here.

 ♥ ♥ ♥

This guy must have "2" favorite NFL teams ... 
AZ Cardinals license plate and Redskins plate holder

I loved this bumper sticker

This is our apartment complex

Notice we still have monkey bars for the kids to play on ... and they love them, like we did!

All praise to Fred !!!

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Fred Reed  ... down in Mexico

Once upon a time there was a fairy kingdom that lived inside a place called The Beltway, and was surrounded on all four sides by a land called America. The Beltway was aligned with another kingdom called Manhattan, inhabited by disembodied heads that spoke from the walls of bars, and with yet another closed kingdom called Hollywood, the abode of  half-educated narcissists. These kingdoms were in eternal political synergy, and spoke not with the people of the surrounding lands, of whom they knew nothing. The following is a chronicle of what befell them, and why.

After years of peace, the Kingdoms were taken greatly aback by the rise of the Trump Monster, their surprise being proof that they knew nothing of the surrounding lands. They knew nothing for good reasons, of which there were two. The first was that they passed their lives with each other and among each other and talking to each other and writing about each other and reading about each other behind the high walls of their kingdoms. In organs like National Review and The Weekly Standard they endlessly wrote stories of the form “A soothsayer in Manhattan replies to what some other sayer of sooths said about yet another’s  attack on someone else.”

They had all dwelt in monasteries called Harvard and Princeton, where they learned that they were the wisest of men, and inerrant. They had no idea that they were hated in the strange lands without the walls, which on their maps were drawn as fog with notations such as “Here dwelleth dragons.” They did not know that there were people who agreed not with them. For were they not right about all things?

The other reason for their puzzlement was a powerful spell called “Political Correctness.” This strong magic prevented the outlanders from saying anything that the Three Kingdoms did not want to hear. Anyone who engaged incantations called “slurs,” which were truthful thoughts about sacred tribes, or who said Inappropriate Things about a certain little country whose only importance was being that little country, was thrown into durance vile. Thus the Three Kingdoms never heard anything they didn’t like, and so believed that almost everyone without the walls loved them. They had scarce an idea what furies were roiling and boiling and stirring under the surface of the Outer Realms.

Now, until the Trump Monster appeared, the America was ruled by a pseudo-democracy of one bicephalous party with two names. The Only Party consisted of blackguards and Quislings and pickpockets bought and paid for by the plutocratic oligarchy of large corporations, AIPAC,  and the. very rich. These told the two halves of the One Party what to do. Every four years there was played  a great tournament in which candidates of the Two Names of the One Party engaged in the most savage combat imaginable.  This was to distract the people outside the walls . Afterwards nothing changed and all went on as before, though the division of the spoils shifted a bit.

And in their ignorance and pride the Three Kingdoms engendered a monster called Trump, and it bit them.

The Only Party had always controlled the villains because it controlled the choice of pretenders to the throne. A pretender gained the Presidency by buying it, and the rich who provided that money controlled as vassals those who accepted it. The pretenders were as straw and melons sold in a market.

Furthermore, the scribes and oracles of the Kingdoms said aloud only those things that were meet for the surrounding peasantry to hear.  The puissant spell of Political Correctness amounted to a societal mute button and prevented the Holy Orders within the Three Kingdoms from  noticing what stirred without.

Until the Trump Monster came raging, slouching toward Bethlehem, with which the Kingdoms confused themselves.

And there was a fright and desperation and rending of teeth and gnashing of hair  for many were the rice bowls threatened.

The darkest of horrors was that the serfs  might come to choose the manner of their government. For long years the Bicephalous Party had presided over that most desirable form of democracy in which the people had no power. This laudable state they had maintained by never talking about anything of substance, such as unending wars in remote lands beyond the edges of the maps, or the importation of slaves from curious and unwholesome countries or the manufactures of all things by foreign dwarves.

A great broil ensured. The people saw for the first time a chance to manage their destinies and rose up for the Trump Monster.  Inside the Beltway, the Wise and Good–for did they not so denominate themselves?–were greatly astonished. “What manner of vileness can this be?” they asked in wonder. They said that the Trump Monster was beguiling fools, the cracked, and those who represented the worst in America. And the scribes and oracles were sore afraid, for most of the outlying populace appeared to belong to these tribes.

One of the Two Names of the One Party, the Democrats, sent forth a dreadful creature called Hillary to fight in single combat with the Trump Monster. Her very visage turned men to stone, it was said. She was held to be of one blood with Boadicea, Jean d’Arc, Lucretia Borgia, and Bonnie Parker.

The Three Kingdoms were at one with her, as she was corrupt, mendacious, criminal, and ugly, as well as suffering coughing fits and dizzy spells. Surely, said the scribes and oracles, any monster must fly screaming from her mere presence.

Yet it seemed that the Trump was no common monster. Every time he was beset by the scribes and oracles of the Beltway, he grew stronger, and a sulfurous smoke breathed from his mouth. With drawn swords the Trump Monster and the crumbling ruin of Hillary circled each other.

And beyond the parapets and crenelations of the Three Kingdoms the sky grew darker. Inside the Beltway and in Manhattan, the disembodied heads railed and raged, but with every blast the helots jointed the Trump Monster in larger numbers, for they hated the Insiders. In Hollywood the Half-Educated Narcissists said ever stupider things, but these had not their usual effect.

In their pride the Three Kingdoms had engendered Nemesis, and they watched in terror behind the ramparts as the sky grew darker and strange shapes twisted in the looming clouds and the Trump Monster strode ever nearer, breathing fire.

For those who are interested, I have stopped the "Sunday Letters" and have started re-posting to my BLOG ... which has been dormant almost two years. I have, as you all know "furor scribendi" ... a rage to write ... and I hope the muse returns since I am doing it this way, instead of my semi-regular letters. I still get to write my thoughts, but I no longer clutter up your in-box. PEACE !!

Just thinkin'

   I was reading the obituaries today (as I do daily) and thought to myself "I don't know any of these people". I don't know why I think I should ... in a metro area of over a million people ... other than, I lived in a town of 2000 for over 20 years where everyone knew everyone (just about). My mind runs in funny directions at times.
   I have resigned my Chaplain position with VFW Post 549, as I have difficulty making time for the Saturday meetings because of duties here at our Casita with Hilda and associated stuff. I will really miss the position, but hopefully I can return to some sort of action with the Post in the future.
    I am trying to get some household chores done today. Already finished the laundry (3 loads) and visited the grocery store, readied the meat for tonight's dinner, etc. Tomorrow is my "Poker" morning, Thursday I take her for a haircut and Friday is a work day.
    I am constantly amazed at what drivers on our streets do and what else they attempt besides driving. It is getting where nothing they do startles me ... I am getting jaded at their capacity for stupidity and lack of concern for any other living beings. And the pedestrians are as bad as the drivers, just not as mobile or as large. 
   I am still studying (various things) as time permits. I am in the middle of three rather large books at the present time, History / Politics / Religion ... strange bedfellows huh? I just finished my second U.S. Constitution course on line with a 92.7%. Not bad for an old fart with fast approaching Alzheimers. 
  My doctor says my A1C (diabetes sugar level) is highly elevated so I have to cut back on sweet stuff and carbohydrates. No Problem ... right? The items that are high in carbohydrates are beer and bread. I LIVE on bread (Bagels, English Muffins, toast, et al).
 

Sunday mornings are my time for thinking, and playing on the computer, studying and other 'alone' activities. I had written something down (probably years ago) that someone had written and I was re-reading it and thought that I would post it.
The Rules for Being Human 
1. You will receive a body: You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire time you are around.
2. You Will Learn Lessons: You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called life. Each day in this school, you will receive the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or you may think them irrelevant or stupid.
3. There are NO mistakes, only Lessons: Growth is a process of trial and error ... experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work". 
4. A lesson is repeated until learned: A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it ... then you may go on to the next lesson. 
5. Learning lessons DOES NOT end: There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are still alive ... there are lessons to be learned.
6. "THERE" is no better than "HERE": When your there becomes a here, you will simply obtain another 'There' ... that will again ... look better than "Here".
7. Others are merely a mirror of you: You cannot hate or love anything about another person unless it reflects to you something that you love or hate about yourself. 8. What you make of life is up to you: You have all the tools and resources that you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours. The answers lie within you. All you need to do is ... Look ... Listen ... and Trust.
9. You will forget all of this: Unless you stay focused on the goals you have set for yourself, everything you have just read won't mean a thing. 

 Especially for 'my son' Sam Adams, all my other kids, Lee Ann ... and for ME!!

I have never had strong views about human evolution. But in recent years, I got a chance to look at hundreds of articles making claims for it. A summary of what I learned might be useful:

1. Real (and imagined) "human evolution" is now so integral to our culture that demand outpaces authenticity. The disappointing history of Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, and Ardi, all hailed in 2001 as human ancestors, attests to the frustrating search for missing links." Sediba, another supposed ancestor, fared no better in 2013. A science writer at ‘Wired‘, not known for intelligent-design sympathies, derides the ceaseless buzz as "ancestor worship." One outcome is that many "separate species of human ancestors" may never have really existed and "may now have to be wiped from the textbooks."
2. There are signals in the noise! As it happens, they are not the signals many hoped to receive. The half human creature we were originally seeking continues to elude us. From surprisingly early periods, we encounter special respect for the dead and a sense of the divine, along with familiar artifacts and organized activities.
3. Early human religion seems like a 747 built in the basement with an X-Acto knife. No one predicted anything like the Gobekli Tepe find in Turkey: It consists of about twenty stone wall circles (only a few of which have been excavated). Two megaliths face each other in the middle of each ring. The rings are also surrounded by huge, T-shaped stone pillars, some adorned with carvings of dangerous animals. The tallest pillars are about 16 feet and probably weigh seven to ten tons. All of this is done with Stone Age techniques. No one knows for sure what prompted this enormous sacrifice of piety because, of course, no documents survive from nearly 12,000 years ago. Some think that the dramatic appearance of the star Sirius near the moon caused people to wonder. For sure, no animals wondered much or for long.
4. The field is infested with competing trivial explanations. Barbara J. King explains at NPR that human religiosity was primed by the meaning-making, imagination, empathy and rule-following of other primates (primates with whom we shared a common ancestor in the past, or those common ancestors themselves). Other primates never built anything like Gobekli Tepe (or even a village shrine). But such events must nonetheless somehow be accounted for by our kinship with them? In other recent accounts, we are also told that human behavior stems from lower testosterone levels 50,000 years ago. So why did such a fall in hormone levels (by accident, we are expected to suppose) never lead to great achievements in any of the many other thousands of life forms? In yet another account, telling stories makes us human. If what makes us human is simply a description of some things humans can do, we are not looking at an informative explanation.
5. No one seems to want to confront the obvious difficulty: If chimpanzee behavior was any use in understanding human attainments, why did those attainments never happen for chimpanzees? No one wants to accept the obvious fact that humans are different. On top of that, the claim that humans are chimp-pig hybrids has been taken seriously. No, this isn't a feminist denunciation that men are pigs. It is a literal but impossible claim. But it is still "science," according to naturalism.
6. There is also a constant need for different human species that died out, leaving only ourselves, evidence for which would support Darwinian theory. "Flores Man" is an example. Supposedly, a new diminutive species of humans (discovered in 2004) arose, flourished, and died out from earlier than 18,000 years ago: To get a sense of the breadth of positions in the controversy, see "Is the Hobbit's Brain Unfeasibly Small ?" (maybe not); "Compelling Evidence Demonstrates that 'Hobbit' Fossil Does Not Represent a New Species of Hominid"; "Researchers offer alternate theory for found skull's asymmetry" (malformed individual); "'Hobbit' Was an Iodine-Deficient Human, Not Another Species, New Study Suggests." The latest article I'm aware of charges that "Homo floresiensis" is an invalid species classification, and the principal skeleton may have been of a woman who suffered from a genetic disorder, Down syndrome. It hardly sounds like settled science to an observer.
7. The original "new species" was the "not-quite-modern-human" Neanderthal (first noted in 1856). The accepted Darwinian interpretation of humanity requires a long, slow transition from a rodent-like primate to us. No one has observed anything of the kind happening. But, fortunately, Neanderthals weren't around as a distinct people group to complain about what was said about them … so for many decades, they stood in for the not-quite-moderns. Current humans have some Neanderthal genes and it is unclear that the group lived differently from the rest of ancient mankind. So any decisions about them are bound to be political or theological at this point. Commenting on a dispute over a supposed human ancestor, Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Richard Potts told the Wall Street Journal, "Evolution is wonderfully messy." Few would dispute it, but a multitude of conflicting speculations does not add up to progress. Maybe that is too challenging a way to put the question. How about, it comes down to what we can responsibly believe. More to the point, who are we? One thing's for sure: There is no reason, based on any of the above, to abandon a typical traditional religious or

philosophical teaching on the origin, let alone the honor and dignity, of human beings. If anything, the sheer vacuity of claims made on behalf of "modern science" (not, in this case, to be confused with actual science) suggests the opposite.