In article ,
Nad R wrote:

Billy wrote:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/art...y_of_maryland_
study_shows.html?cat=9
University of Maryland Study Shows Watching Fox News Makes You Ignorant
A study conducted by the University of Maryland gives credence to the
view that Fox News is anything but, and is really a propaganda machine
meant to further a right wing agenda.

My entire family except me are strong fundamental Christians. I am an
atheist with strong ties to science. Almost everyone in my family believes
in the Ptolemaic system where I believe in the Copernican system. I would
ask them if the Sun was the center of the solar system, they all stated the
earth was the center because they could see the sun move. And the bible
states that the Sun stood still, so how could it be the center if it did
not move. They laugh at me and laugh at the scientific types as being
stupid... It is a sad world... I am also out numbered.

Religious people refuse to believe in global warming, because the bible
states that God would not destroy the earth with water again and refuse to
believe that the poles are melting. They dismiss pollution because they
believe God will create a new planet for them when Jesus Christ returns.

I have two minister nephews that went to Christian universities at have
PHD's in theology and they believe in the crap listed above! They believe
in the literal translation of the bible. They all watch Glen Beck and
believe in the crap he spews. Religious people have no concept of logical
reasoning, they believe in what the religious authorities tell them without
question.

They all belong to the so called "archery" classes. But in reality the
teach kids as young as six years old to use guns. They teach them
propaganda like the government is going to take away their second amendment
rights. The list goes on and they are not the few they are in the many, in
the thousands.

This is one reason why I want to be alone. I cannot stand my family or
others like them.
It is strange, once progressive, Kansas is now part of the "Bible Belt".
I'm happy that they are consoled by their faith, but dismayed that they
disregard science, also in the name of faith.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/15/op...t.html?pagewan
ted=1
Believe It, or Not
By Nicholas D. Kristof
New York Times, Friday, August 15, 2003

Today marks the Roman Catholics' Feast of the Assumption, honoring the
moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So
here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as
likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in
evolution (28 percent).

Then the 'faithful" take a huge flying "leap of faith".



Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
by Charles P. Pierce

http://www.amazon.com/Idiot-America-...e/dp/076792615
3/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299029037&sr=1-1
(Available at better libraries near you.)


INTRODUCTION

Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005)

There IS some art—you might even say design—in the way
southern Ohio rolls itself into the hills of northern Ken-
tucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the
interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening can-
opy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron, a
small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near
Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the
king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no lit-
tle bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.

At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant,
there was an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the mid-
dle of it. Happy, smiling people trickled in through the gate on
a fine summer's morning, one minivan at a time. They parked
in whatever shade they could find, which was not much. They
were almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly.
Their cars came from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and
Illinois and from as far away as New Brunswick, in the Cana-


2 Introduction

dian Maritimes. There were elderly couples in shorts, suburban
families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle Re-
sistant and Stain Released. All of them wandered off, chattering
and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a
low-slung building that seemed to be the most finished part of
the complex.

Outside, several of them stopped to be interviewed by a
video crew. They had come from Indiana, one woman said, two
impatient toddlers pulling at her arms, because they had been
homeschooling their children and they'd given them this adven-
ture as a field trip. The whole group then bustled into the lobby
of the building, where they were greeted by the long neck of a
huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids ran past it and around the
corner, where stood another, smaller dinosaur.

"Which was wearing a saddle.

It was an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently,
this was a dinosaur that performed in dressage competitions
and stakes races. Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of
ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail
almost certainly would have worn a sturdy western saddle. This,
obviously, was very much a show dinosaur.

The dinosaurs were the first things you saw when you en-
tered the Creation Museum, the dream child of an Australian
named Ken Ham, who is the founder of Answers in Genesis, the
worldwide organization for which the museum is meant to be
the headquarters. The people here on this day were on a special
tour. They'd paid $149 to become "charter members" of the
museum.

"Dinosaurs," Ham said, laughing, as he posed for pictures
with his honored guests, "always get the kids interested."

AiG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story
of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which


Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005) 3

means, in this interpretation, and among other things, that di-
nosaurs co-existed with humans (hence the saddles), that there
were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had
enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the
Ark along with his wife, his sons, and his sons' wives, to say
nothing of the green ally-gators and the long-necked geese and
the humpty-backed camels and all the rest.

(Faced with the obvious question of how Noah kept his
300-by-30-by-50-cubit Ark from sinking under the weight of
the dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs
on the Ark were young ones, who thus did not weigh as much
as they might have.)

"We," announced Ham, "are taking the dinosaurs back from
the evolutionists!" And everybody cheered.

This was a serious crowd. They gathered in the museum's
auditorium and took copious notes while Ham described the
great victory won not long before in Oklahoma, where city offi-
cials had announced a decision—which they would later reverse,
alas—to put up a display based on Genesis at the city's zoo so
as to eliminate the discrimination long inflicted upon sensitive
Christians by the statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that deco-
rated the elephant exhibit. They listened intently as Ham went
on, drawing a straight line from Adam's fall to our godless pub-
lic schools, from Charles Darwin to gay marriage. He talked
about the great triumph of running Ganesh out of the elephant
paddock and they all cheered again.

The heart of the museum would take the form of a long
walkway down which patrons would be able to journey through
the entire creation story. The walkway was in only the earliest
stages of construction. On this day, for example, one young art-
ist was working on a scale model of a planned exhibit depicting
the day on which Adam named all the creatures of the earth.


4 Introduction

Adam was depicted in the middle of the delicate act of nam-
ing the saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a
woolly mammoth seemed on the verge of taking a nap.

Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam, this one full-sized,
was reclining peacefully, waiting to be installed. Eventually, he
was meant to be placed in a pool under a waterfall. As the figure
depicted a prelapsarian Adam, he was completely naked. He
also had no penis.

This seemed to be a departure from Scripture. If you were
willing to stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to include
baby Triceratops on Noah's Ark, as Ham did in his lecture, then
surely, since he was being depicted before his fall, Adam should
have been out there waving unashamedly in the paradisiacal
breezes. For that matter, what was Eve doing there, across the
room, with her hair falling just so to cover her breasts and her
midsection, as though in a nude scene from some 1950$ Swedish
art-house film?

After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their
lives, "the man and the woman were both naked, and they were
not ashamed." If Adam could sit there courageously unencum-
bered while naming the saber-toothed tiger, then why, six thou-
sand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some
- family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what
Scripture says is rightfully his, then why can't Charles Darwin
and the accumulated science of the previous hundred and fifty-
odd years take away the rest of it?

These were impolite questions. Nobody asked them here
by the cool pond tucked into the gentle hillside. Increasingly,
amazingly, nobody asked them outside the gates, either. It was
impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us all to college,
and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so
that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we


Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005) 5

would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dino-
saurs rigged to run six furlongs at Aqueduct and make the not
unreasonable point that it was batshit crazy, and that anyone
who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from
sharp objects and their own money. Instead, people go to court
over this kind of thing.

Dinosaurs with saddles?

Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?

Welcome to your new Eden.

Welcome to Idiot America.

» » »

THE title of this book very nearly was Blinking from the Ru-
ins, and it very nearly was merely a tour of the extraordinary
way America has gone marching backward into the twenty-first
century. Unquestionably, part of the process was the shock of
having more than three thousand of our fellow citizens killed by
medievalist murderers who flew airplanes into buildings in the
service of a medieval deity, and thereby prompted the United
States, born of Enlightenment values, to seek for itself the me-
dieval remedies for which the young country was born too late:

Preemptive war. Secret prisons. Torture. Unbridled, unaccount-
able executive power. The Christian god was handed Jupiter's
thunderbolts, and a president elected by chance and intrigue
was dressed in Caesar's robes. People told him he sounded like
Churchill when, in fact, he sounded like Churchill's gardener.
All of this happened in relative silence, and silence, as Earl Shor-
ris writes, is "the unheard speed of a great fall, or the unsounded
sigh of acquiescence," that accompanies "all the moments of the
descent from democracy."

That is why this book is not merely about the changes in


6 Introduction

the country wrought by the atrocities of September 11, 2001.
The foundations of Idiot America had been laid long before. A
confrontation with medievalism intensified a distressing pa-
tience with medievalism in response, and that patience reached
beyond the politics of war and peace and accelerated a momen-
tum in the culture away from the values of the Enlightenment
and toward a dangerous denial of the consequences of believing
nonsense.

Let us take a tour, then, of one brief period in the new cen-
tury; a sliver of time three years after the towers fell. A federally
funded abstinence program suggests that the human immuno-
deficiency virus can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama
legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay writers. The
Texas House of Representatives passes a bill banning sugges-
tive cheerleading at high school football games. And the nation
doesn't laugh at any of this, as it should, or even point out that,
in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is
like having Nebraska ban corn.

James Dobson, a prominent Christian conservative spokes-
man; compares the Supreme Court of the United States with the
Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative
preacher man, says that federal judges are a greater threat to the
nation than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from
the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States
should get on the stick and snuff the democratically elected
president of Venezuela. And the nation does not wonder, audi-
bly, how these two poor fellows were allowed on television.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into
a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida.
The Majority Leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a
diagnosis from a distance of eight hundred miles, relying for his
information on a heavily edited videotape. The majority leader


Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005) 7

of the House of Representatives, a former exterminator, argues
against cutting-edge research into the use of human embryonic
stem cells by saying "An embryo is a person. . . . We were all
at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Mu-
hammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him, or
points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot,
or the inventor of the baby-back rib.

And finally, in August 2005, the cover of Time—for almost
a century, the clear if dyspeptic voice of the American estab-
lishment—hems and haws and hacks like an aged headmaster
gagging on his sherry and asks, quite seriously, "Does God have
a place in science class?"

Fights over evolution—and its faddish camouflage, "intel-
ligent design," a pseudoscience that posits without proof or
method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that
supernatural sources must be studied as well—roil through
school boards across the country. The president of the United
States announces that he believes that ID ought to be taught
in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of
evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these con-
troversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that
ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up.



"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated
segment of our culture."



And there you have it.

Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things.
It is not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not
the place where people go to profit from the fact that people
believe in silly things. That America has been with us always—
the America of the medicine wagon and the tent revival, the
America of the juke joint and the gambling den, the America
of lunatic possibility that in its own mad way kept the original

8 Introduction

revolutionary spirit alive while an establishment began to cal-
cify atop the place. Idiot America isn't even those people who
believe that Adam sat down under a tree one day and named
all the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes.
They take time and spend considerable mental effort to con-
struct a worldview that is round and complete, just as other
Americans did before them.

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on
expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the
intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter teased out of the na-
tional DNA, although both of those things are part of it. The
rise of Idiot America today reflects—for profit, mainly, but also,
and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit
of power—the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of
knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the
notion that the people we should trust the least are the people
who know best what they're talking about. In the new media
age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or
a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the
worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert
is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse,
with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that
because there are two sides to every question, they both must
be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure
biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than
do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the
Church of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida.
Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and,
therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts
him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but no different from all the
rest of us, poor fool.

Dinosaurs with Saddles (August 2005) 9

How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21,
2005, a newspaper account of the intelligent design movement
contained this remarkable sentence:

"They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution
as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic
movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders
firmly on the defensive."

"A politically savvy challenge to evolution" makes as much
sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running some-
one for president on the Alchemy party ticket. It doesn't matter
what percentage of people believe that they ought to be able to
flap their arms and fly: none of them can. It doesn't matter how
many votes your candidate got: he's not going to be able to turn
lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only
real news in it is where it appeared.

On the front page.

Of the New York Times.

Consider that the reporter, one Jodi Wilgoren, had to com-
pose this sentence. Then she had to type it. Then, more than
likely, several editors had to read it. Perhaps even a proofreader
had to look it over after it had been placed on the page—the
front page—of the Times. Did it occur to none of them that
a "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently
ridiculous as an "agriculturally savvy" challenge to Euclidean
geometry would be? Within three days, there was a panel on the
topic on Larry King Live, in which Larry asked the following
question:

"All right, hold on, Dr. Forrest, your concept of how you can
out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true,
why are there still monkeys?"

And why, dear Lord, do so many of them host television
programs?
-----

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...02/15/AR200802
1502901.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR

The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; Page B01

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon
itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his
words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United
States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of
losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of
anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian
Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was
published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the
McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter
saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon
that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's
democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of
anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who
died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a
modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment
has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of
American culture.
(cont.)
----

If you like weekends, thank a union.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/3/7/michael_moore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw