Beauty-Scoring Evolution
Despite winning the big prize, evolution scores low on the scale at the Miss USA pageant:
Only Miss Massachusetts and [newly crowned Miss USA, Alyssa] Campanella stood up for Darwin.
Score one for Charles Darwin. Campanella, 21, of Los Angeles, who calls herself “a huge science geek,” says evolution should be taught in public schools.
The good news is that only three contestants were “flat out opposed”:
Miss Kentucky, home state of the Creation Museum; Miss Alaska who assures us “each of us was individually created by God for a purpose;” and Miss Alabama who doesn’t believe in evolution.
Which leaves 45 or so to be confused.
Go read the whole thing. Then make the decision: either (a) emigrate to a country that educates its beauty contestants or (b) ignore them entirely for the sake of your sanity.
(h/t Andrew Verdon—far left of the bottom picture—or available in video here)
Chris Hedges | This Hero Didn’t Stand a Chance
Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Chris Hedges writes: “Tim DeChristopher is scheduled to be sentenced in a Salt Lake City courtroom by US District Judge Dee Benson on July 26. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $750,000 fine for fraudulently bidding in December 2008 on parcels of land, including areas around eastern Utah’s national parks, which were being sold off by the Bush administration to the oil and natural gas industry. DeChristopher, who attends a Unitarian church in Salt Lake City, comes out of the religious left. This left, defined by Christian anarchists such as Dorothy Day, Philip Berrigan and his brother Father Daniel Berrigan, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King, takes a moral stance not because it is always effective but because it is right, because to live the moral life means that there is no alternative. This life demands a commitment to justice no matter how bleak the future appears. And what sustains DeChristopher is what sustained the religious radicals who went before him – faith.”
READ MORE
found the above on Reader Supported News. not sure the links will work.
point here is it’s bad politics to make enemies of your friends.
i don’t know if DeChristopher is a “creationist” or not… suspect not, but I agree with Sammy that if he “believes in God” he is in some sense a believer in special creation, and I submit that belief is not our enemy. we should not be its.
Wow, I’m glad we have nothing serious to worry about. :))
I still upset that hefner got stood up. Now THAT is a problem.
STR,
There is only the here and now.
Faith, belief, whatever can (and often does) get in between me (homo oeconomus) and God.
When there is no gulf.
This was not a beauty pageant , this was a “scholarship pageant.”
I missed it, were there accordian players and baton twirlers? I love accordians and baton twirlers.
apparently i am not the only one who has noticed:
FRANK L. CONZZELLI
Progressives Can’t Afford to Exclude the Working Classnewdeal20.org — Contemporary liberalism runs the risk of becoming isolated. But this threat does not solely come from the likes of Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck. It also comes from some self-described liberals whose behavior feeds into the right’s caricature of who we are. We risk becoming a group that restricts membership to a certain kind of liberal, one that is educated, not merely nonreligious but anti-religious, and one that is simultaneously smug and self-righteous. One of the dark risks in an open society is the ascendancy of the enemy/friend dichotomy: one helps only those seen as having similar goals, customs, and beliefs and opposes those who don’t. It doesn’t have to be this way.
In Ohio and Michigan those are known as Volvo-and-white-wine liberals.
As opposed to shot-and-a-beer blue collar union old time FDR Democrats.
coberly,
It’s not possible for Libs such as kharris and ken houghton to take seriously the beliefs of the unwashed masses.
A central feature of Liberal mind is that they are so much smarter than, and otherwise superior to, the average person. This is what justifies them being in charge of everything. To be a Liberal is to be this arrogant. They only condescendly indulge the “bitter clingers (TM)” for their votes, and to use as props to aquire more power.
Sammy
sadly, I think you are right about some of the people called Liberals. But not all of them. Or maybe even most of them. There is great danger in lumping everyone into one label and then calling them all the same.
Personally, I blame public education (is Harvard public?). You teach kids the important thing in life is to get all A’s. And if you do you are “smarter” than those who don’t. And if you are smarter, of course you know more than they do, without even having to think.
Now a lot of these all A kids are liberals because that has been the basic belief system of the education establishment for most of the years since WW2. It may have changed since I stopped paying attention. I certainly feel like “the kids today” are pretty ignorant louts. But I am told us old f ah, fathers, have always felt that way.
btw Sammy
as a person who listened to more Paul Harvey than I wanted to as a “working man,” I can tell you it’s not only “liberals” who have a smug sense of superiority.
but i want to say it was liberals who ended legalized racism in this country. and that was a good thing.
what they have done with it since has not been as intelligent as we might have hoped.
sammy & coberly
I think that you are both conflating the idea of a thoughtful and caring person with the identity of liberal. It may simply be that a greater number of such people may be identified by others as liberals only because of their caring and thoughtful attitude towards others. And to be caring and thoughtful may require a more curious mind which may be the underlying feature of a more intelligent person. Note that we can only identify intelligence by the amount of information that an individual is able to incorporate from their external world.
Maybe its the conservative that knows what he knows and knows what he knows is more valid than what others know. The intelligent people are genrally open to receiving and trying to understand new information. Is that the mark of a hard to the right conservative? You tell me.
rusty
that would explain why they don’t invite me to their parties
Jack
there is a reason they made Socrates drink the hemlock.
i was trying to give aid and comfort to Sammy who needs to know that I am more on his side than he thinks. And i was trying to needle my friends the “liberals” who are often a great deal more bigoted than they think.
so i end up making everyone hate me.
being a reasonably thoughtful child of the fifties, not to say forties, and one of those A students and all, i “believe” that reality has a liberal bias.
but i have met a number of Christians who are more thoughtful … and caring … than the liberals who go bananas about “evolution” and some other causes they haven’t thought about and can’t be bothered to care what other people think about.
i don’t think intelligence is the “amount of information” but how well they apply the information… or lack of it … that they do have to the problems they need to solve. in this respect “conservatives” are not just dumb, they are insane…. but i mean the people who are calling themselves conservatives these days, not the people who are a little careful about spending money and calling for government action. on the other hand, the liberals with whom i tend to agree about most “issues” have a knack for stepping on their own feet.