Aaaand guess how many of these right-wing conservatives are against?

/Captain Obvious

>> ^peggedbea:

this is how you decrease the number of abortions:
1. free comprehensive, scientifically sound, sex education to all
2. readily available, easily accessible, very affordable, guilt-free access to contraception in every community
3. counseling
4. streamline the adoption process to make it an actual option to EVERY sane, loving adult with the means to care for a child. i'd adopt a 3rd baby in a heart beat if it didn't cost $40k and they let single women of modest income do it. i have the means to support another child, but i don't have $40k laying around.
5. make health care a right
6. revisit public policies that actually alleviate poverty
7. equal pay for women
8. make legitimate vocational schools as affordable as community college and/or offer more grant-eligible vocational programs within community colleges... i know from experience that learning a trade can offer as much opportunity for single mothers as it can for any young man.
guess how many of these abortion-preventing solutions planned parenthood has a hand in???

this is how you decrease the number of abortions:

1. free comprehensive, scientifically sound, sex education to all
2. readily available, easily accessible, very affordable, guilt-free access to contraception in every community
3. counseling
4. streamline the adoption process to make it an actual option to EVERY sane, loving adult with the means to care for a child. i'd adopt a 3rd baby in a heart beat if it didn't cost $40k and they let single women of modest income do it. i have the means to support another child, but i don't have $40k laying around.
5. make health care a right
6. revisit public policies that actually alleviate poverty
7. equal pay for women
8. make legitimate vocational schools as affordable as community college and/or offer more grant-eligible vocational programs within community colleges... i know from experience that learning a trade can offer as much opportunity for single mothers as it can for any young man.

guess how many of these abortion-preventing solutions planned parenthood has a hand in???

He's right, I've seen her in that movie... Nailin' Palin or sth: I thought she found her vocation.

>> ^PHJF:
K-12's only purpose is to prepare students (at least somewhat) for higher education. Curriculum is almost entirely survey-level, which is fine, because broad curriculum gives a better chance for students to find SOMETHING which interests them. I LEARNED from high school that I like to write, that I like science, that I like building things (from web pages to adirondack chairs), and that I like history. I had some good teachers, I had a few bad teachers, and I had some really great teachers. But almost ALL of my teachers were genuinely interested in their fields, and they wanted to interest students as well. One of my history teachers would lecture with such unbridled enthusiasm and energy that it would have been difficult to NOT pay attention. At the end of it all the only standardized test I took was the ACT. I can't go faulting four years of high school on a single exam.
All that being said, I enjoyed high school. It's unreasonable to expect K-12 to cover virtually every prospective field and vocation. They give you art, music, literature, mathematics, history, sports, woodworking, auto repair, physics, chemistry, biology, languages, drama, etc. etc. Provided teachers are doing their jobs, there are PLENTY of opportunities for students to get some direction.
One thing I quickly noticed after arriving at university was that almost none of the students were proficient writers. Now I know I didn't exactly go Ivy League, but students of higher education, if nothing else, need to know how to write. The matter was made far worse by my composition professor, a hippy who decided not to challenge and improve her students but overlook their (many) shortcomings and pass all with flying colors. My term paper for that class was a lengthy treatise decrying her "methods" as doing direct damage to her students' future education and careers. The grade she awarded that paper didn't reflect agreement on her part.


I learned proper writing when I started my own book about useless drivel... never from school. In fact, I never liked writing or reading until I deployed to Iraq and learned the arts because I was bored.

K-12's only purpose is to prepare students (at least somewhat) for higher education. Curriculum is almost entirely survey-level, which is fine, because broad curriculum gives a better chance for students to find SOMETHING which interests them. I LEARNED from high school that I like to write, that I like science, that I like building things (from web pages to adirondack chairs), and that I like history. I had some good teachers, I had a few bad teachers, and I had some really great teachers. But almost ALL of my teachers were genuinely interested in their fields, and they wanted to interest students as well. One of my history teachers would lecture with such unbridled enthusiasm and energy that it would have been difficult to NOT pay attention. At the end of it all the only standardized test I took was the ACT. I can't go faulting four years of high school on a single exam.

All that being said, I enjoyed high school. It's unreasonable to expect K-12 to cover virtually every prospective field and vocation. They give you art, music, literature, mathematics, history, sports, woodworking, auto repair, physics, chemistry, biology, languages, drama, etc. etc. Provided teachers are doing their jobs, there are PLENTY of opportunities for students to get some direction.

One thing I quickly noticed after arriving at university was that almost none of the students were proficient writers. Now I know I didn't exactly go Ivy League, but students of higher education, if nothing else, need to know how to write. The matter was made far worse by my composition professor, a hippy who decided not to challenge and improve her students but overlook their (many) shortcomings and pass all with flying colors. My term paper for that class was a lengthy treatise decrying her "methods" as doing direct damage to her students' future education and careers. The grade she awarded that paper didn't reflect agreement on her part.

Of course we need a stronger safety net, but this is a shitty way to construct the safety net. Unemployed people should be paid to to learn vocational skills from general treasury money from a single progressive income tax. Unemployment Taxes, sales taxes, social security taxes, medicare taxes, etc are not adequately progressive, and harm the poor. Employers should be free to hire and fire anyone they please for any reason they please with no strings attached. All the restrictions on firing make employers ridiculously circumspect about hiring so that it is actually much harder to get a job and much harder to start a business.

The sheer amount of time people waste figuring out if they qualify for benefits A through Z and filling out the paper work for each one wastes time that could be spent doing something productive. All this shit needs to be consolidated. I'm tired of seeing pages and pages of shit like a $50 tax credit for one-legged zebras on my 1040.

Fuck all the little deductions and pork. Just make annual personal income after taxes = 10k + 0.6*(income before taxes), including capital gains, employer benefits, inheritance, gifts, and absolutely every other source of income in the same pool for that "income before taxes". A 1% annual net worth tax would be fine too.

Subsidies are always rife with waste and contrivances to conform to the letter but not the spirit of the regulation. So instead of giving tax credits to barely efficient cars, just tax fossil fuels themselves. Instead of tax credits for people who bought well-insulated houses, tax the builders in proportion to how shitty their insulation is.

after downing street - http://www.afterdowningstreet.org

Codepink! women for peace - http://www.codepink.org

Iraq Veterans Against War - http://www.ivaw.org

Peaceful Vocations - http://www.peacefulvocations.org/

Chapter 1 courtesy of the http://richarddawkins.net/article,4217,Extract-from-Chapter-One-of-The-Greatest-Show-on-Earth,Richard-Dawkins---Times-Online

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

It is frequently, and rightly, said that senior clergy and theologians have no problem with evolution and, in many cases, actively support scientists in this respect. This is often true, as I know from the agreeable experience of collaborating with the Bishop of Oxford, now Lord Harries, on two separate occasions. In 2004 we wrote a joint article in The Sunday Times whose concluding words were: “Nowadays there is nothing to debate. Evolution is a fact and, from a Christian perspective, one of the greatest of God’s works.” The last sentence was written by Richard Harries, but we agreed about all the rest of our article. Two years previously, Bishop Harries and I had organised a joint letter to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

[In the letter, eminent scientists and churchmen, including seven bishops, expressed concern over the teaching of evolution and their alarm at it being posed as a “faith position”at the Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead.] Bishop Harries and I organised this letter in a hurry. As far as I remember, the signatories to the letter constituted 100 per cent of those we approached. There was no disagreement either from scientists or from bishops.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology. The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

They may think God had a hand in starting the process off, and perhaps didn’t stay his hand in guiding its future progress. They probably think God cranked the Universe up in the first place, and solemnised its birth with a harmonious set of laws and physical constants calculated to fulfil some inscrutable purpose in which we were eventually to play a role.

But, grudgingly in some cases, happily in others, thoughtful and rational churchmen and women accept the evidence for evolution.

What we must not do is complacently assume that, because bishops and educated clergy accept evolution, so do their congregations. Alas there is ample evidence to the contrary from opinion polls. More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we — and by implication all of life — were created by God within the last 10,000 years. The figure is not quite so high in Britain, but it is still worryingly large. And it should be as worrying to the churches as it is to scientists. This book is necessary. I shall be using the name “historydeniers” for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

To repeat, they constitute more than 40 per cent of the American population. The equivalent figure is higher in some countries, lower in others, but 40 per cent is a good average and I shall from time to time refer to the history-deniers as the “40percenters”.

To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused.

Think about it, Bishop. Be careful, Vicar. You are playing with dynamite, fooling around with a misunderstanding that’s waiting to happen — one might even say almost bound to happen if not forestalled. Shouldn’t you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay? Lest ye fall into condemnation, shouldn’t you be going out of your way to counter that already extremely widespread popular misunderstanding and lend active and enthusiastic support to scientists and science teachers? The history-deniers themselves are among those who I am trying to reach. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those who are not history-deniers but know some — perhaps members of their own family or church — and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.

Why, then, do we speak of “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, thereby, it seems, giving spurious comfort to those of a creationist persuasion — the history-deniers, the 40-percenters — who think the word “theory” is a concession, handing them some kind of gift or victory? Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the heliocentric theory. In neither case should the word “only” be used, as in “only a theory”. As for the claim that evolution has never been “proved”, proof is a notion that scientists have been intimidated into mistrusting.

Influential philosophers tell us we can’t prove anything in science.

Mathematicians can prove things — according to one strict view, they are the only people who can — but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried. Even the undisputed theory that the Moon is smaller than the Sun cannot, to the satisfaction of a certain kind of philosopher, be proved in the way that, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem can be proved. But massive accretions of evidence support it so strongly that to deny it the status of “fact” seems ridiculous to all but pedants. The same is true of evolution. Evolution is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the northern hemisphere. Though logic-choppers rule the town,* some theories are beyond sensible doubt, and we call them facts. The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.

We are like detectives who come on the scene after a crime has been committed. The murderer’s actions have vanished into the past.

The detective has no hope of witnessing the actual crime with his own eyes. What the detective does have is traces that remain, and there is a great deal to trust there. There are footprints, fingerprints (and nowadays DNA fingerprints too), bloodstains, letters, diaries. The world is the way the world should be if this and this history, but not that and that history, led up to the present.

Evolution is an inescapable fact, and we should celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty. Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of aeons past. Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.

*Not my favourite Yeats line, but apt in this case.

© Richard Dawkins 2009

>> ^jerryku:
.


Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about here, as much of it seems to bear nothing even close to what I wrote. Maybe you didn’t read my post, or perhaps I didn’t make my self clear. Let me try again. The idea that democracy and science don’t work well together is simply not born out by the existing facts. If democracy and science don’t work well together, then how do we account for the disproportionate number of patents awarded to scientists working in democratic societies, the overwhelming number of advances in science made in the last hundred plus years by Americans and/or people living here under a democratic system? You don’t see how science and democracies are compatible? Fine. I’m just pointing out that there is no evidence for this claim, if anything there is a wealth of proof showing the opposite.

I listed the “intellectuals/scientists of the past” simply to point out that these egghead elites have done great work and done tremendous good in raising America’s prestige the world over.

As far as “intellectuals/scientists of the past who would be pretty upset about modern day America's current situation.” Unless you are in possession of a flux capacitor, assigning the thoughts on present day situations to people that have long been dead and were the product of a far different time and environment is a foolish endeavor. (I will concede however that Thomas Jefferson would most likely be mortified to learn that thanks to science, and a science he helped pioneer, future generations uncovered his little secret regarding Sally Hemmings) I’m sure that some of the founding fathers did not want to give political power to the common man. But I suspect they may have been the same people that had no issue with owning slaves, or treating women as second class citizens, so what they thought then bears little relevance to what we have now.

As far as your claim that so many scientists were communists, your post listed only two. How does two translate to “so many” in a vocation that has millions the world over? Additionally, as the Communist Manifesto was published only 150 years ago, and men have been practicing science for centuries, the idea that “so many scientists of the past supported Communism” is to put it kindly, a little hard to swallow. Considering how much scientists and researchers depend on the free market system to fund their work, I would hazard to guess they would be more interested in living under that system than not.

In regards to “There's nothing about democracy that requires free speech, and free speech does not require democracy.” I really have no clue as to how this relates to anything I posted, or where you felt such a statement fit in to the overall argument.

Not vocational school...I'm not going to Maric. Although I am in the HVAC field and have been for the past 7 years. Community college is an alright cheaper route to go...I'm just hoping along the way I can pick up a magical scholarship for being me until then, mash mash mash.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Community college?! HAHAHAHA! You're getting a criminal law degree or HVAC training. Haha. Just kidding. Keep mashin' them grains.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
I don't know, I kind of like my government subsidized schooling. I wouldn't want to pay for that...shit, if my country could get their shit together I would have to pay very little for a REAL education instead of mashin' the grains at the old community colleges. At the same time, socialism is dangerous in the hands of the wicked. First and foremost we need to flush Washington clean...and not DC, that dirty hippie infested Washington state.

im annoyed with this talk of a terrible past and how his early circumstances are supposed to have some bearing on what he is or is not able to achieve in adulthood. bullshit. this is a measure of mental/emotional strength which is far more important than an arguably arbitrary number. i could knock back hard knocks stories until we all fucking cry, it is no excuse for my current laziness and boredom.

creativity and emotional strength are far more inspriring/admirable qualities, says i.

also all this "HE WORKS IN A BAR" talk is pfft. i used to deliver pizza and sling coffee, didnt make any more or less useful as a human. vocation is not equal to worth.

the stuff about proving the existance of god with binary logic sounds too much like some schizofrenics i have known and loved. he should get that checked out.

ass.

LOL! I noticed how no one commented on the second part of my comment. And yes I had a vocation after the band. The homeless and jobless part was temporary. But it still happened none-the-less. I also didn't do the big hair thing, always though that was ridiculous looking.

Sorry guys, Kurt isn't the Rock God you all seem to think he is. I was told many times by folks that saw Nirvana live that I covered his songs better than he did.

>> ^Duckman33:
>> ^eric3579:
The band that single handily killed the big hair bands. Thank god.

Thank God? Unfortunately, it also killed my way of making a living. You may be thanking God, but it left me homeless, and without a job. Not to mention the thousands of other folks who worked in the rock cubs that lost their jobs when a ton of the clubs that hired 70's, 80's, & early 90's style cover bands closed.

Not Nirvana's fault you didn't have a vocation beyond being a hair-flicking Ayatollah of RockNRolla. \m/ \m/ Rawk!

Looking at his tail as well as his obvious laugh, it looks like he's just excited to be the in the freaking car, like every other dog there is. Dogs express their excitement by both their panting and their vocation. Some are more expressive than others.

Haha, typical finnish vocational school student!