Saturday, February 18, 2006

T-Rex Soft Tissue and Academic Correctness



"I always remember that from the Wanderer (a conservative Catholic rag) articles on virtually any topic: pick some really extreme, marginal enemy on the other side, and pretend that he is the mainstream that you're fighting. It's intellectually dishonest."

This really made me guffaw. When the mainstream is devolving under multiple leftist assaults any target is a good target. But honestly this isn't even close to being the issue because the Wanderer isn't even really a newspaper. It is a propaganda organ and all organs of propaganda look at only what they want to look at and spout what they want. None of us take the Wanderer seriously.

The left practices a far more insidious tactic and that is to ignore anything that they collectively and instinctually sense that they don't want to become mainstream or to get into the public mainstream. Their sense of smell is keen. They can smell the hindquarters of the right at one hundred paces and they recoil with a million self deceptive tactics. The same might be said of the right in all fairness. We can smell the shit of the left at 100 paces and in radically polarized forums people simply react, they do not debate

The left is largely responsible for creating the highly polarized atmosphere it finds itself in now. I remember watching a demonstration in the early 1980s of radically conservative rabbis in Washington DC who were all over the Capitol steps with banners and signs condemning the state of Israel. Film crews filmed everything continuously. Did it make the evening news in Washington DC? Not a peep; and why? Because the "establishment" did not want this in the news. In their consummate arrogance "they" decided it was not mainstream news. The same rotten attitude is found in coverage of the Right to Life Marches. If 25,000 perverts demonstrate it is national news worthy of all appropriate means of editorial amplification. When 50,000 conservatives demonstrate it is not considered newsworthy, is de-emphasized and its priority in print is degraded. This is not only unfair to the public, it is simply dishonest, and intellectually and morally disgraceful.

Now the right is doing the same thing--over reporting what it likes and underreporting what it does not like. I like Fox News but it is guilty of this same tactic. This endless editorializing of the news and spinning of scientific and academic data to fit established theories or pet social projects is enough to make you gag.

So, when I express incredulity that scientists express mere "surprise" at finding intact soft T Rex tissue, it is not because I have an agenda to prove. I don't care whether the earth is 6 billion years old or only several hundred thousand. What I am reacting to is the smell of self deception, of AC (academically correct thinking) the blanking out of the obvious. I do not need a degree in Paleobiology to ascertain that the probability of finding intact soft tissue in a 70 million year old fossil is near zero. So the question remains. How the heck can there be soft tissue in something this old? This is something scientists should be jumping up and down about with excitement. Not because it proves anything but because it simply is what it is.

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