It could be on any desk in any country.

My two dogs had minor operations today. Both are doing fine and have just eaten heartily. I don’t mind the vet’s bill, but 20% VAT on top? It seems rather callous of the Government to penalise us like this when we want to get our pets well again.

Surely paying VAT on their food is tax enough?

VAT was 8% in the 1970s, then went up to 15%, then 17½% and now it’s 20%. Not only that, but the product range widened to include restaurant meals, takeaway food, confectionery, pet food, etc.

Now there are extra taxes on flights, insurance premiums, utility bills… it goes on and on, and all these are taxes on already taxed income!

And I dread to think what ridiculous lengths politicians will go to with their “green” taxes.

When does enough become enough?

————————-

So, how much is that doggy in the window?

Dogs are often bought for children and valued by the elderly and lonely, but don't expect the government not to fleece you any way it can.

Cost of puppy: £600

Cost of lifetime’s food @ £1 per day: £5,113

Cost of vet’s bills (vaccinations; estimated other): £800

The VAT element (@the 20% rate) of the total is £1,085.50.

And I haven’t included the cost of toys, kennels and grooming, which are at least a more legitimate target for VAT, if we must have it.

But no wonder the dog licence was stopped. The small amount wasn’t worth collecting. This VAT racket is in a different league.

Would it be inappropriate to call it organised crime? Well, we seem to have the Mafia running things.

But I digress. I bent down to reap the brown harvest and my fingers poked through the bag. Either my digits just stopped short of the prize, or just touched it and no more. I wasn’t sure and didn’t do the obvious test, I just took out another bag and, in almost gale force winds, managed to pick up the other bag and the booty.

You might be wondering how the sore knees came about. Well, I had been standing in the gutter to pick up Muffin’s pavement art and I stood up, took a few steps and tripped on the kerb. I was felled like a great oak. Time seemed to go slower than usual. Slow enough to prepare for the inevitable crash landing by letting go of the dogs’ leads and spreading my hands to cushion my landing. It is handy how time slows down. On my way down I also had time to recite a couple of Shakespearean sonnets and say “it’s a lovely evening” to a passing stranger. My final thought before hitting the ground was that I hope my specks don’t get broken, as I hate going to the opticians.

As I lay motionless on the ground, Muffin came over to lick my face while I carried out an initial damage assessment. Knees: both sore. Hands: not bad. Glasses: intact. I was wondering if I had landed on a jobby, but on getting to my feet, I realised that I hadn’t.

So, as I sit here now with slightly sore knees, I think about how much worse it could have been. Even now, I could have been crawling home with broken bones, squinting through cracked glasses and covered in poo.

Life could be a lot worse, so don’t let it get you down.

NASA’s original press release on 29th November didn’t give any hint of what they had discovered,

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

But this was enough to induce extreme excitement in some quarters, and led to such speculation as Did NASA discover life on one of Saturn’s Moons?

Not exactly! They found a strain of bacteria which can metabolise arsenic and incorporate it in their DNA.

A good trick if you can do it, but we already know what amazing conditions life can survive in on earth.

People need a paradigm shift here. I speak as a Creationist, of course, but I believe there are dangerous misunderstandings which surround evolution. I don’t think “life” can occur as readily as many people have been led to believe.

There is a Law of Biogenesis which states that, “life arises from pre-existing life, not from non-living material”.

To believe contrary to Louis Pasteur’s Law is hardly a new idea, “The ancient Greeks believed that living things could spontaneously come into being from nonliving matter, and that the goddess Gaia could make life arise spontaneously from stones…”

This is especially interesting as we are again living in an age where Gaia worship is widely practised, this time in the form of devout environmentalism.

But I suspect that NASA will keep putting out “alien” stories, especially in times where money is tight, to keep the government funding coming through.

And it is vital to keep up the pretence if a government ever stages an “alien” invasion as a pretext to removing the remaining freedoms even the bin Laden fearmongering couldn’t reach.

Who could argue with Creation Ministries’ conclusions?

This whole episode seems like it was a well-orchestrated publicity stunt by NASA to get some attention for itself. While this find is a very important discovery about biology, it’s an important discovery about earth biology at its functional limits. Most biologists won’t abandon a single common ancestor for life based on this find because this is a modification of known biology that operates at suboptimal levels. A better analogy would be so-called “superbugs”, which are deadly in a hospital environment full of antibiotics, but can’t compete with their respective wild types outside of the hospital. This find hasn’t even served to uncover a completely different biology to what we know on earth, much less provide evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life.

From this philosophy, developed by Scottish amateur geologist, James Hutton, assumptions about the earth’s past are made – that is, assumptions based on a philosophy and not on scientific evidence.

For example, when a modern geologist sees a massive canyon with a tiny river running through it, he assumes that this tiny river carved out the canyon, and of course, that would have taken millions of years. This assumption is based on a particular philosophy which has become the predominant one and so the assumptions are taken as facts. They aren’t facts, they are assumptions, based on the philosophy that “the present is the key to the past”.

By believing in uniformitarianism, the scientist is presented with a big problem. He has to make the evidence fit the philosophy. So, a tiny river must have carved out the Grand Canyon; mountain ranges must have developed over millions of years by tiny, gradual movements of the earth’s crust.

Evolution Theory came along shortly afterwards. When scientists (natural philosophers) knew that evolution was a fact, they had to fit it into their philosophy of long ages and belief that “the present is the key to the past”

We all know that creatures evolve. A mutation in a bug can produce a resistance to insecticide. With billions of insects, one such mutation is possible; indeed can be expected. Natural selection means that most of the planet has life present, but this is due to fairly simple differences, for example, animals with longer fur survive in colder climates and wingless beetles survive on windy islands, where their now extinct winged predecessors were being blown out to sea. When a really big change occurs, such as a beetle loses its wings, it is still due to a very minor genetic change. The information that says “make wings” stopped working. All the information for wings is still in the beetle’s DNA, so that, if some time in the future these wingless beetles were seen to have sprouted wings, it is only because a mutation caused the gene to be switched on again. No amazing, very gradual, process has happened over millions of years to produce these complex wings. The information was there all along. Just like with the blind cavefish that can see again “after millions of years” when the gene pool is improved with blind cavefish from a separate population.

This is the vital information I wish to relay: that these scientists gave evolution abilities which it does not have. They had to in order to fit evolution into their philosophy. The mistakes were compounded. People were further separated from the truth. The layman became blinded by millions and billions of years and therefore believed that anything is possible given a vast amount of time.

It is, of course, theoretically possible, but so are lots of things, like drawing out all four aces from a thousand decks of cards consecutively. It’s never going to happen, though. The life we see around us is far too complex to have developed by random mutations and natural selection. The genetic information which builds complex structures has been there since the Creation. Mutations only enable creatures to evolve from their created state.

This is why we don’t see real evidence of transitional life forms. I discussed Archaeopteryx on Tom Harris’s blog earlier this month. Archaeopteryx is perhaps the best known alleged transitional fossil, even though it is a fully formed bird with wings, feathers and avian lungs.

The fossil record does not support the Theory of Evolution. It supports an ordered creation – one where relatively minor genetic changes enable animals and plants to adapt to various climates, terrains and diets.

To sum up:

Modern science is largely based on an assumption made by an amateur Scottish geologist. As natural philosophers started becoming known as “scientists” in the increasingly materialistic 19th Century, they had to incorporate evolution into their philosophy of long ages while simultaneously rejecting the Creator, or at the very least devaluing Him. This necessitated massively overestimating the capability of organisms to evolve. Tragically, this catalogue of errors is now considered to be the truth by most people: people who know little or nothing of where their beliefs come from, but will defend them anyway. 

Firstly, I don’t know whether Dawkins added this article to his website himself, or if one of his evolved apes did, but it is quite bizarre that anyone could believe the angle to this story, which was reported in Popular Science. It is amazing how people who think of themselves as scientists can believe that ‘evolution’ can explain away everything.

For every 300 Muscovites, there’s a stray dog wandering the streets of Russia’s capital. And according to Andrei Poyarkov, a researcher at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the fierce pressure of urban living has driven the dogs to evolve wolf-like traits, increased intelligence, and even the ability to navigate the subway.

Poyarkov has studied the dogs, which number about 35,000, for the last 30 years. Over that time, he observed the stray dog population lose the spotted coats, wagging tails, and friendliness that separate dogs from wolves, while at the same time evolving social structures and behaviors optimized to four ecological niches occupied by what Poyarkov calls guard dogs, scavengers, wild dogs, and beggars.

The guard dogs follow around, and receive food from, the security personnel at Moscow’s many fenced in sites. They think the guards are their masters, and serve as semi-feral assistants. The scavengers roam the city eating garbage. The wild dogs are the most wolf-like, hunting mice, rats, and cats under the cover of night.

But beggar dogs have evolved the most specialized behavior. Relying on scraps of food from commuters, the beggar dogs can not only recognize which humans are most likely to give them something to eat, but have evolved to ride the subway. Using scents, and the ability to recognize the train conductor’s names for different stops, they incorporate many stations into their territories.

You have probably noticed the silliest suggestion, i.e. that the dogs are evolving “wolf-like traits”.

Domestic dogs were bred from wild dogs, silly. And with an increased gene pool due to interbreeding, the dogs will be more like their wild ancestors than domestic dogs are, which were bred to favour certain characteristics.

The spotted coats, wagging tails, and friendliness that separate dogs from wolves can be explained by an experiment carried out by Soviet biologist Dmitri Belyaev, who:

…set up a Russian silver fox research centre in Novosibirsk, setting out to test his theory that the most important selected characteristic for the domestication of dogs was a lack of aggression. He began to select foxes that showed the least fear of humans and bred them. After 10-15 years, the foxes he bred showed affection to their keepers, even licking them. They barked, had floppy ears and wagged their tails. They also developed spotted coats – a surprising development that was connected with a decrease in their levels of adrenaline, which shares a biochemical pathway with melanin and controls ­pigment production.

Biologist Andrei Poyarkov explains,

With stray dogs, we’re witnessing a move backwards, that is, to a wilder and less domesticated state, to a more ‘natural’ state.” As if to prove his point, strays do not have spotted coats, they rarely wag their tails and are wary of humans, showing no signs of ­affection towards them.

Poyarkov reckons that “dumping a pet dog on the streets of Moscow amounts to a near-certain death sentence” and “fewer than 3 per cent survive”.

So there are tough mutts down there. Wily ones too.

Naturally, the dogs have adapted (not evolved) to their new environment. Poyarkov reckons that the pack leader is “not necessarily the strongest or most dominant dog, but the most intelligent – and is acknowledged as such. The pack depends on him for its survival.” With fewer than one in thirty abandoned pet dogs surviving, we can understand why intelligence is so respected by the other dogs.

It should worry us that such bad science is being perpetuated in the popular media. A lie told often enough becomes the truth. I suggest this describes the Theory of Evolution. If there is so much indisputable evidence for it, why are we presented with such desperate attempts to try and convince us/perpetuate the myth?

The other posts to date:

Richard Dawkins Exposed: Part I

Richard Dawkins Exposed: Part II – Five Minutes

Richard Dawkins Exposed: Part III – Indoctrination Camp for Children

Leonard Stern, writes,

Here’s the problem: The atheists don’t understand that it’s possible to reject scripture as history but still accept it as sacred narrative.

I would say the problem for Christians is that they are cowed by atheists’ ridicule. Christ spoke about Genesis like it was literal, e.g. when talking of the importance of marriage (and quoting Genesis 2) and so should we.

We can count on the new atheists to remind us yet again that the Sumerians had their own version of a flood story (the Gilgamesh epic)

What does the Bible say? There was a global Flood. Many cultures all around the world relate a flood story. Why? Because there was a global flood! It explains an awful lot about our planet that a uniformitarian worldview cannot.

Do Not Covet Thy Neighbour’s Wife, reduces women to property.

Hitchens is so ‘new man’ isn’t he? Except a wife does belong to her husband and vice versa. Successful cultures have men as the head of the family. Hitchens’ mistake is to believe (or wish) that this means women are treated as second-class citizens, which it doesn’t necessarilly.

Religion is ridiculous for Hitchens because, in his view, it means that you necessarily believe that Eve was made from Adam’s rib.

Ribs are the only bones that will grow back.

Wilson really believes, for example, that Noah crammed all those animals on a single boat. I wonder how many times Hitchens has patiently crunched the numbers for his pal, calculating the mass of the animals in order to show that Noah’s task was an engineering impossibility.

The Ark was not an ‘engineering impossibility’. Korean naval architects, using the dimensions stated in Genesis, calculated that it would be extremely stable in high seas. As for the sheer number of animals, it is not nearly as many as people imagine. Like humans adapted to suit different parts of the world, so did the animals. There weren’t hundreds of different people groups on the Ark, just eight people in total. There needed to be just one or two types of cat, dog and bear for example and as they spread and bred after the waters receded, natural selection provided the speciation.

Yet all the professional atheists want to do is take out a Bible, flip to the story of Balaam in Numbers 22:1-35, and demand to know if you believe in talking donkeys.

Why shouldn’t we believe that the Almighty can make an animal talk? He created them in the first place. He made Balaam speak his words as well. Christ ordered devils to leave a man and they entered the Gadarene swine. God can do things that we cannot. It can’t be that hard to understand.

The problem with the “atheist”, and I like to put this word in inverted commas because I don’t believe anyone is totally atheist, (Richard Dawkins has described himself as a 6.8/6.9 out of 7 atheist. That makes him an agnostic!) is that he seems to have a limited capacity for imagining what could be, and is contented to settle for what is. He finds it hard to understand that an Almighty Creator can do whatever he wants.

Christians should stop apologising for scripture and realise that atheists, or rather agnostics, have problems understanding the world around them and the spirit within them.

The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.

So you could run two of these gas-guzzlers and its carbon footprint is the same as a pet pooch? So, turning that around, a car doesn’t really cause very much environmental damage at all?!

Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.

Provocative or just stupid?

The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.

“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.

Mmm. Climate change tax on pet food?

“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”

A lot of people just don’t worry about the fact that they have a dog. Neither should they. I wonder what the carbon footprint of a brontosaurus was?

Professor Vale took her message to Wellington City Council last year, but councillors said banning traditional pets or letting people keep food animals in their homes were not acceptable options.

We’ll probably get the one pet policy and then the one child policy – after the EU mandarins have returned from their fact-finding mission to China.

Kelly Jeffery, a Paraparaumu german shepherd breeder who once owned a large SUV, said eliminating traditional pets was “over the top”.

I know: why not eat the environmentalists? They think there’s too many people in the world.

H/T Watts Up With That

I love Basil Brush as much as the next man, and I wouldn’t personally go and watch dogs ripping one of their fellow canines to bloody shreds, but for me, it is no longer an issue because New Labour played the cute fox card to death in order to portray the Tories as the ‘nasty party’ and take the public’s attention away from important matters.

Matters like this. In Britain, approximately 200,000 unborn humans are killed in the womb every year, or occasionally they are yanked out and die shortly afterwards on a metal dish. New Labour has made abortion easier. The abortion providers ‘advise’ the government to teach children they have a ‘right’ to abortion.

This terrible business is being promoted as a ‘choice’. Women have been deceived into believing they have the right to kill the fruit of their womb, and without any concern for the father, or more importantly, for what they are nourishing inside them.

Meanwhile, our hearts are meant to bleed for the countryside’s fluffy vermin, the rare beetle and the beached whales.

Strenuous efforts are made to rescue marine mammals, like this from earlier in the month,

A whale which had become stranded in Loch Eil near Fort William has died, despite a huge rescue attempt.

A 10-hour operation took place last Sunday in a bid to lure the Northern Bottlenose Whale back into the sea.

This involved the first UK attempt in attracting a whale to safety by playing the sounds of killer whales underwater.

Compare this with Sarah Capewell’s baby son, who doctors left to die because he was born two days before their ‘guidelines’ say they should keep premature babies alive.

Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.

She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.

Miss Capewell is now fighting for a review of the medical guidelines.

A lot of time and effort was spent by New Labour in their quest to outlaw hunting with dogs. The Political Animal Lobby (PAL), had given donations to other parties, but £1million went to the Labour Party before the 1997 election. With a bribe donation that size, they obviously expected a good result.

I’m unsure how to end this post. What do I have to say to convince those people affected that a human life is immeasurably more valuable than an animal’s?

All dogs children in Britain will be fitted with microchips which contain their owner’s parent’s details, under cross party plans designed to track family pets children.

Owners Parents will be forced to install the microchip containing a barcode that can store their pet’s child’s name, breed description, age and health along with their own address and phone number.

The barcode’s details would then be stored on a national database which local councils could access in a bid to easily identify an owner’s pet a parent’s child.

Come on, you just know it’s going to be next, don’t you..?

Scary stuff from Ambush Predator.