Friday 15 September 2006

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ABC explains it all

Anyone - even whole nations - can make an honest mistake, but re-electing George Bush after enduring four years worth of embarrassing faux pas and horrifically inept foreign and homeland policy decisions is nothing short of criminally stupid.

Two years later I still wonder how the hell it happened. I've contemplated all kinds of wacky scenarios from alien mind-control technology to ballot tampering (OK so envisaging this one doesn't require a supreme leap of faith).

When I stumbled across an ABC News poll taken in February 2004 it all became clear; context is the key. The survey examined the percentage of Americans who believe that selected biblical parables are literally true.

The most unsettling disclosure has to be that a whopping 60 per cent of the participants stated they believe the story of Noah's ark and the great flood really, truly, actually happened exactly as depicted in the old testament.

Let's take a moment to step back and consider some of the finer details of this tall tale:-
Sprightly 500 year old Noah (along with his wife, sons and their wives) spent 120 years - using nothing more than primitive hand tools - building a 450 foot boat. A boat which is significantly longer than the largest wooden vessel ever constructed - the 338 foot Pretoria schooner-barge, which incidentally broke apart and sunk in 1905 during a violent storm.

In a time frame of only 7 days Noah loaded 30 million different animal species (including prehistoric ones!) and sufficient sustenance to keep them alive into the ark and sailed around for a year and a day until the flood water receded.

Experts with too much time on their hands have calculated that this would take approximately 35 years to accomplish and each animal would have to be squeezed into a space the size of a golf ball. This, of course, is assuming all the animals had previously been gathered from around the globe and were waiting obediently on the shore ready to board the ark - a feat other analysts believe would take a further 684 years!

Once bath time was over, the same merciful, benevolent god who wrought this carnage upon the entire animal and human population conjured a rainbow in the sky as an everlasting symbol of his covenant with Noah (he promised not to obliterate any of his creations again, even if he was having a really bad day). This is why rainbows appear to this day whenever the heavens open on a sunny day, don't you know.

60 per cent.

Yep, I can believe the same people elected a borderline retarded chimp in a cowboy suit to rule the richest, most powerful nation on earth.

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