Month: February 2009
Does the Fact That We are Getting Stupider Disprove Darwin?
Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. For the 34 percent of you in a recent Gallup poll who didn’t know who Darwin was, and for the 10 percent of you in the same survey who guessed wrong, Darwin is the guy who wrote “On the Origin of Species.” The book, detailing the scientist’s observations during a five-year expedition most notably to the Galapagos Islands, was published in 1859 and has been taken as an assault on Christian creation myths ever since.
In addition to showing that most people are too stupid to get the facts straight before they object to them, the Gallup poll revealed other alarming trends. Answers directly correlated with factors of age, education, and church attendance.
Do you, personally, believe in the theory of evolution?
All respondents
| Yes | 39% |
| No | 25% | No opinion either way | 36% | No answer | 1% |
High school education or less
| Yes | 21% |
| No | 27% | No opinion either way | 52% |
College graduate
| Yes | 53% |
| No | 22% | No opinion either way | 26% |
Respondents age 18 — 34
| Yes | 49% |
| No | 18% | No opinion either way | 33% |
Respondents age 34 — 54
| Yes | 39% |
| No | 24% | No opinion either way | 37% |
Respondents age 55 and up
| Yes | 31% |
| No | 30% | No opinion either way | 38% |
Attend church weekly
| Yes | 24% |
| No | 41% | No opinion either way | 35% |
Attend church at least monthly
| Yes | 30% |
| No | 26% | No opinion either way | 44% |
Attend church seldom or never
| Yes | 55% |
| No | 11% | No opinion either way | 34% |
Quote du Jour
Banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1802
Offered as a Public Service for Valentine’s Day
OK, it’s overly long and not all that great a song, but it’s kind of funny and it’s true — some sex toys are toxic and many are not regulated at all.
Homeless Woman Handed the Mic at Obama Meeting
The extraordinary thing about this clip from Obama’s recent town hall in Florida is not his reaction to a homeless woman who wants, not a car or a park, but a kitchen and a bathroom for her family. No, the extraordinary thing is the fact that she was allowed in the room. Can you imagine someone like this being at a George W. Bush or John McCain or Sarah Palin — or any other Republican — event? And being on the front row? Could not happen.
Big ol’ h/t to Steve Schale.
California GOP Gov. Candidate Meg Whitman Says ‘Faith’ Drives Her Opposition to Gay Marriage
On Monday, former EBay CEO Meg Whitman, the one-time Mitt Romney supporter who was also on John McCain’s list of possible vice presidential candidates before he chose Sarah Palin, gave her first interview since she announced last week that she is running for California governor.
Opposition to gay marriage might not hurt her chances – but Whitman’s support of offshore drilling in California could be the kiss of death for her campaign
Asked by the reporter for the Los Angeles Times to defend her support of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that repealed the right of gays to marry in the state, the New York transplant, who made her fortune in the gay-friendly Bay Area, said her opposition to gay marriage was a “matter of personal conscience and my faith.”
So is she a Mormon, a Catholic, an evangelical Protestant or an orthodox Jew?
No. She’s a Presbyterian.
While the Presbyterians are debating gay rights, and the church does not sanction gay unions, the church as not undergone the sort of upheaval that has roiled the usually stodgy Episcopal Church, where anti-gay schismatics have left the U.S. diocese to join the African Anglican church that advocates imprisoning gays.
Sorry. Just does not pass the smell test. Or rather, it stinks to high heaven of a purely tactical move to try to garner votes of GOP primary voters. Indeed, Whitman’s support of Proposition 8 was a surprise among her former employees and colleagues in the Silicon Valley, according to an article two months ago in Gawker’s Valleywag:
Ted Haggard: ‘Heterosexual with Issues’ Or Bisexual without a Clue?
Disgraced megachurch preacher Ted Haggard is back. The poster boy of sexuality-based self-hatred is the subject of a new HBO documentary, The Trials of Ted Haggard,” by Alexandra Pelosi. He is also the object of new allegations of sordid misconduct back when he was still the spiritual leader of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado, as well as the president of the National Evangelical Association and a frequent visitor to the Bush White House.
“Are we going to be godly, or are we going to be bad?”
– Ted Haggard to Grant Haas
– Ted Haggard to Grant Haas
The charges come from Grant Haas, 22, who says he sought counseling from Haggard three years ago after having been kicked out of a Bible college because he was gay. But based on Haas’ description, it appears Haggard’s “counseling” was more about how to live as a closeted but still sexually active right-wing Christian on the down low than it was, thankfully, about “reparative therapy” or any of the other so-called Christians’ anti-gay hokum.
In an extensive radio interview last week with pioneering gay activist Michaelangelo Signorile, Haas described a world behind the scenes at New Life that sounds more like Saturday night at Disco-era bathhouse than everyday goings-on at a megachurch.
First of all, Pastor Ted was even more of a hot mess than was known previously. For example, he told Haas that he frequently indulged in a lethal cocktail of drugs he called the “party formula”:
HAAS: [Haggard] explained that the “party formula” usually involved taking crystal-meth, poppers, Viagra, renting pornography and jerking off alone or with others. He told me that he knew a lot of people who were into this type of activity and found it very enjoyable.
Haggard also revealed that his favorite porn film was “Greek Holiday.” And, venturing way deep into TMI territory, he informed Haas that he owned a dildo that was cast from his own, well, self, which he’d nicknamed “Ted 2.”
According to Haas, Haggard and other male staffers ran a program called “Twenty-four-Seven,” which Signorile describes as…
Quote du Jour
God wants me to serve.
— Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman (R), quoted by Smart Politics, on why he’s going to win his court case over the recount in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race.
Twitter Me Croton!
I understand that Twitter is the hottest new social media thingy going, even though it doesn’t make any money — except for goo-gobs of venture capital.
I’m on Twitter —marginally. I mean, there are these people I don’t know who “follow” me, which is creepy, and in return, I “follow” other people I don’t know, which is less creepy but still somehow unfulfilling. And I’m a big-idea kind of guy, so 140 characters is a real struggle — it’s not even a decent introductory sentence’s worth of words.
OK, so maybe I don’t “get” Twitter the way I “get” LinkedIn, but I read about something in the Miami Herald this weekend that I truly believe would enable me to finally “grok” Twitter. It’s called Botanicalls, and for just $99 you can get tweets from your tulips, messages from your mums, IMs from your impatiens. Of course, you have know how to solder and do some computer programming, so it’s not exactly a turn-key product.
Jill Rosen, the reporter who wrote the story for the Baltimore Sun, recorded this heart-breaking series of tweets from the croton in her office that is rigged with a Botanicall outfit.
On Friday, she received this message from her plant: “Water me, please.” But Rosen was too busy to check her Twitter account, and went home for the weekend, leaving her vexed vegetable untended. The pitiful perennial sent another message over the weekend: “URGENT!” But Rosen was too busy having fun to heed the desperate, all-capped and emphatically punctuated cry for help from her suffering shrub.
On Monday morning, though, when a chastened Rosen finally read the tweets from her parched plant, she raced to give the dessicated croton a drink of water, after which the plant really laid it on thick with a snarky “Thank you for watering me!”
Who needs that kind of crap from a plant when I’ve got friends on Facebook whose inane messages and SuperPokes I ignore for weeks.
I think I’ll save the $99 and just follow Rosen’s croton on Twitter.
