“What if this crisis was just a prelude - a precursor to a much greater threat - one that could possibly cost millions of lives? The current economic crises was based on the idea that we can live and consume based on credit - and the belief that we can continue to do so unabated as long as we steadfastly ignore the facts and spread the risks widely enough. That idea didn’t fly. Yet its seems that humanity still seems to believe that the things that have failed in the monetary economy, will, in the long run, still apply to the material reality of our world. Quite simply, because nature will not present us with a bill for the resources upon which we depend for our very survival.”
“The fact that during the current U.S. election campaign, this insane exploitation of nature has been combined with the dim-witted rejection of scientific evidence being propagated by promoters of one side (of course, by the “Christian” Republican side) is actually quite logical. It’s no coincidence that it is precisely those people who have paved the way for the economic collapse that are still of the opinion that as long as we pray hard enough, everything is possible. But no prayer or contingency plan will contain an ecological collapse once it begins.”
Exasperation over the standard of debate in the U.S presidential race is definitely global, and in ‘Old Europe,’ this exasperation centers on how sex and religion insert themselves into a debate that ought to be about better public policy.
“What I don’t understand is all the fuss about Sarah Palin. She, the clueless, internationally inexperienced Governor of the pygmy state of Alaska has been chosen by John McCain to be the Vice President of the United States, and all the media can get animated over is the fact that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is expecting a child?”
“Why should I be at all interested in their husbands or wives, their mothers or children?
What does it matter if Palin’s husband was driving drunk, if her teenage daughter’s sex is good or bad, or whether Barrack Obama’s stepfather taught him to box in Indonesia? Why during an out-sized mass-gathering in Denver, do I have to witness Obama’s two little daughters standing in the spotlight waving like little dolls whose batteries are about to run out? Why should whether John McCain and his wife Cindy are happy be relevant?
“As far as I’m concerned, Sarah Palin’s children might not have sex at all, John McCain could be single and Obama’s children could play at home with their slot cars. They could all be bad husbands or wives, frequent brothels and subsequently lie to their families about it.”
It seems that both in and out of the United States, the things that concern people the most about Sarah Palin - John McCain’s running mate - is her age, his age, and Palin’s fundamentalist Christian upbringing.
What lessons - if any -can one glean about the direction of the Republican Party from its embrace of an ultra-conservative working mother with a daughter pregnant out of wedlock? According to Jordan Mejias of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it may indicate a change in course best highlighted by harkening back to the infamous Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown episode of 1992.
The creationists deserve a few props here. Since the Dover loss they’ve switched strategies away from claiming that ID is science and are instead focusing on “academic freedom”. That the concept of academic freedom doesn’t generally apply at the elementary and secondary levels seems to be of no consequence. The Louisiana legislature has passed, by a veto-proof majority, a bill that protects the “academic freedom” of teachers to teach creationism as science. […]
As a soon-to-be-resident of Louisiana, it has me wondering what I’ll be walking into. This will do nothing to help the image of the state, or of the state’s high school graduates. Indeed, I can see it making the more prestigious schools avoid Louisiana graduates and it will probably discourage the best professors from working at Louisiana’s finer schools, such as Tulane and Loyola.
Furthermore, if Governor Jindal signs the bill, as opposed to just letting it become law without his signature, it will reduce his chances of being McCain’s VP pick.
Think Progress quotes from Jindal’s appearance on Face the Nation Sunday:
I don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them. … I want them to see the best data. I personally think human life and the world we live in wasn’t created accidentally. I do think that there’s a creator. … Now the way that he did it, I’d certainly want my kids to be exposed to the very best science. I don’t want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from them because of political correctness.
Newt Gingrich was on that Face the Nation program singing Jindal’s praises; Steve Benen parses Gingrich’s arguments and hopes McCain goes ahead and picks him as VP.
Michael Weiss has a good piece in Slate on the problem with using scientists’ words to support your religious beliefs. Read it!
According to a gallup poll, the majority of Republicans does not believe the theory of evolution to be true. Quite remarkable, one could say, is that “even among non-Republicans there appears to be a significant minority who doubt that evolution adequately explains where humans came from.”
Funny enough, “about a quarter of Americans say they believe both in evolution’s explanation that humans evolved over millions of years and in the creationist explanation that humans were created as is about 10,000 years ago.”
Some results: Now thinking about how human beings came to exist on Earth, do you, personally, believe in evolution, or not?
Yes: 49%
No: 48%
Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years
Definitely true: 39%
Probably true: 27%
Probably false: 16%
Definitely false: 15%
Furthermore, 38% said that they believed that “beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” against 43% of Americans who said to believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so].”
Furthermore, 30% of Republicans believe in evolution, against 68% who believe that God created mankind in his its present shape. Those numbers are 61% and 37% for Independents respectively; and 57% and 40% for Democrats.
I have to admit that I find the results of this poll to be utterly amazing. In Europe, especially in the Netherlands - I am quite sure - the far majority of people have accepted evolution as the explanation of how mankind came into existence. Of course, there are Christians like me who believe that God guided the process, but most Dutch Christians do - as far as I know - believe that mankind evolved.
This means, of course, that it does not hurt Republican candidates one bit when they say that they do not believe in evolution. It might hurt them with Independents, sure, but if they want to appeal to ‘the base’ it is probably best for them to say that they believe that God created mankind 10,000 years ago and that the theory of evolution is false.
