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Tuesday, January 24, 2006
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Jonah Goldberg's gonna have to work extra-hard this year to win his second consecutive Chickenhawk Award, 'cause it looks like Rick Santorum is gonna be very, very tough to beat (via Atrios):
Santorum: "And yet we have brave men and women who are willing to step forward because they know what's at stake. They're willing to sacrifice their lives for this great country. What I'm asking all of you tonight is not to put on a uniform. Put on a bumper sticker. Is it that much to ask? Is it that much to ask to step up and serve your country?"
Video here.
(Via Sadly, No!.)
9:30:45 PM 
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Muslims aren't the only ones worried about women's swimwear. Check out this stunning collection from "WholesomeWear." Fundamentalism: bringing the world closer together - by putting women in their place.
(Via Daily Dish.)
9:29:58 PM
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Conservative religious groups are once again making grade school textbooks the battleground. In California, supremacists and revisionists are trying to make radical changes to kids' textbooks, inserting propaganda and absurd assertions that are not supported in any way by legitimate scholars. The primary effort is to mangle history, but they're also trying to make ridiculous claims about scientific issues.
Such as that civilization started 111.5 trillion years ago, and that people flew to the moon and set off atomic bombs thousands of years ago.
(OK, everyone, let's all do our best imitation Jon Stewart double-take: "Whaaa…??")
Yeah, these aren't fundamentalist Christians, but Hindu nationalists with very strange ideas—still, it's the same old religious nonsense. Two groups, the Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation, have a whole slate of peculiar historical ideas driven by their religious ideology, and are pressuring the California State Board of Education to modify textbooks. They want to recast Hinduism as a monotheistic religion, whitewash the caste system and the oppression of women, and peddle racist notions about Aryan origins.
This is what happens when religious dogma is allowed to dictate educational content—reality and evidence and objective analysis all become irrelevant. The earth is neither 111.5 trillion years old, nor only 6,000 years old, and the errors and misperceptions of old priests are not a sound foundation for science. It doesn't matter whether those priests spoke Sanskrit or Hebrew, since their ideas are the product of revealed 'knowledge' rather than critical, evidence-based research, they don't belong in a public school classroom.
Heck, what am I saying? It's just another idea, right? Let's teach the controversy and allow orthodox Hindu supremacists to battle it out with fundamentalist Christian dominionists in front of sixth graders. It should be exciting and enlightening.
(via Butterflies and Wheels)
(Via ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed.)
9:18:47 PM
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I think by now we all realize that every word Bush speaks is a lie.
The White House was told in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that the city would probably soon be inundated with floodwater, forcing the long-term relocation of hundreds of thousands of people, documents to be released Tuesday by Senate investigators show.
A Homeland Security Department report submitted to the White House at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, hours before the storm hit, said, "Any storm rated Category 4 or greater will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching."
The internal department documents, which were forwarded to the White House, contradict statements by President Bush and the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, that no one expected the storm protection system in New Orleans to be breached.
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Mr. Bush said in a television interview on Sept. 1. "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."
[snip]
A White House spokesman, asked about the seeming contradiction between Mr. Bush's statement on Sept. 1 and the warning as the storm approached, said the president meant to say that once the storm passed and it initially looked as if New Orleans had gotten through the hurricane without catastrophic damage, no one anticipated at that point that the levees would be breached.
(Via First Draft.)
9:06:32 PM
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Four religious truths:
1. Muslims do not recognize Jews as God's chosen people.
2. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.
3. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian World.
4. Southern Baptists do not recognize each other at Hooters.
Related Tags: Christian, joke, humor, Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Jews, Hooters
(Via Blogotional.)
8:59:49 PM
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Aside from the kids books, I haven't ready any Hoban since his masterpiece Riddley Walker, over 25 years ago. I'm missing out, and need to rectify that.
Earlier this month Hoban published his 14th book for adults, Linger Awhile. Set in London like the previous five and involving some of the same characters, the novel surpasses even the standard peculiarities of a Hoban story. In it, an 83-year-old man falls helplessly for the long-since-dead love interest from an old cowboy film. He persuades his friend to extract her from videotape by boiling her up with a couple of frogs in a suspension of disbelief: resurrected in black-and-white, she develops a hunger for colour that can only be sated with human blood. The toothy celluloid cowgirl goes on the rampage through Soho pursued by a poetry-quoting detective, a baseball-bat-toting jeweller and three increasingly anxious dirty old men.
Wow.
(Via robotwisdom.)
8:34:58 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 2/1/2006; 8:44:38 PM.
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