{pic by luna715}

The idea of secession from the United States is often bandied about in Far Right circles as if it were the dire Nuclear Option within the conservative political arsenal. Just last week, on September 4, conservative economist Walter E. Williams broached the topic on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Williams—an occasional fill-in and hand puppet for the Dark Lord himself—was discussing the not-quite-mass movement for secession that is afoot in New Hampshire and opined that secession didn’t work “last time” (that unpleasant Civil War incident), but it did work “the first time in 1776,” and it would be nice to “see whether we could break the tie” and “have a sovereign nation.” Similarly, Texas Governor Rick Perry, appealing to the nebulous Right Wing populist rage at one of the Fox News “Tea Parties” last April, floated the possibility of secession “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people” (apparently, he forgot which party won and which party lost in the elections last November). And there is no shortage of neo-Confederate hate groups, such as the League of the South, which are devoted to the idea of secession as a means of escaping federal intrusion upon the God-given right of states to enslave human beings for fun and profit.

Implicit in Right Wing chatter about secession is the assumption that it somehow constitutes a “threat”; that the inhabitants of a newly shrunk United States would bemoan the day they lost the invaluable contributions which the Far Right makes to Human Progress. But let us consider what would actually be “lost” were the United States of America (U.S.A.) to jettison the original 11 members of the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.): Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Even a cursory examination of available data indicates that the U.S.A. might benefit enormously from a southern-style divorce of this kind.

For instance, at a time when reigning in health care expenditures is a top priority for nearly every policymaker in the country, the Secession Option makes fiscal sense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that the U.S.A. spends more that $75 billion on obesity-related medical expenditures each year, and the C.S.A. states account for roughly 30% (or $22.3 billion) of that total. In fact, the C.S.A. states have some of the highest rates of obesity in the nation. Based on my own calculations using the CDC’s obesity-rate data for each state and the U.S. Census Bureau’s state-population totals from the 2007 American Community Survey, I estimate that secession would permit the U.S.A. to shed roughly 26 million medically expensive obese individuals, which would reduce the size of the obese population in the country by one-third.

However, the benefits of secession go far beyond the fiscal advantages of shedding excess baggage from the health care system. Allowing the C.S.A. states to secede would eliminate nine of the 22 “red” states that swung Republican in the 2008 election. More precisely, based on popular-vote totals compiled by the U.S. Electoral College, secession would remove 36% (or 21.6 million) of those U.S. voters who thought that a McCain-Palin administration would have made a nice sequel to eight years of Bush-Cheney.

Shedding surplus Republicans from the U.S.A. would be advantageous not only from a partisan political perspective, but would vastly improve the general state of knowledge among the reduced U.S. population. The base of the Republican Party consists of Evangelical Protestants, a rather Taliban-esque group that tends to frown upon Enlightenment-era ideals such as scientific discovery and the use of human reason. For instance, 65% of Evangelical Protestants believe that all forms of life have always existed in their present form ever since a magical Supreme Being zapped them into existence—the fossil record and genetic mutation be damned. Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestants are heavily concentrated in the C.S.A. states. Based on state-level estimates of religious affiliation from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and adult-population totals reported for each state by the 2007 American Community Survey, I conclude that secession would remove 44% (or 25.5 million) of all Evangelical Protestants from the U.S.A.

In short, the secession of the C.S.A. states might be just the sort of fiscal, social, and intellectual stimulus that the U.S.A. needs to move forward into the 21st century rather than backward into the Middle Ages. There is an apocryphal quote that is widely attributed to Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Governor of Texas, 1925-1927 and 1933-1935), and is said to have been uttered in response to a question about the use of the Spanish language in Texas schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for Texas schoolchildren.” I think that pretty much says it all.

{pic by stallio}

People who are accustomed to thinking for themselves often experience confusion upon visiting the virtual salons in which Arch-Conservatives share their erudite observations concerning history, science, and current affairs. This confusion stems in large part from the vastly different evidentiary standards by which Far-Right Wingers tend to evaluate different beliefs. Some beliefs require no supporting evidence at all to be accepted as Truth in the Uber-Conservative Consciousness. But there are other beliefs for which no amount of evidence can ever suffice. For instance, no evidence is necessary to support the belief that Barack Obama is an illegal Kenyan immigrant born in Mombasa. But no amount of evidence is sufficient to support the belief that Obama is a U.S. citizen born in Honolulu.

There are no hard and fast rules among Super Conservatives as to when a belief requires evidence and when it doesn’t. Such knowledge is more of an art than a science and requires experience to master. For those readers unfamiliar with the unpredictable empirical twists and turns of the Paleoconservative Worldview, here is a handy topical guide for distinguishing Fact-Free Truth from Evidence-Based Heresy:

Cosmology

Fact-Free Truth: A magical and invisible Supreme Being created the universe about 6,000 years ago.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The universe as we know it came into being 12-14 billion years ago with an event called the “Big Bang.”

Biology

Fact-Free Truth: The magical and invisible Supreme Being created all forms of Life just as they exist today.

Evidence-Based Heresy: All forms of life change over time through the interplay of genetic mutation and natural selection; a process known as “evolution.”

History

Fact-Free Truth: The stories of The Bible tell the literal truth about the history of Humankind.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The stories of The Bible are parables created before the existence of a clearly defined “non-fiction” genre in literature.

Climatology

Fact-Free Truth: “Global warming” is a hoax perpetrated by a vast international conspiracy designed to undermine U.S. sovereignty in order to create Word Government.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” from industrial processes are causing the average temperature of the earth to rise over time.

Politics

Fact-Free Truth: The Obama administration is “socialist.”

Evidence-Based Heresy: The Obama administration is “centrist Democrat” by U.S. political standards (which qualifies as “moderate conservative” by global political standards) and does not come close to fitting the actual definition of “socialism.”

Patriotism

Fact-Free Truth: The United States of America is the greatest nation that has ever existed or ever will exist and is uniquely favored by the magical and invisible Supreme Being.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The United States of America is number 15 on the Human Development Index of nations as ranked by average health, knowledge, and standard of living—right after Iceland, Norway, Canada, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Finland, Denmark, and Austria.

Sexuality

Fact-Free Truth: Homosexuals choose a deviant and hedonistic “life style” that is frowned up by the magical and invisible Supreme Being.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Homosexuals are attracted to members of the same sex.

Sex

Fact-Free Truth: Sex outside of marriage is wrong.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Sex outside of marriage is fun.

{pic by PsychoBauble}

According to Russell Kirk, who qualifies as a deep thinker in conservative circles thanks in large part to his authorship in 1953 of a book called The Conservative Mind, a key attribute of conservatives is that they “are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.” In other words, fear the unknown, and cling to what little you do know regardless of how wrong it might be. While there is certainly some value in the desire for social stability that this mentality reflects, the “conservative” mindset is not particularly helpful when it comes to the acquisition of knowledge. In fact, history reveals that the “conservative” mind tends to glorify whatever forms of ignorance are most prevalent in any particular era. For instance…

… Back in the early 1600s, Galileo Galilei dared rely upon astronomical observations and mathematical calculations found nowhere in The Bible to conclude that the earth is not the immovable center of the universe, but actually orbits the sun. The “Theological Qualifiers” of the Inquisitorial tribunal which tried him reached a more conservative, faith-based conclusion; namely, that Galileo’s belief was “absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.” In fairness, the Catholic Church did get around to admitting the error of this decision in 1992. Now that a few centuries have passed, most modern conservatives in the United States admit that the earth probably revolves around the sun despite The Bible’s failure to explicitly mention this fact.

… In 1925, a jury in Dayton, Tennessee, heard the case of John Scopes, a high-school biology teacher charged with violating state law by teaching the theory of evolution. William Jennings Bryan, speaking conservatively on behalf of a prosecution team led by the appropriately named Herbert and Sue Hicks, claimed that “if evolution wins, Christianity goes,” since the creation fable of The Bible states quite clearly that everything in the world was magically zapped into existence in six days. However, under questioning by Clarence Darrow for the defense, even Bryan admitted that not everything in The Bible can be taken literally, and that a “day” in the Book of Genesis may not have been 24-hours long. It is a tribute to the staying power of blind faith in devout ignorance that many modern conservatives act as if there is still some sort of “debate” over the scientific underpinnings of the theory of evolution. According to their worldview, there is far too little tangible evidence to support the idea of evolution, but plenty to support reading The Bible as a textbook in both history and science.

… In 2007, reflecting the consensus of scientists worldwide, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the available evidence on global warming is now “unequivocal,” and that it is “very likely” carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by human industrial activities are responsible for the phenomenon. Yet many conservatives continue to take it on faith that this is simply impossible. Columnist George Will claims that global warming isn’t even occurring, while scientific luminaries like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck argue that carbon dioxide couldn’t possibly be harmful since we breathe it. Presumably, the only acceptable “proof” of global warming will come if and when New York and Los Angeles are completely under water—at which point conservatives will finally be willing to tackle the problem.

The creationists and the global-warming-denialists of the conservative camp would do well to remember the case of Galileo in particular. Clinging blindly to conventional thought for its own sake may seem noble and high-minded at the time, but—more often than not—it makes one look monumentally stupid in retrospect. And in the case of global warming, it’s suicidal.

{pic by Colin Purrington}

A front-page story in the March 11, 2009, Washington Post serves as an example of human stupidity both laughable and terrifying in its implications for the future of the United States and of Civilization as a whole. The laughable part of the story is the recounting of a recent field trip to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History by students in an “Advanced Creation Studies” class at Lynchburg, Virginia’s own Liberty University—the faux institution of higher learning founded by the late, great religious fanatic Jerry Falwell. Apparently, excursions to venues such as “natural history museums, aquariums, geologic sites, and even dinosaur parks” are a rite of passage undertaken by many Creationists as a means of inoculating themselves against the deleterious effects of science.

The terrifying part of the story is a reference to a 2006 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life which found that “42 percent of Americans believe humans have always existed in their present form.” In other words, despite the abundant evidence of evolution—the well-documented genetic changes that have been observed in organisms over the course of many generations; the chronology apparent in the fossil record; the anatomical similarities and geographic distribution of related species—more than two out of every five people in an ostensibly “advanced” nation such as the United States view the creation stories of their favorite religions as literal renditions of world history.

This constitutes a grim indictment of the U.S. educational system. Not only is a sizable chunk of the populace unaware of what words like “evolution,” “science,” and “theory” actually mean; but they also lack any sense of perspective on the blindingly random diversity of the world’s religions and creation stories. There are as many creation stories as there are cultures. Which one is “right”?… Yoruba? Maori? Hopi? Norse? Mossi? Wakaranga? And which of the world’s religions possesses the greatest authority in matters of history?… Candomblé? Baha’i? Sikhism? Zoroastrianism? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Santeria? Of course, all a Fundamentalist of any kind needs is “faith”… you just know what you know… even when you know nothing at all.

It is ironic that many of today’s Creationists would probably be dead if the “theory” of evolution had not enabled scientists to develop new and better antibiotics in response to the evolution of antibiotic resistance among the bacteria that cause infectious diseases. Indeed, this suggests a means of reducing the incidence of Creationism in the U.S. population that might be far more cost-effective than a rejuvenated system of public education… we could stop giving antibiotics to Creationists when they get infections. It is only logical to assume that if Creationists don’t believe in the process of evolution through mutation and natural selection, then they don’t believe in the power of antibiotics either.

{pic by Kaptain Kobold}

There are many reasons to question the competence and qualifications of the Republican Party’s newly minted vice-presidential candidate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Her level of political inexperience on the national stage makes freshman Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama look like a seasoned veteran. She moralistically trumpets a brand of home-taught, abstinence-only, anti-choice sex education that failed dismally within her own family, transforming her into an unlikely advocate of teen pregnancy and teen marriage. But, most disturbing of all from an intellectual perspective, she apparently believes that evolution is a figment of the liberal imagination.

This raises a fundamentally important question when it comes to evaluating her readiness to assume a position of authority: Does she also believe that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are real? If she is ready to go on “faith,” blithely ignoring science, evidence, logic, and common sense in order to accept the Bible’s literary parable of creation as literal truth, then how can she make rational decisions on matters of public policy? Creationists have an uncanny ability to confuse fact with fiction, reality with flights of fancy. When this unique ability is applied outside of a religious context, it is usually referred to as “delusion” or “psychosis” rather than “faith.” Regardless, one need only look at the disastrous global legacy of George W. Bush to see what can happen when power is entrusted to someone with a predilection for willful ignorance and a blissful disdain for ideologically inconvenient facts.