For paleontologists like Dr. Sato, layers of bedrock represent an accumulation over hundreds of millions of years, and the Lower Jurassic is much older than the Upper Cretaceous. But here in the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, Earth and the universe are just over 6,000 years old, created in six days by God. The museum preaches, “Same facts, different conclusions” and is unequivocal in viewing paleontological and geological data in light of a literal reading of the Bible. In the creationist interpretation, the layers were laid down in one event— the worldwide flood when God wiped the land clean except for the creatures on Noah’s ark— and these dinosaurs died in 2348 B.C., the year of the flood. “That’s one thing I learned,” Dr. Sato said. —“Paleontology and Creationism Meet but Don’t Mesh,” Kenneth Chang The New York Times
Humans at the end of the Darwinian phase; organic food not organic; emissions offsets a lighter shade of green; “Pickens wind plan may be hot air”; lush photos of polluted waters in New York
A lot of people– even people who follow the health debate– seem to be under the impression that the [health] industries are merely promising to save some money over the next few years, on a purely voluntary basis. That’s not quite right, as best as I can tell. Both the drug and hospital industries are making a more important pledge: They are suggesting they will go along with legislation that changes the way they are paid. The drug industry has offered to endorse changes to the Medicare drug benefit. The hospital industry has offered to endorse changes in the way Medicare pays hospital bills. By themselves, the endorsements are meaningless. But the endorsements make it possible, politically, for lawmakers to write these changes into reform legislation. That’s not meaningless. —“Let’s Make a Deal, Health Reform Edition,” Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic
Medical commercialism infects care; California’s budget crisis and the threat to the Obama agenda; conflict over international stimulus exit strategies; investigating a South Korean cyber-attack; Iranian protestors to carry roses as weapons
After years of America getting its lesbian images via the model-perfect waifs of Showtime’s The L Word, the lipstick lesbian has given way to a new butch, who differs markedly from her mullet-coiffed, man-hating predecessor. When k.d. lang graced the cover of Vanity Fair receiving a shave from Cindy Crawford in 1993, it epitomized the butch-femme dichotomy in lesbian culture—or, at least, the larger world’s perception of it. Today, butch icons, like Rachel Maddow and Ellen DeGeneres, are considered sex symbols by their Sapphic sisters—and by not a few men. At the Stonewall and other local oases of butch culture, New Yorkers are happy to see their own kind return to the limelight. For decades, popular culture portrayed butches as unfashionable, mannish, and leather-clad sadists, like the one played by Mercedes McCambridge in Touch of Evil, who, when Janet Leigh is about to get gang-banged, growls, “I just wanna watch.” —“Rachel Maddow, the New Sexy,” Winnie McCroy, The Village Voice