Romney has chosen Paul Catholic Randroid “Tax Cuts for the Rich” Ryan for his running mate? I guess the American Plutocracy has decided there is no point in pretending anymore.
Everyone go congratulate Chris Rodda. She’s been battling that dishonest dirtbag David Barton for a long time, and now he’s getting his comeuppance (although without acknowledgment of her contribution): NPR slammed him hard, and now his publisher has yanked his latest book off the shelves for it’s crappy scholarship.
Here’s a taste of his sloppy knowledge of history. Did you know the founding fathers already had the creation/evolution debate? And decided in favor of creationism?
I’m going to try a different approach to Sam Harris’s accusations. Since one of the problems with grappling with the objectionable ideas Harris has thrown out is that they’re fuzzily presented and laced with caveats to hide behind, I’ll just state my position as clearly as I can on a couple of the contentious issues, and why I think that way. Maybe contrasting them with Harris’s arguments will at least clarify the differences.
It’s going to be so much fun for them. “Hi, little girl. Piss in this cup for me.”
Although they never seem to get around to catering to my fantasies. “Hey, mature and intelligent woman, the law says you have to play with my squid.” Maybe if they did, more people would sit up and question the invasion of privacy.
I haven’t even glanced at that awful Instahack’s blog in years, and now I am reminded why. Here’s what he has to say about the recent murders at a Sikh temple:
The 6 Sikh temple shooting victims identified; Satwant Singh Kaleka died trying to fight off shooter. Heroic. But it’s too bad he didn’t have a gun.
What? So it’s Kaleka’s fault because he wasn’t carrying a gun? In a temple?
In Instahack’s world, are we supposed to be armed everywhere?
In an obvious ploy to appear erudite and well-read, Mitt Romney recently cited Jared Diamond to support his ill-informed opinions on culture. It’s really a bad idea to misrepresent a living scientist, because they tend to come back and expose you as a dishonest fraud.
It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)
Oops. Didn’t read the book, huh? I’ve had a few student papers like that.
The real stinger is in the conclusion.
Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.
Too often, he softballs truly odious guests on his show, and sometimes he practices that annoying false equivalency, but I have to admit, he’s exactly right here.
Abdi Jeylani Malaq Marshale must have been an awesomely brave person. He lived in Somalia, he was a comedian, he made fun of Islamists, and he worked to dissuade young people from joining the insurgency.
So someone shot and killed him.
And it’s not just comedians!
So far this year, at least one Somali journalist has been targeted and killed each month.
I would have thought that it was a relief, a minor bit of unconcern, that Mitt Romney nominally supports evolution (he’s one of those waffly theistic evolutionists, so he doesn’t really…but at least he wouldn’t be brazenly contradicting all of the evidence). But there’s a potential problem looming: who will he pick for vice president? Who does he turn to advice on education? Ken Miller discusses the situation, and points out that his key advisor on education reform and potential VP pick is…
Bobby Jindal, creationist governor of Louisiana.
Jindal has an elite résumé. He was a biology major at my school, Brown University, and a Rhodes scholar. He knows the science, or at least he ought to. But in his rise to prominence in Louisiana, he made a bargain with the religious right and compromised science and science education for the children of his state. In fact, Jindal’s actions at one point persuaded leading scientific organizations, including the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to cross New Orleans off their list of future meeting sites.
What did Jindal do to produce a hornet’s nest of “mad scientists,” as Times-Picayune writer James Gill described them? He signed into law, in Gill’s words, the “Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), which is named for what it is designed to destroy.” The act allows “supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials” to be brought into classrooms to support the “open and objective discussion” of certain “scientific theories,” including, of course, evolution. As educators who have heard such coded language before quickly realized, the act was intended to promote creationism as science. In April, Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Science at Louisiana State University, testified before the Louisiana Senate’s Education Committee that two top scientists had rejected offers to come to LSU because of the LSEA, and the school may lose more scientists in the future.
And now Jindal is poised to spend millions of dollars of state money to support the teaching of creationism in private schools.
But don’t panic! Jindal is currently just one possibility for VP, and there are plenty of other Republicans Romney might pick…like Nikki Haley, or Rick Santorum, or Michele Bachmann…
OK, panic. There’s no way we’ll be happy with anyone he chooses.
