Ron Paul Doesn’t Believe In Evolution

Ron Paul has received a lot of attention on the internet this election season, even though he probably doesn’t even have dial-up. This is due to the tremendous support he has seen by web-savvy libertarians who like his no BS attitude, support of free-markets, and votes against the Iraq War.

However, after seeing Ron Paul explain that he doesn’t believe in EVOLUTION, I wonder if that support will continue. Paul WAS my top choice among Republicans, but if there is one single issue that will make me vote against a candidate, it is a denial of evolution. At this point in time, evolution is backed up by science to pretty the same extent as electricity and magnetism. If you don’t believe in evolution, then I don’t trust you with nuclear warheads. Period.

10 Year-Old Canadian Girl More Helpful To Afghans Than 61 Year-Old American President

In 2006, a ten year-old Canadian girl named Alaina Podmorow heard that in Afghanistan, many girls were not able to receive an education because there was not enough funding for female teachers. So Alaina got together with 18 other girls and formed Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan, a junior branch of the non-profit group Women for Women in Afghanistan. They organized fundraisers, potluck dinners, and even a silent auction.

To date the group has raised enough money to pay the salaries of 26 teachers in Afghanistan. Absolutely amazing. I won’t even taint this story by mentioning that if the US nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq were to have ANY chance of working whatsoever, these salaries should have been funded years ago by the US government. And that we are still providing approximately half the rebuilding funds it has been estimated are necessary in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on previous counter-insurgencies. And that as a result we are going to fail in Iraq and probably Afghanistan too. Oops.

Prothero Attacks “Intelligent” Design

David Prothero just recently his new book, “Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters”, in which he takes off the kid gloves and really hits the creationist/intelligent design movement hard. Some of his arguments are just priceless. He really hits the “intelligent” part of intelligent design, suggested that humans are, in fact, poorly designed.

For example, human backs and feet are not meant for bipedalism, male nipples serve no functional purpose, nor does the appendix, and the human genome is full of non-functioning DNA.

We Need To Teach Intelligent Design In Our Classrooms

I’ve been reading a lot about intelligent design, which is being pushed very hard by religious conversations who are uncomfortable with the idea that dinosaurs inhabited the earth before humans, and that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. Intelligent design says that evolution could not have happened without God, and that we should replace our biology text books with the book of Genesis.

I think that that is great. Science class would be way easier. The answer to every question is “God Did It.” I could totally get an A on that unit.

While we’re at it, we should see if we can’t challenge the theory of gravity. After all, gravity is a theory, not a fact. We cannot definitely prove that mass attracts other mass in a way that causes two objects to move towards each other, we can just observe that it always happens and come up with equations reflecting that behavior and then use those equations to create airplanes. But who’s to say that gravity isn’t such a confusing process that it could not have happened without God. Or that there’s no such thing as gravity at all, it’s just God making things fall downwards. It would make physics so much easier. Take a typical physics problem:

If an object of a mass of 500 kilograms is on top of a cliff with a height of 100 meters, and is thrown up in the air with a velocity of 20 meters per second, how long will it take for the object to hit the ground?

Answer: However long God decides it should take to fall.

Now of course, ignoring scientific truth in favor of biblical truth sort of gets in the way of actually developing things like the internal combustion engine and microchips. But I’m sure if the creationists get their way, and we teach scripture instead of science, pastors and preachers can develop new technologies way better than scientists and businessman ever did.

US Government Makes Me Embarassed To Be An American

Here’s what’s going on in Washington (D.C.) right now. Democrats are trying to pass their twelve spending bills. Bush has pledged to veto any bills with excessive spending because of our huge deficit, even though he didn’t veto the ones the Republicans passed with huge deficits. Some Republicans are jumping ship, not because they think it’s the right thing to do, but because they don’t want to lose votes. And state and local governments all want to get as much money from the government as possible.

Currently there is a 22-billion dollar chasm between what Bush wants and what the Democrats want. As a result, emergency spending bills have been passed to keep the government running until November 16. There are a few things about this whole mess that I find truly wrong:

1) Every single state and local government seems to feel like they are “entitled” to a piece of the federal government pie. Nevermind that we are running a massive deficit, they just want their money.
2) Democrats seem to be okay with running massive deficits. They were even willing to raise the debt limit back in March.
3) Bush is right that we should not be running a massive deficit. But the current one is his fault. He slashed taxes and ignored pork spending as ran unprecedent deficits for 6 years with a Republican Congress. And the 22-billion dollars he’s quibbled with the Democrats over is essentially meaningless on top of a 9 trillion dollar debt (each citizen’s share is about 29,000 dollars). Oh, and he invaded Iraq unnecessarily, and that’s costing several hundred billion dollars a year.

What really embarasses me is that we are running a 9 trillion dollar debt with no political desire anywhere to balance the budget. Considering we have a 13 trillion dollar economy, that is a dangerously high amount. Additionally, an increasing amount of our debt is being purchased by our countries, especially China. As a result, the dollar is plummetting, as is American economic superiority.

The national debt is currently going up by 1.48 billion dollars a day. But that’s not the worst part. Baby boomers are going to be hitting 65 really soon. And even though life expectancy is in the 80’s, retirement, Social security, and Medicare still kick in at 65. Entitlement programs already dominate the budget. If we can’t balance the budget now, what exactly are we going to do when the cost of our entitlement programs double?

Bill Clinton On Giving

Is the Woodland Park Zoo’s “Masai Journey” Exhibit Inherently Racist?

One of Seattle’s local NPR affiliates hosted a great discussion yesterday on the racial implications of the “Masai Journey” exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo.

The “Masai Journey” program features four Masai cultural interpreters from rural Kenya, where local people are heavily involved in conservations efforts to protect the animal life that their ancestors have coexisted with for so long. Some Seattle intellectuals find the program racist. They’re offended by the discussion of African human life alongside African animal life. They say that it sends children a confusing and potentially damaging message about black people.
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Let He Who Didn’t Smoke Pot in the 60’s Cast the First Stone

This summer marks the forty-year anniversary of the “Summer of Love,” or more aptly, the “Summer of Drugs” as Ted Nugent called it in his recent Op Ed piece. In 1967, the parents of today’s twenty-somethings were twenty-somethings themselves, and many of them were running around making fools of themselves with wild parties, unprotected promiscuous sex and profligate drug use.

That’s why Jeffrey Zaslow’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal about my generation’s sense of entitlement pisses me off so very much. In it, he relies on the same tired complaint uttered by generation after subsequent generation, “kids today!”

He opens his article with a quote from Louisiana State University finance professor Don Chance about how very entitled his students feel. Every semester, Chance says, his students make “a pilgrimage to his office” to grade grub for A’s they haven’t earned.

Zaslow then makes a huge, unsubstantiated leap from one professor’s experience to blaming Mr. Rogers for a whole generation’s supposed sense of entitlement. Zaslow argues that by telling us that we are all special just the way God made us, Mr. Rogers set us up for a lifetime of believing that the world owes us a living.

Zaslow goes on to make a number of excellent points about parenting. He says that kids should be held accountable when they behave badly, instructed to call adults by their last names instead of their first names, and made to listen to adult conversations without interrupting. I agree with all of these parenting practices. But I still find Zaslow’s assertion that there is something wrong with my generation as a whole — based on anecdotal evidence — to be profoundly misguided and offensive.

But as long as we’re relying on anecdotal evidence alone, let me run down the list of kids today that I know:

• Jeff Sommers, an officer in the Marine Corps, Jeff is on his third tour of duty in Iraq.
• Elliot J. Partin is also in the Marine Corps. Elliot is about to ship out for his third tour of duty in Iraq.
• Andrew Sparrow, my beloved fiancé who spends his life preparing today’s high schoolers for the flat world challenges they will soon face. He could be making bank as a computer programmer. Instead, he teaches and I love him for it.
• Ellie and Dan Swanson. Recently married, Ellie and Dan are honeymooning in Costa Rica during their final summer vacation before returning to medical school. Incidentally, they’re staying in hostels, not four-star resorts.
• Mark Melief, a good friend of mine who recently put his whole life back together from scratch. Instead of pouting about the tough times, Mark finds the silver lining and keeps on slugging.
• Nicole Cotes, recently returned to the Pacific Northwest after teaching underprivileged children in Chicago for a year.
• And on…and on…and on…

My generation are no slouches, Mr. Zaslow. Many of us are just as tough and hardworking as you and Dr. Chance. I’ll admit freely that we don’t measure up to our grandparents’ generation. But there’s absolutely no way that anyone born after 1940 has any right to complain about our supposed inadequacies as a group. And you certainly have no right to blame whatever sense of entitlement we do have on Mr. Rogers. After all, his show wasn’t on the air when your generation was out running around stoned out of their minds and trying to fix the world by throwing flowers at the Russians.

I’m Too Excited Too Sleep

Tomorrow is the last day of school. As a teacher, this is the equivalent of Christmas when you’re seven. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my job. The kids are great at my school, and I am bummed that I have to have a new group next year. I’d love to keep the same ones.

But two and a half months paid vacation is something that generally makes you a little bit excited. Even if you are doing other work (landscaping, programming, etc.), it’s pretty freaking sweet.

Claremont McKenna College Acts Like a Spoiled Brat, Won’t Share Toys, Tickets to Clinton Speech

Recently, former president Bill Clinton came to speak at Claremont McKenna College. CMC is a part of the Claremont Consortium, which is where I went to school. Specifically, I’m a Pomona alum. The two schools do have a rivalry, and obviously this may indicate a bias on my part. Nevertheless, I see a disturbing trend with regard to CMC.

For his recent speech, President Clinton was kind enough to waive his usual speaking fee, with the assumption that most of the audience would be students. That’s why the decision on the part of the CMC administration to exclude students from all the other colleges from participating in the event was — in a word — sucky.

As Pomona student Jenn Wilcox wrote:

This event seems like a slap in the face to the concept of an educational consortium. The whole point of shared resources (like a large auditorium located on Pomona’s campus…) is that they can be accessed by the entire community, not one college desperately trying to draw more applications and climb up the ranking system.

Yes, President Clinton was CMC’s speaker. And yes, it was absolutely appropriate that they allocated enough tickets to make sure that all of CMC’s students and faculty were able to see Mr. Clinton speak. But the rest of the tickets should have been made available to the other students in the consortium, rather than given away to donors.

Claremont McKenna consistently scores lower in the college rankings that Pomona. Recent crises of leadership further underscore serious issues with the college. Unsurprisingly, CMC’s students take it to heart. They walk around with a chip on their shoulders when it comes to Pomona. In one particularly egregious incident, they defaced a priceless mural belonging to Pomona College.

With this most recent act of disrespect to the entire consortium, it appears that the destructive rivalry between the two schools has finally found its way into CMC’s administration. By way of a solution, I suggest that CMC President Pam Gann be fired. Obviously, the school needs much sounder leadership.

Abstinence Only = More Abortion

Deborah has a great post about a recent U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report saying what we all knew already: abstinence-only education doesn’t work!

“Can we stop wasting our money already?” she asks.

My sentiments exactly.

Student Says Bulk of Virginia Tech Shootings Were Easily Preventable, I Agree

Today’s tragic murders at Virginia Tech started at about 7:30 a.m. EST when gunfire erupted inside West Ambler Johnston Hall, which is one of the school’s biggest residential buildings.

On the Virginia Tech network public discussion forum at Facebook student Ben Hair wrote:

They could have prevented most of this…shooting at 730 in WAJ, classes don’t start til 8, why couldn’t they cancel classes for the day…SOMEONE WAS SHOT AND IT TURNS OUT THEY DIED…I THINK THATS GROUNDS TO CANCEL CLASS RATHER THAN SENDING OUT AN EMAIL THAT SAYS USE CAUTION AND REPORT ANYTHING TO POLICE. They could have save almost 20 lives and 20 injuries if they just decided to cancel class right away.

Update: Here is a campus map that I got from CNN:

As you can see, West Ambler Johnston Hall is all the way across campus from Norris Hall where the bulk of the shootings took place two hours later. With two hours and a sprawling campus between the first and second incidents, I want to know just how the latter half of this tragedy wasn’t prevented.

Update 1:45 p.m. : College officials are saying that they had reason to believe that the first shooting in the residence hall was domestic in nature and that the shooter was on the run. Evidence at the scene led campus police to believe that the shooter in West Ambler Johnston was leaving campus and likely leaving the state. They say they do not yet know whether the shootings at Norris Hall were linked to the shootings at West Ambler Johnston.

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Did Blogging Moot the “Difference Between Lightening and the Lightening Bug?”

I used to spend more time revising my writing. My dad often said that, “writing is re-writing.” This held true for me throughout most of my student life. The first drafts of my school papers often contained unfinished ideas. When I re-read them, I immediately saw that more needed to be said. So I unpacked and reorganized them thoroughly before handing in the assignment.

Now, I must admit that I didn’t give every school paper equal attention. Some topics were just plain boring to write about. But writing assignments on subjects that captured my imagination received the benefit of many red pen strokes before the professor got a crack at them.

All of this changed after college. Mark Twain famously wrote that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug.” But what happens to that noble idea when the fast-paced world of Internet media urges you to settle for the almost right word because you don’t have five minutes to mull the difference between “ineffable” and “inarticulable?”

Blogging - especially blogging for business as I do, is a get-in, get-out, get-on with it art. It revolves around brevity: both in the time spent writing and in the prose itself. It allows for, and even embraces the publication of unfinished thoughts. The revision process happens in the comments and in later blog posts on the same topic.

But what does this say about the quality of our writing? Is being a good writer relative to the medium in which you publish your work, or will the advent of easy personal publishing platforms make good writing less relevant? John Milton might not have been a very good blogger. But could Robert Scoble give us Paradise Lost?

Like my father before me, I write for a living. But unlike him, I spend next to no time revising my verbal concoctions. In that sense, blogging has taken something away from me and I plan to get back. From now on, I will take the time to revise my work before I send it out into the ether. Starting now.

PS: I know that the use of “moot” as a verb is considered an “uneducated” usage, but language is fluid and I like the way it works. If anyone else knows of a better word for, “to make irrelevant,” I’d love to hear it.

On Fearmongering and the Internet

Sometimes, I can’t tell whether Senator “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AK) is a political animal preying on people’s worst fears about the Web or just a doddering old fool whose Senate tenure has outlived his ability to understand and respect change.

Either way, his latest call to ban Wikipedia and other interactive Web tools from institutions that receive Federal funding (think libraries, schools, etc.) really pisses me off.

Robert Scoble said it best today:

Hint to Ted: our society should be looking to give our kids MORE access to knowledge, not less. The trick is in giving kids skills to separate the wheat from the chaff. Not trying to remove the whole kaboodle.

We give kids sex ed in health classes because we don’t want them getting pregnant or diseased due to bad decision making and poor information. Maybe it’s high time that kids were taught about online safety during their computer classes. After all, not all parents are Web-savvy enough to give their kids the best and most accurate information about how predators leverage online technologies to search for prey. It’s a good thing for them to be learning in school.

A question for all you lawyers out there: Given the digital divide in America, couldn’t banning blogs/wikis/social networks from public libraries and schools create such a disparity in freedom of speech that Stevens’ legislation could be unconstitutional?

I Hate Ralph Nader

I mean REALLY hate him. Mr. Nader recently announced he is considering another bid for the Presidency in 2008. Is this guy completely insane? Does he actually think he can win? Does he actually think he can accomplish something other than potentially costing Democrats the election!?

Flashback to 2000. I can understand Ralph Nader running. Every stoned college student and hippie beatnik in the country cheered him on as he toured the country. My friends prayed he’d somehow win as they took bong-rips. But then reality struck, and he got a meager 1 percent of the vote. And that one percent is the reason we are f*cking Iraq, the reason our education system is going down the tubes, and the reason we have a goddamn budget deficit that would make Ronald Reagan rollover in his grave.

If Ralph Nader wanted to change the system, or even if he just wanted to feel important, he should have ran for Congress in some hippie liberal district. He could win any place that is dominated by college students and tree-huggers. That’s at least 30 districts. But in running for President all he’s doing is wasting time and Democratic votes. Everyone knows he can’t win. You can’t just create a viable third party in one election cycle. You start small and work your way up.

I just can’t understand what Ralph Nader thinks he’s doing. There is NO ONE at this point who thinks that Al Gore would be just as bad (from a Green point-of-view) as George W. Bush. We ALL know that Ralphie ruined the past six years of our lives. It’s his damn fault the polar bears are dying. And yet, he still continues to run for the Presidency. If he comes through Seattle I’m going to throw eggs at him. Ralph, if you’re reading this, don’t run for the Presidency anymore. You’ve done enough damage to this country, and the rest of the world. Idiot.

P.S. I don’t mean to go on a rant, but I hate Ralph Nader more than anyone else. I don’t usually hate people, but I really hate Nader. I feel like screaming at him. The Iraq War, that’s your fault. I hope you know that. Oh, and if Bush invades Iran, that’s your fault too.

In the State of Washington, Marriage is ALL About Children

I love this most recent challenge to the “marriage is for procreation” crowd. In much the same way that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster took on the anti-evolution crowd, the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance has put forth a bill that would require married couples to have children or face an annulment. Under the initiative, anyone who could not have children would not be issued a marriage license.

The most common arguments against gay marriage, abortion, and evolution in the public school are all cleverly formed bluffs to hide the real truth about fundamentalist Christianity’s agenda for America: turning their narrow moral views into laws that bind us all. Initiatives like 957 expose the truth by calling those groups’ bluff. Hilarious!

My Sister is Turning Into a “Fuzzy European Liberal”

My sister Suzy has a new blog. It’s pretty cool. In it, she blogs about what she is learning in her semester abroad. She also writes that, after living in Britain, America’s public health care and education systems are pathetic compared to Britain’s, and claims its the responsibility of the government to take care of people. Awww.

Now, I’m a very liberal guy. I think we should legalize everything from prostitution to pot to polygamy, and leave Iraq tomorrow (bye-bye). But what REALLY irks me is what sister calls “soft” liberals (and what I call fuzzy liberals), who rag on America, because we have problems that other countries have solved.

America is the greatest country ever. Sorry we don’t have universal free health care, but the US is huge. It’s a lot easier to have free health care when your country is the size of Rhode Island and full of 19-generation white wealthy bankers and chocolate makers (screw you Switzerland). Take a look at China, India, and Russia’s social welfare programs and compare them to ours.

And please don’t rag on America’s public education in comparison to other countries, because it’s better than any other countries. Our scores may not be the best, but we turn out inventors who churn out more patents than all our Europe combined. The iPod, computer, GOOGLE, the Wright Brothers; when it comes to inventions, discoveries, and patents, America is far and away the best. What’s the last thing Europe invented or discovered. Oh, that’s right, America. And since then we’ve been kicking their ass.

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