OK, I could be wrong but...gun laws...

Whenever a Facebook meme makes a claim like this, my red flags go off.  Here is the claim.

• 25 States allow someone to carry a gun down the street with no permit of any kind
• 4/5 murders are committed in the other half of the country.

OK, I assume that Andrew is talking about "open carry" states where you can carry your weapon as long as it is not concealed.  My source for these states is OpenCarry.org. [1]  I know this type of source is very unlike me, but I used them to verify the maps I altered from another questionable source Wikipedia. [2]   My source for homicides is much better.  Though four years old, I used the Deaths: Final Data for 2009, made available by the CDC. [3]  Even though, it is older, it should provide a base in which to verify Andrew's quote.  After all, he is alleging that less gun laws cut down on murder.  

Right off the bat, we run into problems.  There are twelve "open carry" states, not 25.  Added together, they had 2018 murders in 2009 and represented 12.01% of the total murders.   Andrew may have begun talking about crime rates in his next sentence and he should have.  A state with high population and a low rate could put out as many murders as a state with low population, but a high rate.  In 2009, the national homicide rate was 5.5 out of 100,000.  Four "open carry" states (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina) were above the national average that year.  So 75% of "open carry" states were below the national average, but that is only eight states.  

There are fifteen licensed carry states where you can apply for a license to "open carry".  These states combined counted for 3081 murders in 2009.  They represented 18.34% of all murders.  With stricter gun laws, only three of these states (Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee)  had a homicide rate higher than the national average.  So 80% of the licensed carry states were below the national average.

In case you were wondering 20 states were at or above the national average.  As mentioned already, only four of them were "open carry" and only three were licensed carry.  I don't know if this has necessarily anything to do with open display of fire arms.  Alabama's homicide rate is lower than Georgia's and much lower than Mississippi's.  With the exception of Kentucky and Virginia, the South was equal to or higher than the national average.

Anyways, let's just evaluate the claim.  There are not 25 states with "open carry".  Even if you add licensed carry, you run over to 27 states.  Yes, almost 9/10 murders occur in not open carry states, but that was not the claim.  The claim was that half the states, with stricter gun laws, account for 80% of the murders.  Licensed carry and "open carry" combined amount to about 30.35% of all the murders.  This leaves about 69.65% account for by the stricture states.  While this may be more than 2/3, look at the states in question.  Many of them have lower populations and produce less murders.  Even with a higher homicide rate of 8.7, New Mexico put out less than half of the homicides of Arizona with their  5.9 rate.   Yet the main point is that it is not the 4/5 claimed.

Praise God that someone "figured out" that the Bible says "trust God".

I am just thinking now about decades of sermons about "how to know God's will?", "Are we living in the end times?", "How to know that you know," "how to pray", "spiritual gift tests", books by Chuck Smith, C.S. Lewis, MacArthur, Piper, years of Greek and Hebrew classes, and apologetics. God may have it all figured out, but He really makes it difficult to find out. Let's not even get into the thousands of years of hard work that it took, just to get the Bible to the point that we can make this Facebook meme. Also, church history is about people trying to "figure it out". ugh...

Banned in Chicago...on display in Boston

If it is a Facebook meme, it most likely is not true.  The first image is of a nativity that was donated to Arlington Heights Park District.  The park turned down the donation and the donor lawyered up.  However, the park said that the donor never filled out the proper paper work.

But Timothy Riordan, the attorney for the Arlington Heights Park District, said Finnegan had simply never filled out an application for a permit. Instead, he asked the district to accept a donation of a nativity they didn’t want.
“In our view there’s no real controversy,” Riordan said.

He sent Finnegan’s lawyer an application for a park use permit on Nov. 26.

“He wanted to donate the nativity scene to the park district," Riordan said. "The park district indicated it wasn’t interested in accepting that donation. The park always had a holiday display and just didn’t think it was consistent with the display they’d had in the past. If you want to use a park for any purpose, there’s a form.”

Finnegan said Tuesday that he plans to apply for a permit to place the nativity in a different part of the same park. [1]

The second image is of a painting on display at Boston's Bunker Hill Community College Art Gallery.

“I always regretted cancelling my exhibit in New York because I feel my First Amendment rights should override someone’s hurt feelings,” D’Antuono told Fox News. “We should celebrate the fact that we live in a country where we are given the freedom to express ourselves.”

“The crucifixion of the president was meant metaphorically,” he continued. “My intent was not to compare him to Jesus.”

D’Antuono blamed the controversy on conservative media “trying to promote the idea that liberals believe the president to literally be our savior.” [2]

 So we have a nativity that is not banned in Chicago and a painting in an art gallery.  These Facebook memes should be sourced.  More to the point, the nativity display is intended on public land.  I would guess that there are many nativities displayed in Chicago this time of year.

Millions of these

The picture was captioned, "Darwin's Folly"

Flickr

I saw the picture above on Facebook and thought that this would be the appropriate forum to write something. The chart points to a quadrupedal ape on the left and a Homo sapien on the right and alleges that there are "millions of these". Then it asks, "so where are the millions of these?"

This Facebook meme seems to be an edited picture of the one on the right. The farthest to the left is not named,  but it is probably not a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes[1] and paniscus[2]).  Second on the chart is the Spanish "hominidos" which in English is the Family "Hominidae".  Within the Hominidae family are the genera: Pan (Chimps), Pongo (Orangutan), Gorilla, and Homo.[3]  Also included are extinct genera: Orrorin, Ardipithecus,  Australopithecus and Paranthropus.[4]  The second does not represent a genus or species, but an entire family.

Nature

With the discussion of the second, let us return to the first.   The skull marking the second is very similar to a chimpanzee, however the image has the second as a clear biped.  Still, the canines are also more prominent in Ardipithecus.  The feet also have a prominent thumb like toe that is also similar to the genus Ardipithecus.  So this is probably meant to emulate the Ardipiths.

What about the first one?  There are a couple of reasons that it is probably not meant to be a chimp.  One, human beings are not supposed to have evolved from chimps.  Chimps and Humans are hypothesized to share a common ancestor about 8 to 5 million years ago.  Fossil chimps were not even discovered until 2005.  They were dated at around half a million years old and were impossible "to say whether they belonged to the same species as modern chimps" "or to some unnamed, now extinct ancestor".[5]    Still, it is very unlikely that the image is trying to demonstrate that Ardipithecus,  Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo all evolved from Pan or that Pan is older than Australopithecus.  Further, Dawkins noted in An Ancestor's Tale, "We must not assume, as many laymen do, that our ancestors were chimpanzees."[6]

The third from the left is the genus Australopithecus.   Despite Lucy (afarensis) being the most well known, there are at least six species of Australopith: anamensis, afarensis, bahrelghazali, africanus, garhi,[7] and sediba.  The previously mentioned Ardipithecus genus contains two species: kadabba and ramidus.[8]  Why is this important?  Do you remember the question?  "So where are the millions of these?"  There are only two known species of the genus Pan, yet there are about 300,000 troglodytes [9] and 20,000 paniscus [10].  Despite the fact that there are not "millions" of Pan left alive, the Facebook meme seems to suggest that six species of Australopiths alone could not produce a population of millions or be representative of a genus comparable in population to Pan.

The next skull on the chart is for the genus Paranthropus which contains three species: boisei, aethiopicus, and robustus [11].  The Paranthropus genus, however, is not represented by a figure.  Moving on, the next three are a select three species from the genus Homo.  The first is Homo habilis [12].  Habilis and Homo rudolfensis are thought to be among the earliest representatives of the genus.  Next is Homo erectus. [13]  More than 50 individuals were found at just one site and they have been found throughout Africa and Asia.[14] The final figure is Homo sapien.

Summing up, the animal to the left is probably not a chimpanzee.  Even if it is, I hope the point is clear, even with only showing three species from Homo, there are abundant fossils for that genus.  Also the other two genera cited also have abundant fossils.  Any of these genera dwarf the chimpanzee fossil record by a mile.  Also the Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo genera are represented by more species than the genus Pan.

PS - The meme on Facebook (with over 300 shares) is captioned "Darwin's Folly".  When Darwin wrote Origin of the Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), only Homo sapiens were known to science.  Darwin hypothesized the existence of the other species.  This seems more like a successful prediction of Darwin's theory rather than a folly.

Sanchez kisses butt (butt fumble)