Sapere Aude!

Tea Party leader: Women too emotional to vote

Looking for all the world like everybody’s – anybody’s – dear, sweet aunt, mother or grandmother, Janis Lane, leader of the Central Mississippi Tea Party, says the biggest mistake America has made was giving women the right to vote. Her remarks were made last June in an interview with the Jackson Free Press, but just now came to light through the efforts of the New Orleans-Times Picayune.

“Probably the biggest turn we ever made was when the women got the right to vote. Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting,” so said Ms. Lane.

As a Tea Party leader, Lane is obviously politically active. She votes. Yet she is not sure that women deserve that right.

via www.allvoices.com

I think neuroscientists should scan the brains of people that say things like that.

The CEO Who Built Himself America's Largest House Just Threatened to Fire His Employees if Obama's Elected

David Siegel is the founder and CEO of Westgate Resorts, a huge national timeshare company and one of the largest resort developers in the world. In 2007 he was a billionaire, although he may be only a hundred-millionaire now. He and his wife Jackie were the subjects of the recent documentary "The Queen of Versailles," about their ongoing quest to build the largest house in America, a 90,000 square foot monument to excess. And yesterday, David Siegel sent an email to all of his thousands of employees, in which he—in a veiled way—insinuated that they would be fired of Barack Obama is reelected.

UPDATE: Shortly after we posted this letter, we found out, thanks to multiple readers, that it bore suspicious resemblances to a popular chain letter that was circulated just before the 2008 elections. Well, we just got off the phone with David Siegel, who told us the letter below is real, and that it was sent out to all of his employees yesterday. "I did use the letter that had circulated before as a guideline, but I changed it [to fit my circumstances]," he told us. "It speaks the truth and it gives [employees] something to think about when they go to the polls." He also said that its threats of possible layoffs are real, based on his assessment of the political and economic climate. He added that he "hasn't had any negative feedback" on the letter.

via gawker.com

Obama 'Redistribution' Clip Truncated - Yahoo! News

The 14-year-old audio clip circulated by the Mitt Romney campaign this week to attack Barack Obama as favoring "redistribution" of wealth was "deceptively edited," Democrats say, leaving out important context that Obama provided in his next breath.

In the clip Republicans are pushing around - and Romney now cites on the stump - then Illinois State Sen. Obama is heard speaking at a university conference in October 1998, appearing to endorse "redistribution" of wealth.

"I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody's got a shot," Obama is heard saying on the clip, which then abruptly ends.

In the full recording, obtained by NBC News, Obama continues to explain in the next sentence that he is speaking broadly about making city and state government more efficient in their use of resources - and endorses "competition" in the "marketplace."

"How do we pool resources at the same time as we decentralize delivery systems in ways that both foster competition, can work in the marketplace, and can foster innovation at the local level and can be tailored to particular communities," he says.

The edit of the last line out of the clip earned Romney and the Republican National Committee a "four pinocchios" rating by fact checkers at the Washington Post.

via news.yahoo.com

Does Religion Really Poison Everything? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

For years Richard Dawkins has used the self-immolation of moths to explain religion. The example can be found in his 2006 best seller, The God Delusion, and it's been repeated in speeches and debates, interviews and blog posts. Moths didn't evolve to commit suicide; that's an unfortunate byproduct of other adaptations. In much the same way, the thinking goes, human beings embrace religion for unrelated cognitive reasons. We evolved to search for patterns in nature, so perhaps that's why we imagine patterns in religious texts. Instead of being guided by the light, we fly into the flames.

The implication—that religion is basically malevolent, that it "poisons everything," in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens—is a standard assertion of the New Atheists. Their argument isn't just that there probably is no God, or that intelligent design is laughable bunk, or that the Bible is far from inerrant. It's that religion is obviously bad for human beings, condemning them to ignorance, subservience, and endless conflict, and we would be better off without it.

But would we?

Before you can know for sure, you have to figure out what religion does for us in the first place. That's exactly what a loosely affiliated group of scholars in fields including biology, anthropology, and psychology are working on. They're applying evolutionary theory to the study of religion in order to discover whether or not it strengthens societies, makes them more successful, more cooperative, kinder. The scholars, many of them atheists themselves, generally look askance at the rise of New Atheism, calling its proponents ignorant, fundamentalist, and worst of all, unscientific. Dawkins and company have been no more charitable in return.

While the field is still young and fairly small—those involved haven't settled on a name yet, though "evolutionary religious studies" gets thrown around—its findings could reshape a very old debate. Maybe we should stop asking whether God exists and start asking whether it's useful to believe that he does.

via chronicle.com

It's worth remember that there are lots of useful fictions.

Conservatives begin to doubt revisionist historian | Bud Kennedy | Fort Worth, Arlington, Nor...

Four years ago, Christian history writer David Barton was a Republican kingmaker lobbying to leverage then-unknown Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin onto the presidential ticket.

Now the prolific author of America's Godly Heritage has been dumped by his publisher over "lost confidence" and faces mounting criticism from conservatives for unscholarly and unreliable work.

The jolt was delivered Thursday in North Carolina-based WORLD Magazine, an evangelical biweekly that quoted the Discovery Institute's Jay W. Richards on Barton's "embarrassing" errors and "misleading" claims.

By day's end, Barton, 58, a Parker County resident and the former state Republican vice chairman, had been rejected by Tennessee-based Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson. The company stopped selling his bestselling The Jefferson Lies.

An NPR All Things Considered report on Wednesday quoted conservative historians doubting Barton's revisionist portrayal of Jefferson as a Bible-believing evangelical.

via www.star-telegram.com