the tindog coffeehouse

Source.

The downside: You have to pay $150 to check your luggage.

The upside: You get a free physical.

Previously:
A frustrating glimpse inside Homeland Security
Winning the war on liquids

A new study by the Pew Research Center shows that atheists, Jews, and Mormons know more about religion than Christians. In fact, out of 32 questions, atheists scored the highest with a score of 20.9 while white evangelical Protestants only scored 17.6. And Mormons and atheists scored just as strongly with questions specifically about Christianity.

Should we be at all surprised by these results? Not really. Many atheists tend to be more highly educated in general and trend toward the intellectual. Think college professors, scientists, and historians. Meanwhile, Mormons have a fanatical adherence to their religion, which uses (and distorts) the Bible extensively. So it’s not surprising that either of these groups would be well-versed in various religious teachings. The same can be said for Jews, who like Muslims tend to be more devout in their faith but also have a long history of religious oppression.

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A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about defining “manhood”. I concluded that manhood couldn’t simply be reduced to biological or emotional maturation, but that it was the result of a conscious choice to take responsibility for our lives.

Newsweek, however, has a slightly different definition.

According to the liberal scribes at Newsweek, it’s time for a “New Macho”, where men are more likely to be stay-at-home dads or have jobs traditionally dominated by women such as teachers or nurses. They point to Sweden as a role model due to their mandatory paid paternity leave laws. (Never mind that Sweden has one of the highest rates of out-of-wedlock births in the world or that Swedish men are often forced to pee sitting down in order to squash their masculinity.)

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Father’s Day may just be another holiday manufactured by the greeting card companies (and sponsored by Home Depot), but it could just be the key to ending poverty as we know it.

According to a new study by the Heritage Foundation, having a married father in the household “has the same effect in reducing poverty as adding five to six years to a parent’s education level”:

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Dallas Morning News columnist Jacuielynn Floyd framed the Texas State Board of Education’s incessant tussling over social studies standards perfectly:

But it glaringly underscores that this entire exercise, which I once naively believed to be part of an effort to produce intelligent, intellectually responsible citizens, is not about academics at all.

No, there’s nothing to see here but the same old blowhard talking points that currently pass for political discourse.

Religious conservatives who dominate the board don’t even bother trying to pretend otherwise. They’ve made it clear that they believe their mission is to even the score with what they see as snotty leftist academics who have poisoned public education.

It’s not about kids grasping history and learning to draw independent conclusions – it’s about who gets to run the indoctrination camp. …

Paradoxically, the saddest thing about all this is also the only consolation I can find.

It’s this: Ideological fist-pumping over such meddlesome trivia as substituting “free enterprise” for “capitalism” or “constitutional republic” for “democracy” won’t make much difference to teenagers who graduate without being able to punctuate, add simple fractions or find Panama on a map.

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For some reason I’ve been really down the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if it’s a case of post-holiday blues, my workload, the weather, or what. But I’ve been depressed and have constantly been beating myself up.

Staring at the images of Haiti, though, I realize how petty I’ve been. Even in the best of times, the people there live in unimaginable poverty. According to Encyclopedia of the Nations:

Most Haitians live in small, often remote, villages or isolated settlements, with no access to electricity, clean water, or social services. Some rudimentary education is offered by church and other charitable organizations, but the distances children must travel to school, the costs of books and uniforms, and the necessity for them to work from an early age means that illiteracy is estimated at over half of the adult population. Illness can often spell financial disaster, as meager savings or investments such as a pig must be sold to pay for medicines. In some areas large numbers of people are dependent on aid agencies for food supplies.

Existence in the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince is perhaps even grimmer, with overcrowding, disease, and squalor widespread. Those who work can expect to earn no more than US$2 a day, hardly enough to buy food, let alone other necessities. The majority, however, must scrape some sort of living from the informal sector. Figures for child mortality, communicable diseases, and life expectancy reveal the country’s poverty and deprivation. According to the Pan-American Health Organization, approximately 380,000 Haitians—over 5 percent of the population—were infected with HIV/AIDS by 2000.

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