It's still a long ways off, but at the moment, the frontrunners for the 2012 Republican candidacy for president are Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, and Mike Huckabee. What do they all have in common?


None of them "believe in" evolution. I'm guessing they also don't believe in vaccination or refrigerated food.

Seriously. This is the best the republicans can do right now. Barack Obama won because George Bush was too much of a lunatic. So what do they do? They shove forward more lunatics. They're just so goddamn out of touch. It's embarrassing to watch.

I mentioned to my dad a while ago that Mike Huckabee doesn't acknowledge evolution. Being a lifelong republican himself, he brushed it off and said it didn't matter, it wasn't an issue that was important. I let it drop from there, because you'll get more things done arguing with a rock than you will having a political discussion with my dad. Whether or not someone accepts evolution is an extremely important thing to me. If someone is a creationist, I judge him. It shows an unjustified and vehement distrust of science - and in 2009, science is what our world is. Like what Neil DeGrasse Tyson said in that video I posted not too long ago, if one is not scientifically literate, the lens in which he views the world is different. In that world, facts are "only an opinion." That person refuses to seek out the very knowledge that makes our universe so beautiful. He is knowingly limiting himself and his potential for self-fulfillment, and that is not a person whose opinion I can greatly respect.



"If I'm put on the spot, do I believe that it's basically just sort of an accident that this happened, this wonderful creation of ours? Or do I believe there was a creator behind it? Look, I'm going to go on the side that there's a creator behind it."

Either deny evolution, or you hate God. You can't have both. Bible.

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Quick - What things do these three congressmen all have in common?

Sheldon Whitehouse



Alan Grayson



Al Franken



Answer

1) They are all serving their first terms.
2) They take no shit.

Notice how all these so-called "Blue Dog Democrats" - the democrats who oppose health care reform - have been in Washington for decades? Notice how they were the same democrats with no fucking backbones during the Clinton years, and went right along with the republicans' deregulation which caused the current economic crisis? Notice how Barack Obama was a newcomer to Washington as well? Just thought I'd point all of this out.

This can't wait for next Sunday. Holy shit.

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oh god giant block of text big words

Have you ever wondered about the differences in brain activity between religious people and non-religious people? Well, thanks to the wonders of the internet... YOU HAVE AN ANSWER!!!!

Here's an experiment I found, led by America's less pissy and cooler version of Richard Dawkins - Sam Harris. This focuses on the differences between religious people and nonbelievers, in how they evaluate the truthiness of statements.

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects—fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers—as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For each trial either a religious statement (e.g., “Jesus Christ really performed the miracles attributed to him in the Bible”) or a nonreligious statement (e.g., “Alexander the Great was a very famous military leader”) appeared, and participants pressed a button to indicate whether the statement was true or false. Our stimuli were designed to produce roughly equal numbers of believed and disbelieved trials in each category.

And here's the kicker:

Our study was designed to produce high concordance on nonreligious stimuli (e.g., “Eagles really exist”) and high discordance on religious stimuli (e.g., “Angels really exist”). The fact that we found essentially the same signal maps for belief minus disbelief in both groups, on both categories of content, argues strongly for the content-independence of belief and disbelief as cognitive processes. Despite the fact that religious believers and nonbelievers accepted and rejected diametrically opposite statements in half of our experimental trials, the same neural systems were engaged in both groups throughout. This would seem to rule out the possibility that these results could be explained by any property of the stimuli apart from their being deemed “true” or “false” by the subjects in our study.

In other words - facts and beliefs are processed in the exact same way. From the brain's point of view, religious belief and empirical data are the same.

Then it's no wonder there's such a divide in this country in the reason-versus-faith debate. Each side believes with complete certainty in its own truths, and each side believes that the other's truth claims are ludicrous.

Additionally, Harris noted that the pleasure centers in the brain lit up when atheists disagreed with a Christian claim, and when Christians affirmed one -- meaning we enjoy the fight.

I really want to see the brain activity of Glenn Beck when he's claiming atheism is directly responsible for all evil. I'd bet anything they're the same ones that light up at the peak of orgasm.



HEY EVERYONE, LET'S GRAB THE TORCHES AND YELL AT SOMETHING WE DON'T UNDERSTAND

"How about this for the headline - Rio Gets Olympics."

"Are you retarded? That'll never do. Barack Obama is a poopy head. There. Much better. Oh, and put in a picture of Jesus getting struck by lightning, because Barack Obama hates Jesus."


Additionally, the cover to Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue has been released.


Here's an excerpt:

Corporate media. You betchya. Washington elitists. Maverick. I have a vagina. Wink.

This could spark a revolution. God help us if any of her supporters learn how to read.

heeeeeeeeeeeeee

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