My second time at the Keeneland races. It’s no Kentucky Derby but still tons of fun. Since I was not too lucky with betting on horses I decided to wonder around a lot to take couple of pictures. If in Kentucky and it’s horse race season it’s a must or also good … taking the Woodford Reserve Distillery Tour.

Enjoy the pics:

- Scary Horse

During our last visit to the States, Juergen and I finally made good on a long-standing promise, and ventured inside northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum. My sweet Christ in heaven, it’s as unbelievable as you’ve heard.

Any reasonably educated person would enter this "museum" expecting to be offended, but no one could truly be prepared for the scale of madness on display. We went, planning to be hilariously entertained, and left depressed. On the drive back home, Juergen and I hardly spoke. We just didn’t have the energy.

The Creation Museum is not a museum in any normal definition of the word. It’s a fun house ride. You start at the beginning, and follow arrows through the various exhibits, with no freedom to deviate from the path — you can’t skip things that don’t interest you, or jump ahead to things that do. I suppose that’s what religious nutbags enjoy: a pre-approved narrative; a path to follow, dictated by a higher authority. It’s diverting, but it’s not a museum.

I was expecting faux-science and ridiculous reasoning, and we got those in spades, but I wasn’t expecting overt racism. Did you know Adam, Eve and Jesus were muscular, sexy Caucasians? Their animatronics sure were! In an introductory video explaining the difference between Evolution and Creationism, we meet a kind, elderly white scientist, blessed with the wisdom of years, and a shifty little Asian. Guess which one is the dirty Darwinist!

The exhibits were utterly insane. My favorite described how similar species came to exist on different continents. Clear evidence of an anicent supercontinent, you say? Well, continental drift requires millions of years, and a good Creationist knows that Earth is just 6000 years old! Here comes the tortured logic…

"During the Great Flood, tree trunks floated to the water’s surface creating makeshift rafts that carried species to the different continents of the Earth".

Wow! Science is easy when you can just make shit up!

The depressing part about the "museum", though, was how crowded it was on a Thursday morning. Packed! Full of families, the elderly, and children. Schoolbus loads of children. I mean we actually saw multiple yellow school buses in the parking lot. There’s a whole generation of kids in America being taught this rubbish, as though it were fact. At every exhibit, hordes of wide-eyed kids absorbing junk science… "Canyons really formed in a matter of hours?!"

I wanted to whisper into every little ear, "These are lies".

I’ll be straight-up about this because it’s important: the parents who bring their children here are brainwashing them. The schools who bus children to this "museum" are permanently damaging them. I have no problem with religion, but there is a serious sickness with a society that can peddle easily disprovable junk as science. It’s wrong, and I have no doubt in my soul that the profiteers pushing this dog & pony show know it.

This kind of willful and well-financed push against knowledge could only happen in America (update: well, maybe not. Thanks Tracy!). I’d like to believe that this crazy evangelicalism is just a fringe of society, but it seems contaminate more and more minds every single day. The Creation Museum is proof of that, and it needs to be fought.

Click here for a bigger version of God’s Word!

- Everyone is welcome on this site

We just got back from our little Election Tour 2008 to couple of poll stations and a Obama office out here in Kentucky and it was exciting and it really got me super excited. Couple of my readers might get kind of annoyed that I do personal posts right now but this day is just too important and it would be ignorant to pretend there is nothing going on and to continue just to post couple of fun gadgets and videos. And as a long term RGS reader you know that I do get personal on Random Good Stuff on topics which are important to me.

For example RGS already endorsed Obama 10 month ago. In that post I explain why I care so much about US politics. Now it’s finally election day (and it does totally feel like X-Mas) and I can’t wait for the results tonight.

Today I met a guy, he is a neighbor of Mike’s parents and he is republican but today he voted democrats all the way through.

Go Barack!

Some more pictures from election ’08

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Me being a good citizens of the European Union.

Couple of lines but none of them have been too bad.

We stopped by an Obama office. It was fun to talk to some Obama supporters.

Mike posing with Barack Obama – well kind of.

I want to see her pictures tomorrow in the New York Times.

EEEEK – So excited!