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The other day Cynthia Tucker wrote a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution titled “Evolution a vital study; that’s a fact.” It was not really any different than hundreds of others that are churned out everyday. Her main points are that Georgia’s children will stay in the “education cellar” if a disclaimer sticker is placed on text books which teach evolution and that many scientific theories are accepted as implicit facts. She gives gravity as an example.

As is typical of such works, her implications are more insulting and ridiculous than what she actually writes. Although she stops short of calling “creationists” and “biblical literalists” ignorant, stupid, uneducated and without intellectual merit, the implication is unmistakable. While not saying it, her view that evolution is the one and only scientific theory which call never be questioned and that anyone who wishes to have an open debate about it are religious fanatics and dumb country bumpkins, it is still very clear.

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[From Dec 2004]

To those who feel it was a mistake to invade Iraq: you have failed to learn a very important lessen in logic. As a teaching tool, let me tell you how my daughter learned this lesson.

As a new sixteen year old driver, she was parking in a shopping center parking lot. The space she decided to park in was an angle type and it was angled in the other direction. As she started entering the space, my niece, who was setting in the front passenger side, said she didn’t think they could make it. Well, my daughter thought she could. She kept going. When she felt the car stop and saw the white Toyota in front of her rock, she knew she had been wrong.

The lesson in logic she learned that day, and the one I hope my disgruntle countryman will soon learn, is that the consequences of being wrong is a factor of paramount importance in any decision. What was my daughter’s down side. If she was wrong but continued on her course, she would cause an accident, damage property and possible cause injury, a relatively catastrophic loss. If she was right and could have made it, but stopped anyway, she would have to stop and back up, a relatively small loss.

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By Alec Russell in Salt Lake City
(Filed: 10/02/2006)

When Reed Smoot arrived in Washington as a newly elected Utah senator a little over a century ago, he was left in no doubt what America thought of Mormons assuming positions of federal power.

"Perhaps it may be for the best that the Mormons should send an apostle to Washington," opined Harper's Weekly. "It stimulates the public disgust. They have thriven on ignorance, obscurity and sensuality. Attention of decent enlightened people is the last thing that will profit them."

And that was among the more open-minded commentaries. For the next four years, from 1903 to 1907, Smoot was treated as little better than a one-man freak show as enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints subjected him to thousands of hours of hearings to deny him his seat.

The church is recalling the saga with trepidation as one member, Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, prepares for a serious tilt at the White House in 2008.

"The Smoot hearings were a watershed event in our relations with the United States and the world," said Dallin Oaks, one of the 12 apostles who counsel the prophet, the Mormon equivalent of the Pope.

"If Romney should be the [Republican] nominee, the church will be in a position in the media that it has not been in since the Smoot hearings. You couldn't read a newspaper for four or five years without reading about Mormons during the Smoot hearings.

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We fund terrorist every time we turn the key

By John R. Taylor

You have heard all those who want to mind everybody else’s business scream about your SUV. How you should feel guilty about driving one because you are aiding terrorist and destroying the environment. Well maybe you are, but isn’t it going a bit far when we don’t have even the freedom to choose what we drive? If are willing to pay $50 for a tank of fuel that will take you 200 miles, I think you should have that right. I like paying $16 for a tank that will take me 400 miles better; of course I’d like it better were it four or five dollars.

The problem is that we should be able to drive what we want and can afford, and not dirty up all our air, and help those who wish us dead. And we can. We may not do it, but it is completely in our power to do it. What we all together must realize is that it is not so important what we pour our fuel into, but rather what the fuel is we are putting in it. The gasoline we now use is distilled from petroleum crude oil, a resource we have in great supply, but not nearly so great as our colossal appetite for it. Because we can’t supply it domestically we have no choice but to import it. The United Kingdom has a vast North Sea reserve and we import enormous quantities form them. This adds to our trade deficit and is therefore damaging to our economy, however the UK is our ally and doing business with them is much more favorable than doing business with counties and peoples who are trying to destroy us. But we require so much oil that we must get it from everywhere. OPEC, the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries, is a cartel of mostly Middle Eastern countries; Venezuela being the notable exception. That their anti-competitive practice of suppliers banning together to control the price of a commodity is unethical and would be illegal in this country, should be enough for us not to trade with them to say nothing of the fact that of every dollar we Americans spend on their oil much of it goes to sponsor terrorism and acts of violence against us and our allies. We are most literally trading with the enemy. The attacks of 9/11 were funded by American dollars paid to Saudi Arabia for oil.

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By John R. Taylor

Watching my children raise their families, I have noticed that they carry their children to the doctor much more frequently than I did them. And as I think back, my parents used physicians much less than even I did. Now I, in no way, am implying or suggesting that my children use doctors too much or that my parents use them too little. But this has made me think about my childhood, and how things were way back then.

Growing up I was cursed with chronic lesions or boils. The things old folks back then called risens. More often than not, I had one of these painful and embarrassing sores someplace on my body. Daddy took me to the doctor a time or two about them, but all we ever got from him was a bill, so Daddy and Mama treated me themselves.

Mama’s idea about the cause of my affliction was that I had poison in my system and it needed to come out. I just needed a “good working”. Her approach to getting it out was straight forward enough. She give me large doses of an archaic laxative called Syrup of Black Drouph; I, nor my computer can spell it, and it may have been drought, or something else, but this black, sweet tasting liquid had an effect I remember all too well. I think this stuff must have been invented back during the Spanish Inquisition for torturing heretics. I have read about some of the instruments used for that purpose and this tonic would have fit right in.

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The Names Have Been Left the Same
by John R. Taylor

You often read stories or see movies that tell you the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Well this story has no innocents. I know all the characters and they are none of them even close to innocent. Now I am telling this tail for the truth, though I can’t really testify that I actually remember the events themselves, but I do remember telling the story many times. In the telling over the years some of the facts have gotten fuzzy around the edges and some more have been completely lost, and I think maybe I have made up a few to take their place.

             My yarn I have for you is from a time long ago, a time some say was ignorant, intolerant and backward, but I remember as good, clean and peaceful. It was a time when young children and teens said “yes Sir and no Mam,” to their elders.

It was a time when not every family had a television and those who did had only one and usually got only one channel. The programs were of the type, The Andy Griffin Show, Bonanza and the Wonderful World of Color. Genie was the raciest thing on. Right and wrong were black and white and not shades of gray. Summers were long and hot and we children could not fathom the meaning of the word bored. Our imaginations were boundless as we were kings, knights, cowboys, Indians and superheros. The magical phrase, pretend like, instantly transformed us into whatever or whoever our young minds could conceive. A scrawny twelve year old boy could become an Indian chief. An old abandon tobacco harvester became a Martian spaceship. We had used the phrase so often we shortened it to one word, “tenlike”, although we never noticed that we had. “Tenlike you’re a cowboy and that stick is your gun.” Poof! I was a dashing and daring cowboy and a stick from a pecan tree was a Colt Peacemaker.

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