Monday, July 03, 2006

How to be a Conservative Rob Hood over at the Conservative Voice gives the nine key things that conservatives and Christians believe. Evolution is a myth. Creation is real. God is real. It is still legal to say the word Jesus. The Earth is only around 6000 years old. Noah built an ark and the world was flooded which created the Grand Canyon. Millions of years is absurd. Global Warming is a myth and is totally junk science that should be trashed. Jesus was resurrected from the dead and will one day return to judge the world and create a new one while the one we live in now will be destroyed. Merry Christmas! Yes, it's still legal and above else, normal to say these words at CHRISTmas. Abortion is murder because God alone has the authority to create and take a life in the womb. Homosexuality is sin because God CREATED (again going back to creation) a woman for Adam, not another man. God condemns homosexuality and any sexual sin including sex outside of marriage. The Holy Bible is the divine, inspired, infallible Holy Word of God. The Second Amendment is in the constitution and should stay just as it is. Prosecute criminals, not victims! Some "interesting" chains of logic being shown here - Hood appears to have the logical equivalent of ADD. Note that Hood sees these as the key things that conservatives and Christians believe, not what conservative Christians believe. Apparently the unwritten premise is that you need to be a Christian to be a conservative in this country. Some basic reading here and here is, methinks, required. PZ rips him one here. Hood's expertiste in political theory, evolutionary biology, climatology, theology, geology and constitutional law comes from his associates degree in electronics technology, I guess. Quite the Renassiance man. Read the comments on this post... (Via Stranger Fruit.) 3:25:05 PM    comment []

Mark Twain's "The War Prayer" "O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen." --Mark Twain (Via Ariadne's Labyrinth.) 3:08:33 PM    comment []

Quote for the Day "A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake," - Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Taylor, June 4, 1798. (Via Daily Dish.) 3:00:10 PM    comment []

"Operation Swift" Was No Secret Let's try this again. As New York Times editor Bill Keller said on Face the Nation yesterday, and the Boston Globe reported last week, Operation Swift and the Administration's war on terror financing was no secret. From the Globe: Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. ``A lot of people were aware that this was going on," said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task..... Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database. Here is the U.N. report. Check out Paragraph 31: [Add: Link may not be operational this morning, it was fine last night.] (Via TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime.) 2:48:55 PM    comment []

Americans’ Shallow Agenda My summary of the Republican pre-election publicity stunt (discovered via Arse Poetica), focusing on what really matters to most Americans: forcing public schoolchildren to worship a Christian God every morning (HR 2389) barring condo associations from mitigating displays of patriotic fervor (HR 42) dissuading lawyers from defending cases regarding the establishment of Christianity as the state religion (HR 2679) preventing gay people from being as miserable as straight people (HJ Res 88) lecturing women about the pain their choices are causing the religious-right (HR 356) preventing asexual reproduction, because then what use would there be for men? (HR 1357) permitting ignorance of the law as an acceptable defense for gun traffickers (HR 5092) preventing Republicans from gambling online the money they should be donating to The Party (HR 4777) permanently restricting the government’s ability to fund expeditionary wars and finally, reaffirming the right of people to shoot at relief workers in times of natural disaster (HR 5013) Wait, no mention of the IRAQ or TERRORISM? I thought those were a few of the Republicans’ MOST FAVORITE things. This is no joke. I’ve linked to the text of all the bills, so you can read them and decide for yourself. (Via Link.) 2:38:46 PM    comment []

Prayer In Schools Jewish family flees Delaware school district's aggressive Christianity A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they're suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation. Both families are asking relief from "state-sponsored religion." The behavior of the Indian River School District board suggests the families' fears are hardly groundless. [. . .] Classmates accused Alex Dobrich of "killing Christ" and he became fearful about wearing his yarmulke, the complaint recounts. He took it off whenever he saw a police officer, fearing that the officer might see it and pull over his mother's car. When the family went grocery shopping, the complaint says, "Alexander would remove the pin holding his yarmulke on his head for fear that someone would grab it and rip out some of his hair." Read on... (Via Seeing the Forest.) 2:34:46 PM    comment []

Missile Balloons - Tie them to your car And go really fast on the highway. I bet you will get some weird reactions. (Via Random Good Stuff.) 12:51:55 PM    comment []

101 Best Sea Books Great list of sea literature. (via Metafilter) (Via Cynical-C Blog.) 12:17:22 PM    comment []

Support The Geneva Convention Kevin Drum has a great post up, short and to the point. Here it is in its entirety: THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS....Jonah Goldberg today: If Democrats want terrorists to fall under the Geneva Convention let them say so. My guess is most won't, if they're smart. Well, I'm a Democrat, and I'll say it: anyone we capture on a battlefield should be subject to the minimum standards of decency outlined in the Geneva Conventions. That includes terrorists. It's our way of telling the world that we aren't barbarians; that we believe in minimal standards of human decency even if our enemies don't. It's also a necessary — though not sufficient — requirement for winning this war. I hope other Democrats are smart enough, decent enough, and dedicated enough to beating terrorism to say so too. Hell, I'm not a Democrat and I will say it too! As one of Kevin's commenters says: If Republicans want the U.S. to no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions and want the U.S. to give formal notice that is withdrawing from the Geneva Conventions let them say so. What Goldberg is arguing is essentially that, altghough he spins it as something else. Let's see Republicans answer that question. Blogswarm, anyone? (Via NewsHog.) 9:50:41 AM    comment []

Flying Snake Home Page These snakes don't need a plane. Flying snakes are a small group of species of tree snakes that live in South and Southeast Asia. At rest they appear unremarkable, but on the move they're able to take to the air by jumping from the tree, flattening the entire body, and gliding or parachuting to the ground or another tree. 9:30:06 AM    comment []

Winning hearts and minds Wow. And I thought we had problems winning friends in the Middle East. Bush has even bungled one our traditionally best relationships. People in Britain view the United States as a vulgar, crime-ridden society obsessed with money and led by an incompetent president whose Iraq policy is failing, according to a newspaper poll. A few highlights, errr, lowlights: 77 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement that the US is "a beacon of hope for the world". 12 percent of Britons trust them to act wisely on the global stage. This is half the number who had faith in the Vietnam-scarred White House of 1975. 83 percent of those questioned said that the United States doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. (Surprised it's not higher. Who actually thinks Bush cares?) 70 percent of Britons like Americans a lot or a little. (Phew, there's hope for the future.) 1% consider Bush a "great leader" against 77 percent who deemed him a "pretty poor" or "terrible" leader. 1 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests. In answer to other questions, a majority of the Britons questions described Americans as uncaring, divided by class, awash in violent crime, vulgar, preoccupied with money, ignorant of the outside world, racially divided, uncultured and in the most overwhelming result (90 percent of respondents) dominated by big business. Now if they can only take a serious look at Blair, not to mention their own violent crime, rigid class divisions, corporate weasels (BP, Shell, etc) and rampant racism. We can only hope that in a few years, both of our countries are able to get back on track. (Via AMERICAblog.) 8:45:20 AM    comment []

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