Thursday, November 10, 2005


KANSAS BOARD OF EDUCATION GIVES INTELLIGENCE A NEW MEANING


If a lack of ethics can get an incompetent elected to the White House (where it has become apparent even to the alleged president that simply blundering along unethically for five years isn't working), then a lack of intelligent discernment in a state board of education should come as no surprise.

Voting 6 to 4 (see below) to pass that mental vaccum on to their children, whose minds might otherwise be taken up with intelligent inquiry, the Kansas Board of Education has voted to minimize the troublesome childhood trait of seeking intelligent answers to rational questions, making their offspring eligible to one day sit with the majority on the Kansas Board of Education.

They're treating science the way Japan treats history.

Voted for 'intelligent' design:
Kathy Martin
Kenneth Willard
John W. Bacon
Iris Van Meter
Connie Morris
Steve Abrams

Voted for intelligence:
Janet Waugh
Sue Gamble
Carol Rupe
Bill Wagnon

Panda's Thumb
Scientific American

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Pennsylvania shines some light in the darkness

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Perils of the Unconscious Mind:
Robertson warns Pennsylvania voters of God's wrath

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"The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."

From: Greetings from Idiot America
by Charles Pierce

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"When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."
-- Robert T. Pirsig

4 comments:

Chancy said...

and then on the evening news , I think it was on ABC, after reporting on this story and showing members of the school board tsk tsking about the fallacy of evolution, the camera moves on to pictures of a chimp with eyes set too close together and a vacant look on its' face. I swear this chimp reminded me of "someone we see almost daily on the news" and one who is widely regarded as an Emperor with no clothes. Can't for the life of me remember who. But with empirical evidence such as this I vote for evolution.

Anna Haynes said...

Giblets points out it's high time we moved on to Intelligent History.

Tabor said...

Didn't some entire school board get voted out based on a similar decision recently?

Robert Brady said...

Yes, in Pennsylvania: I just added a postscript linking to it. Intelligently done, PA!