Zogg Almighty

My wife e-mailed me this link, and it's fucking hilarious. Maybe I'm the last guy on the 'net to find it, but if not, here you go.

Speaking of odd religion, I've already ranted about the bad rap Kansas gets for putting Intelligent Design on the table as something that should be taught alongside evolution. Atheists and others who believe (wrongly) that the seperation of church and state means a prohibition on even an idea that might lead someone to think about religion in the abstract have fought it hard. They've held their breath, fallen on the floor and kicked their arms and legs, plugged their ears and chanted 'LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU THERE'S NO ONE TALKING!' They've even threatened to take their toys and go home, or in the most recent piece of news, boycotted a hearing because, in the words of one woman I heard interviewed on NPR, we're too dumb to have the wrongness of intelligent design explained to us in an hour.

Isn't school supposed to teach critical thinking? These people are the same sorts who persecuted Gallileo. They want us to accept it on blind faith that life is fully explained by evolution and that anyone who says it's at most a partial explanation should be drummed out of academia.

I think some of the strict evolutionists are really pissed that supporting Intelligent Design in the curriculum should get you sent to Camp X-Ray or some other gulag.

I'm a life-long atheist, even if I'm in something of a crisis of a lack of a lack of faith. Still, I went through a supposedly top-drawer school district and learned:

• Evolution is the complete explanation of the origin of life and the differentiation of species.


• That anyone who believes something counter to that first item is either a religious zealot or a lunatic. They belong on the Art Bell show.


• George Washington cut down a cherry tree.


• Ben Franklin discovered electricity.


• Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves.


• Everyone knew us teenagers were going to have sex, but we should at least have the decency to wear a rubber.


• If the rubber breaks, you can go get an abortion and not tell your parents.


• Communism looks good on paper.


• Free enterprise caused the Great Depression.


• Public spending and World War II ended the Depression.


• FDR saved the Jews.


• Israel was founded by people reclaiming unpopulated land.


• Prohibition failed because it was impossible to enforce, but the drug war is different.

Okay, that last item I didn't even buy at the time. And I think by high school there was some fessing up about the cherry tree, but basically the above list is all stuff that was either said by teachers, printed in textbooks or otherwise transmitted to the student body sometime between Kindergarten and the parole of the class of 1988 from Shawnee Mission North.

But if we actually teach our kids the facts, they can come to their own conclusions. What are we afraid of? That they might not be good cogs for the machine of state and commerce? That's a good reason to teach them better as it is.

I can recall few teachers who actually presented opposing ideas and encouraged a rigorous, intellectual debate that would lead students to reach their own conclusions. The Planned Parenthood people came in on a red carpet to tell us about the wonders of birth control. Anyone suggesting that a fifteen year old, besides being legally below the age of consent, might not be ready to make that kind of potentially life altering/ending decision, well they must be a religious bigot and the children must be protected from them.

I even had a teacher admonish us that whatever we did, don't try anal sex. He went on to tell us all the things that could happen: HIV transmission, rectal tearing, etc. He also had a former student, out about ten years, talk abut the pre-aids high school sex scene, about how she was shocked that kids would not insist on a condom as everyone she knew in her day did. This chick was about 28, and I can only speak for myself but I was just dying for her to make me put on a condom.

It was in my brief college career that I read the 'Autobiography of Ben Franklin' and found out he didn't discover electricity, he just proved that lightning was electricity. This is remarkable stuff, got him in the Royal Academy if memory serves, and led to the development of lightning rods. That's great, why not teach kids that Ben Franklin figured out a way to keep some homes from burning to the ground? He also developed a very good stove, a descendent of which is still popular. Started a newspaper and the Poor Richard's Almanac. Helped found a library, a fire company, and a fucking country. He was a vegetarian for the most part, and I think about as close to a teetotaller as people got at the time (the 'Autobiography' notes the replacement of a beer bucket with soup and water in a British print shop he worked in while trying to acquire additional type for his own paper, as the inscrutible Empire made it very hard to get fonts in the colonies). The guy was amazing, and you can leave the womanizing out for the grade-schoolers but there's so many awesome things he DID do, there's no excuse to teach the kids a lie.

I could rant similarly about Washington. Jefferson didn't free his slaves, though he definitely diddled at least one of them. I'm sure there was no coercion... But these guys did great things that you could teach the kids. And you definitely shouldn't teach them that Washinton was a great strategic mind. He was embarassingly inept at warfare, his gifts were in the charisma department.

FDR, well, I think if he could have put off fighting Hitler until the Jews were finished, he would have. It's ironic how many Jewish people went Democrat because of him. If FDR, Henry Ford and so on could see it now: a Jewish guy driving a Ford pickup to a Democratic Party caucus!

And I've ranted elsewhere in my blog about Israel. I'm not anti-Jewish, BTW. To an extent, Israel should probably be excused its atrocities: they are financed and armed to a huge extent by the U.S. and have been all along. We have the engineer of the Trail of Tears, a genocidal maniac who makes Saddam Hussein look benevolent if you consider the limited technology of 1812-1836. If Jackson had mustard gas and nukes, there wouldn't be enough Indians left to mount a protest outside Arrowhead stadium.

All that money we send to Israel, it has the faces of murderous fiends we not only put in power but venerate over a century after their death. When Israel says there are no Palestinians (the official stand of the Israeli state into the 1960s), it's not much different than the U.S. pretending there's nothing but wilderness to the West.

I disagree with historian Paul Johnson's assertion that 'settled' and 'nomadic' people are so incompatible that one had to dominate the other. He extends this not only to the crimes against the Native Americans, but to the Scottish highlanders, and to the cannibalistic and ferrocious warriors of Tasmania, who (I can't find the exact passage in 'Birth of the Modern'), regrettably had to be exterminated to the last man because they wouldn't give up to British rule. A truly civilized people would not consider this either unavoidable or even acceptable.

Still, Israel is on solid ground from a standpoint of immitating their American patrons. Of course there's a lot more of these non-existent Palestinians. The 700,000 or so that fled under a hail of bullets in 1947-1948 have had kids, and most have stayed right there, either on the edge of Israel or trapped in the amber of the former Palestine.