Thanks for the good questions.

a) yes
b) yes
c) no
d) yes
e) n/a

If you exclude suicide, the USA doesn't have a staggering rate of gun deaths. It is high compared to some other western countries, but on a world rate it is still very low.

When looking at public health (which is the reason for reducing gun violence) you need to be pragmatic. What will actually give a good outcome for public health? In this case there are about a half a dozen things that kill and maim US citizens at much higher rates than firearms do.

E.g. you are much more likely to be killed in a car crash than murdered by someone with a firearm. Cars by accident kill more people in the USA each year than firearms do on purpose. That's some scary shit right there. Think about that for a second, cars are more dangerous than firearms and people are not even trying to kill themselves or someone else with one. So as an example, you'd be better off trying to fix this first.

Or fix the suicide rate in the US. People aren't in a happy place there.

Obesity kills more people. Doctor malpractice kills more people. Etc. But these are hard issues to tackle that will cost billions or trillions. The low hanging fruit is firearms.

Free health care and mental health care, a better social security system, and various other means would all have magnificent outcomes on everyday life in the USA. But again, they cost a lot and require a paradigm shift.

Have you ever encountered interpersonal violence against you (i.e. had someone attack you)? Or have you maybe worked in a job where you often come into contact with people who have been attacked? I find people change their mind after they realize that they were only ever one wrong turn away from some crazy bastard who wanted to hurt them badly.

And it's well known that there's no other western power ready to step in.

Which is why this commentary affirms that the US is ceding power to Russia and China.

In the US, the central government cedes power to the States. In the world, there are other strong central governments who will step into the power vacuum. The weaker European states will be forced to react to the paradigm shift.

About damn time Hollywood started to realize these movies need a paradigm shift. I love the new breed of genre-busting superheroes (Legion and DeadPool), but I'm sick to death of the standard cookie-cutter pieces which seem to come out seven or eight a summer these days.

Here's a thought, instead of adding $600 billion dollars to the US military budget, we could use some of that money to push broadband out to every home in the US.

When every struggling post-boom town has high speed internet, we just need to push the dinosaurs who resist "work from home" out of senior management positions in the corporate world and we'll have a migration towards the smaller, more remote communities, where property values are much lower.

It will mean that sprawl subdivisions will become the new slums...but that just provides incentive to bulldoze those warts off the map and return the lost farmland.

The paradigm shift would spark massive economic growth.

Naw...we need more tactical stealth fighters.

I'm so angry this man is not my president elect right now.

Good work douchebags. You thought you were so clever with your fucked up voting strategies, bitching about "lesser of two evil" choices, refusing to vote and taking a stand against...whatever the fuck you thought you were doing. Now we have a thin skinned, narcissistic, ignorant, man-child for our president.

Stop trying to rationalize this. This is not a voter revolt, this is not a paradigm shift in politics, this is not Hillary Clinton's fault or Debbie Wasserman Schultz's doing; this is the result of the masses falling for decades of misinformation combined with an emotional appeal to our worst instincts by a demagogue. You fell for it while you patted yourself on the back for being so much smarter than everyone else. Now we're fucked.

So grow the fuck up and do something to fix this.

The cynic in me really hopes this isn't a really good actor pretending to be a redneck.

Not many people are capable of such a massive paradigm shift late in life. It can make your entire ego crumble and you become a heaping pile of 'What the fuck am I?'

If he's legit, bless, because damn that's some major introspective aweseomeness.

"There is nothing that states can do that needs to be done that markets cannot do better. The current technology trajectory is proving the point, many times over. The result is political instability. A paradigm shift. Obsolescence of the public sector. The growing irrelevance of power. Ever less dependent on, and hence loyalty to, the coercive power structure and ever more cultural, economic, and social reliance on the structures that society creates for itself." via.

An example of this technology is Bitcoin which is now where the internet was in 1995. Back then, the confused mainstream didn't get it, but will soon find out why (the likes of) Federal Reserve Notes are to (the likes of) Bitcoin what the radio is to the internet.

Unbelievable. Our world is being run by imbeciles and the corrupt.

There are people out there in the world that dedicate themselves to learning information, refining methods, trying to make things better for everyone. They should be running countries. But instead, we've got men with hardly any qualifications and hardly any life experience.

Instead of gathering in a room and listening to community representatives telling them exactly how we want our money spent, the top brass are actually sat in a cushty conference room with a buffet and champagne, copping backhanders and selling us down the river.

When did the general populace suddenly fall into this groove of 'civilisation' - this unspoken belief that The Government are all-seeing, all knowing, and always out for what's best in the long run. We, collectively, have just been taken for billions and billions of dollars or pounds or whatever you use by a collection of the world's richest people. They have not been held to account, and in fact they've somehow convinced us to pay them back what they've lost. Imagine if you lived in a wild west village and you'd paid the sheriff every week to protect a safe with everyone's money in it, and he'd been out at night gambling it away. You'd be fucking furious, an angry mob would be at his door. But for some reason we're all docile about the exact parallel of that situation happening in reality.

We really need a paradigm shift in public consciousness, because the metaphor has progressed, right now that wild west village is under martial law and being run through intimidation by a gang. We don't live in some fantasy world where some unseen force is ensuring fair-play. We are the people who have to strive to ensure fair play in everything otherwise we're just letting people rob us. Literally.

We can't progress like this. In charge of the UK's education system is a guy who has never had any experience teaching whatsoever, let alone teaching under the current system, let alone qualifications in teaching. There's a petition on to have him do a week of teaching so that he can understand just how badly he's ruining everything. This is a real person like you or me and he's in charge of running the education system. We're all standing by watching someone we know is incompetent do a complicated job. Half of us wouldn't even admit to being able to do that job if we were offered it, but this fucking bumbling posh moron takes the wheels with the manic grin of an idiot that feels no fear. Dashing the wheel left and right, we idly watch on as he plays around to see what will happen, crossings our fingers nothing bad happens.

@enoch, thanks for your comments. I thought it better to respond directly to your profile than on the video, about which we're no longer discussing directly. Sorry for the length of this reply, but for such a complex topic as this one, a thorough and plainly-stated response is needed.

You wrote: "the REAL question is "what is the purpose of a health care system"? NOT "which market system should we implement for health care"?"

The free market works best for any and all goods and services, regardless of their aim or purpose. Healthcare is no different from any other good or service in this respect.

(And besides, tell me why there's no money in preventative care? Do nutritionists, physical trainers/therapists, psychologists, herbalists, homeopaths, and any other manner of non-allopathic doctors not get paid and make profit in the marketplace? Would not a longer life not lead to a longer-term 'consumer' anyway? And would preventative medicine obliterate the need for all manner of medical treatment, or would there not still remain a need to diagnose, treat, and cure diseases, even in the presence of a robust preventative medical market?)

I realize that my argument is not the "popular" one (and there are certainly many reasons for this, up to and including a lot of disinformation about what constitutes a "free market" health care system). But the way to approach such things is not heuristically, but rationally, as one would approach any other economic issue.

You write "see where i am going with this? It's not so easy to answer and impose your model of the "free market" at the same time."

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. The purpose of the healthcare system is to provide the most advanced medical service and care possible in the most efficient and affordable way possible. Only a free competitive market can do this with the necessary economic calculations in place to support its progress. No matter how you slice it, a socialized approach to healthcare invariably distorts the market (with its IP fees, undue regulations, and a lack of any accurate metrics on both the supply-side and on the demand-side which helps to determine availability, efficacy, and cost).

"you cannot have "for-profit" and "health-care" work in conjunction with any REAL health care."

Sorry, but this is just absurd. What else can I say?

"but if we use your "free market" model against a more "socialized model".which model would better serve the public?"

The free market model.

"if we take your "free market" model,which would be under the auspices of capitalism."

Redundant: "free market under the auspices of free market."

"disease is where the money is at,THAT is where the profit lies,not in preventive medicine."

Only Krugman-style Keynesians would say that illness is more profitable than health (or war more profitable than peace, or that alien invasions and broken windows are good for the economy). They, like you, aren't taking into account the One Lesson in Economics: look at how it affects every group, not just one group; look at the long term effects, not just short term ones. You're just seeing that, in the short-run, health will be less profitable for medical practitioners (or some pharmaceuticals) that are currently working in the treatment of illness. But look at every group outside that small group and at the long run and you can see that health is more profitable than illness overall. The market that profits more from illness will have to adapt, in ways that only the market knows for sure.

Do you realize that the money you put into socialized medicine (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, etc.) is money you deplete from prevention entrepreneurship?

(As an aside, I wonder, why do so many people assume that the socialized central planners have some kind of special knowledge or wisdom that entrepreneurs do not? And why is there the belief that unlike entrepreneurs, socialist central planners are not selfishly motivated but always act in the interest of the "common good?" Could this be part of the propagandized and indoctrinated fear that's implicit in living in a socialized environment? Why do serfs (and I'm sure that, at some level, people know that's what they are) love the socialist central planners more than they love themselves? Complex questions about self-esteem and captive minds.)

If fewer people get sick, the market will then demand more practitioners to move from treating illness into other areas like prevention, being a prevention doctor or whatever. You're actually making the argument for free market here, not against it. Socialized bureaucratically dictated medicine will not adapt to the changing needs as efficiently or rapidly as a free market can and would. If more people are getting sick, then we'll need more doctors to treat them. If fewer people are getting sick because preventive medicine takes off, then we'll have more of that type of service. If a socialized healthcare is mandated, then we will invariably have a glut of allopathic doctors, with little need for their services (and we then have the kinds of problems we see amongst doctors who are coerced -- by the threat of losing their license -- to take medicaid and then lie on their reports in order to recoup their costs, e.g., see the article linked here.)

Meanwhile, there has been and will remain huge profits to be made in prevention, as the vitamin, supplements, alternative medicine, naturopathy, exercise and many other industries attest to. What are you talking about, that there's no profit in preventing illness? (In a manner of speaking, that's actually my bread and butter!) If you have a way to prevent illness, you will have more than enough people buying from you, people who don't want to get sick. (And other services for the people who do.) Open a gym. Become a naturopath. Teach stress management, meditation, yoga, zumba, whatever! And there are always those who need treatment, who are sick, and the free market will then have an accurate measure of how to allocate the right resources and number of such practitioners. This is something that the central planners (under socialized services) simply cannot possibly do (except, of course, for the omniscient ones that socialists insist exist).

You wrote "cancer,anxiety,obesity,drug addiction.
all are huge profit generators and all could be dealt with so much more productively and successfully with preventive care,diet and exercise and early diagnosis."

But they won't as long as you have centrally planned (socialized) medicine. The free market forces practitioners to respond to the market's demands. Socialized medicine does not. Entrepreneurs will (as they already have) exploit openings for profit in prevention (without the advantage of regulations which distort the markets) and take the business away from treatment doctors. If anything, doctors prevent preventative medicine from getting more widespread by using government regulations to limit what the preventive practitioners do. In fact, preventive medicine is so profitable that it has many in the medical profession lobbying to curtail it. They are losing much business to alternative/preventive practitioners. They lobby to, for example, prevent herb providers from stating the medical/preventive benefits of their herbs. They even prevent strawberry farmers to tout the health benefits of strawberries! It is the state that is slowing down preventive medicine, not the free market! In Puerto Rico, for example, once the Medical Association lost a bit to prohibit naturopathy, they effectively outlawed acupuncture by successfully getting a law passed that requires all acupuncturists to be medical doctors. Insanity.

If you think there is no profit in preventative care or exercise, think GNC and Richard Simmons, and Pilates, and bodywork, and my own practice of psychotherapy. Many of the successful corporations (I'm thinking of Google and Pixar and SalesForce and Oracle, etc.) see the profit and value in preventative care, which is why they have these "stay healthy" programs for their employees. There's more money in health than illness. No doubt.

Or how about the health food/nutrition business? Or organic farming, or whole foods! The free market could maybe call for fewer oncologists and for more Whole Foods or even better natural food stores. Of course, we don't know the specifics, but that's actually the point. Only the free market knows (and the omniscient socialist central planners) what needs to happen and how.

Imagination! We need to get people to use it more.

You wrote: "but when we consider that the 4th and 5th largest lobbyists are the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry is it any wonder that america has the most fucked up,backwards health care system on the planet."

You're actually making my point here. In a free market, pharmaceutical companies cannot monopolize what "drugs" people can or cannot take, sell or not sell, and cannot prevent natural alternatives from being promoted. Only with state intervention (by way of IP regulations, and so forth) can they do so.

Free market is not corporatism. Free market is not crony capitalism. (More disinformation that needs to be lifted.)

So you're not countering my free market position, you're countering the crony capitalist position. This is a straw man argument, even if in this case you might not have understood my position in the first place. You, like so many others, equate "capitalism" with cronyism or corporatism. Many cannot conceive of a free market that is free from regulation. So folks then argue against their own interests, either for or against "fascist" vs. "socialist" medicine. The free market is, in fact, outside these two positions.

You wrote: "IF we made medicare available to ALL american citizens we would see a shift from latter stage care to a more aggressive preventive care and early diagnosis. the savings in money (and lives) would be staggering."

I won't go into medicare right now (It is a disaster, and so is the current non-free-market insurance industry. See the article linked in my comment above.)

You wrote "this would create a huge paradigm shift here in america and we would see results almost instantly but more so in the coming decades."

I don't want to be a naysayer but, socialism is nothing new. It has been tried (and failed) many times before. The USSR had socialized medicine. So does Cuba (but then you may believe the Michael Moore fairytale about medicine in Cuba). It's probably better to go see in person how Cubans live and how they have no access to the places that Moore visited.

You wrote: "i feel very strongly that health should be a communal effort.a civilized society should take care of each other."

Really, then why try to force me (or anyone) into your idea of "good" medicine? The free market is a communal effort. In fact, it is nothing else (and nothing else is as communal as the free market). Central planning, socialized, top-down decision-making, is not. Never has been. Never will be.

Voluntary interactions is "taking care of each other." Coercion is not. Socialism is coercion. It cannot "work" any other way. A free market is voluntary cooperation.

Economic calculation is necessary to avoid chaos, whatever the purpose of a service. This is economic law. Unless the purpose is to create chaos, you need real prices and efficiency that only the free market can provide.

I hope this helps to clarify (and not confuse) what I wrote on @eric3579's profile.

@Trancecoach
i am going to have to disagree with your "free market" argument.(i snooped on your commentary on @eric3579 page).

and here is why:

since we both agree that what we have now is NOT a free market health care system and it is rife with corruption.we can move on to the real meat of the argument.

in my opinion the basic flaw in your argument is the base question.
free market or socialized medicine?

this is the wrong question.
because the questions ignores the very essence which we should be addressing.
the REAL question is "what is the purpose of a health care system"?
NOT "which market system should we implement for health care"?

so,
what IS the purpose of the health care system?

ah...
see where i am going with this?
not so easy to answer and impose your model of the "free market" at the same time.

because they are incompatible.
you cannot have "for-profit" and "health-care" work in conjunction with any REAL health care.

my family is in the medical field (as i know you are as well),and i have had this discussion with them many,many times.

when i have asked them "what is the best way to optimize a persons long term health"?
they have always answered,without exception "preventive care"."early diagnosis"."education on the benefits of diet and exercise".

and i suspect you would agree with their assessment.

but if we use your "free market" model against a more "socialized model".which model would better serve the public?

if we take your "free market" model,which would be under the auspices of capitalism.
where is the profit in a healthy society?
answer:there is none.
disease is where the money is at,THAT is where the profit lies,not in preventive medicine.

cancer,anxiety,obesity,drug addiction.
all are huge profit generators and all could be dealt with so much more productively and successfully with preventive care,diet and exercise and early diagnosis.

it is ineffecient and morally despicable and the costs are counted in dead bodies.

but when we consider that the 4th and 5th largest lobbyists are the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry is it any wonder that america has the most fucked up,backwards health care system on the planet.

so if we used your "free market" model instead of the corporate welfare system we are using now.
the results would STILL be the same.
because BOTH systems are for-profit.

now,
let us examine medicare.
runs on a 3-5% overhead,while in contrast the health insurance industry runs between 25-35% and are..for-profit.

IF we made medicare available to ALL american citizens we would see a shift from latter stage care to a more aggressive preventive care and early diagnosis.
the savings in money (and lives) would be staggering.

this would create a huge paradigm shift here in america and we would see results almost instantly but more so in the coming decades.

i dont feel i have to list them because i respect your intellect.

i feel very strongly that health should be a communal effort.a civilized society should take care of each other.
a corporation cares nothing for my health nor yours.they care about profit.

and preventive care is NOT profitable,yet death and disease are.

so.
socialism>free market

It's an interesting video, and honestly, I'm not sure whether I agree with it or not.

I suppose I'd segregate it into art and engineering

On the one hand, having a single creative vision can result in some great art.

On the other hand, almost all modern engineering of any kind is a collaborative effort. Systems are simply too big and complex for one person to exercise an auteur-like control over.

The problem to me is not collaboration. The problem is getting the right kind of collaboration. The "design by committee" argument is a result of bike shedding.

Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Pretty good argument for single creative vision, right? Clearly the "people" didn't understand the paradigm shift.

But no great invention occurs in a vacuum, and no great invention was ever perfect on the first iteration. It's an incredibly hard problem. Feedback from users is undeniably important, but a good engineer must be able to differentiate between useful feedback and people who don't understand the problem domain.

Personally, I work collaboratively 90% of the time. The 10% is the interesting bit though

@enoch I'm not hostile towards those who disagree with me, but towards those who intentionally misrepresent me. I'm guessing you once met some fundamentalist hard-headed fox news republican whatever, and you think I'm that guy. I'm not. So, please stop misrepresenting me, it's really annoying.

You suggest letting government/society burn? Sure, maybe that's what we're headed to anyways. I don't treat politics as discussing "what should we do", that's irrelevant if you and I can't agree on what's actually wrong. To me, it's more about understanding the problem.

@dag The problem I see in how you're using examples outside of America is that what you suggest as a solution in another country can just as much be an example of another country's success despite what you're pointing out as the solution.

"we tax the rich a lot in Australia and everything is better over here". Ok. What if Australia would be better off if you didn't tax the rich so much? Then you'd be just proposing we do what's not helping Australia to help America, all the while overlooking whatever is actually working in Australia.

It does seem somewhat obvious that taxing the rich would forcefully reduce wealth inequality, but then we wouldn't be looking at what's causing the inequality, just trying to punch it out of existence with taxes, and possibly establishing more social injustice in the process. To me, it seems quite unfair to tax someone more just for being richer, a moral hazard even (punishing productivity?), but moral concerns are passé and don't seem to bother anyone these days.

@shatterdrose I treat a smaller government solution as something like a paradigm shift. You see government doing things right in country X, Y or Z, and I see them as, most likely, taking credit for what they're not fucking up. I mean, seriously, don't you know governments do that all the time?

There are plenty of people who unfairly benefit from government, but government is mostly not a net benefit to society, and those people will lie through their goddamned teeth about how much good they do, usually taking credit for anything working in society. There sure are plenty of suckers who believe them.

Wanting less government is not snap judgement, it's not dogma, it's quite often what no one ever considers.

Wanting more government is the convenient way out, governments are the agents of every social planner's wet dreams. In their minds, governments always have "unlimited" resources, they're always above any law, they're never morally wrong, and they're always run by honest uncorruptible people.

I love your "get involved" answer to criticizing government. What you don't seem to realize is that I'm criticizing how much government IS involved. That can hardly be changed from the inside. People who run for government always want a bigger piece of the pie, they're not likely to win on a "we want less pie" platform.

Hehehe, they said "paradigm shift"....Dream-On, too many cattle-peeps using their brains for verbal masturbation and ineffectual inaction....Not in my lifetime without some catastrophic or otherwise, world-unifying event.

How can we have a substantive conversation if you're not willing to put in any effort to actually understand the subject matter, either for or against? If you're content with your blind faith in whatever scientists tell you, then you're just as dogmatic as you accuse me of being. The video I provided is very good and it chronicles the history of deep time, as well as the science behind it, in exacting detail using the methodology of geologists. You could watch 10 minutes of it, and if you decided you didn't like it, you could turn it off.

As far as the paradigm shift goes, here is a quote from the father of uniformitarianism, Charles Lyell:

I am sure you may get into Q.R. [Quarterly Review] what will free the science from Moses, for if treated seriously, the [church] party are quite prepared for it. A bishop, Buckland ascertained (we suppose [Bishop] Sumner), gave Ure a dressing in the British Critic and Theological Review. They see at last the mischief and scandal brought on them by Mosaic systems … . Probably there was a beginning—it is a metaphysical question, worthy of a theologian—probably there will be an end. Species, as you say, have begun and ended—but the analogy is faint and distant. Perhaps it is an analogy, but all I say is, there are, as Hutton said, ‘no signs of a beginning, no prospect of an end’ … . All I ask is, that at any given period of the past, don’t stop inquiry when puzzled by refuge to a ‘beginning,’ which is all one with ‘another state of nature,’ as it appears to me. But there is no harm in your attacking me, provided you point out that it is the proof I deny, not the probability of a beginning … . I was afraid to point the moral, as much as you can do in the Q.R. about Moses. Perhaps I should have been tenderer about the Koran. Don’t meddle much with that, if at all.

If we don’t irritate, which I fear that we may (though mere history), we shall carry all with us. If you don’t triumph over them, but compliment the liberality and candour of the present age, the bishops and enlightened saints will join us in despising both the ancient and modern physico-theologians. It is just the time to strike, so rejoice that, sinner as you are, the Q.R. is open to you.

P.S. … I conceived the idea five or six years ago [1824–25], that if ever the Mosaic geology could be set down without giving offence, it would be in an historical sketch, and you must abstract mine, in order to have as little to say as possible yourself. Let them feel it, and point the moral.”

As you can plainly see, Charles was scheming to deceive the church into accepting his uniformitarian theories even though he knew they contradicted scripture. He wasn't interested in a scientific investigation of the facts:

From a lecture in King’s College London in 1832

I have always been strongly impressed with the weight of an observation of an excellent writer and skillful geologist who said that ‘for the sake of revelation as well as of science—of truth in every form—the physical part of Geological inquiry ought to be conducted as if the Scriptures were not in existence

He had an agenda and his bias is plain to see. He completely excluded the testimony of scripture apriori before he even began. That is the beginning of why there was a shift in geology as the intelligentsia embraced his theories and began to teach it at Universities. There was no spectacular confirmation of any of this; in fact the evidence he gave about Niagra Falls to supprt his theory has been completely falsified.

That doesn't sound like circular reasoning to you?

It would sound circular if none of those had any other basis for their timelines other than each other, which, not being an expert, I have to guess is not the case. You, the one making the enormous claim that the entire field of geology is unscientific, have to demonstrate that.

I found some more cherry-picking. From that article about mudstones, you take this one quote: "One thing we are very certain of is that our findings will influence how geologists and paleontologists reconstruct Earth's past" and determine from it that the age of the planet will be scientifically revised from many billions of years to a few thousand. You have no basis for that. Also, why are you quoting geologists? That isn't even a science, I thought, right? Is it just because these ones happen to sound like their story could be twisted to agree with yours?

Your argument from incredulity not-withstanding, I think Max Planck sums it up rather nicely: " A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

If by that quote you mean that old people tend to have a hard time changing their minds about things in face of contradictory evidence, you're right -- that's human nature. If you mean that scientific theories change randomly because new opinions grow and the old ones die out like cultural habits, you're wrong.

There was a paradigm shift from catastrophism to uniformitarianism in the late 19th century. It was a deliberate move away from the idea of a global flood. To make their theories worked, they needed vast amount of time

This is another grand claim. Can you give a verifiable non-biased (non ID) reference as to the deliberateness of the shift, and the pre-formed idea that they needed to conjure up vast amounts of time? Science doesn't become conventional wisdom without a preponderance of evidence to back it up. It doesn't mean any of it is correct, just that there's a lot of supporting evidence.

In other words, you believe whatever the scientists say and there is no reason to understand the alternative viewpoint.

No. You're the one making ridiculous claims. I'm rebutting for fun, for sport. I don't believe your religion is real. I trust scientists more than dogmatists, and if I have to choose how to spend 1.5 hours, it's going to be reading Feynman or watching TYT or studying math or practising card tricks. You brought up the topic, and I happen to only care enough about it to rebut a bit, not to dedicate hours to it. Also, you have a history here of providing horribly unscientific quotes and references without any attempt at intellectual honesty, and based on that, I can guess the quality of that video, and I don't need to spend 1.5 hours only to be disappointed in myself for trying. If I were really that curious, I would go to the geology department of my university and ask some professors about the circular argument, and what the original basis was for the dating. If you care that much about actually finding the truth, you'll do just that. But I think you're too afraid to learn something contradictory to your dogma.

It's all predicated upon the philosophy of deep time. Deep time is the cornerstone of modern research, and it supported by flimsy, circumstantial evidence.

Non-ID reference for the flimsiness required for grand claims.