Received as an email and I find it hard to believe that any school system can even begin go down this road.
Next they will be suggesting that some book written thousands of years ago should be used as the only science textbook.
Statement of Belief
Collected Things
Ærchie’s Archive- Norty Blues 20240512 Episode 64
- Norty Blues 20240505 Episode 63
- Episode 62 Norty Blues 20240428
- Norty Blues 20240421 Episode 61
- Norty Blues 20240407 Episode 59
- Norty Blues 20240407 Episode 59
- Norty Blues 20140331 episode 58
- Norty Blues 20140324 episode 57
- Norty Blues 20140317 episode 56
- Norty Blues 20240310 Episode 55
Screams from the Stalls
bog roll
REPRODUCTION RESTRICTIONS
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.Just a link is all that is required if you want to reuse my work.
Ærchies Archive - Digital Detritus 
And we still wonder why they elected George W. Bush??? 😦
LikeLike
Sehr geEhrter AerChie
If indeed Kansas is going down “that road” as outlined in this Cartoon, it would be reminiscent of :
the Buffoonery with which early in the 1st World War the Royal Air Force initially refused to allow the British Fighter Pilots to have Parachutes, because Parachutes “would diminish their fighting spirit”
I suppose (like Mr Reagan’s invasion of Grenada) this seemed a good idea at the time
Thus, a Pilot without a Parachute would have no alternative but to stand and fight …. while a Pilot with a Parachute would be tempted to avoid the unpleasantness necessarily concomitant with killing or being killed
This argumentation is rather like the Philosophical Hypothesis of Macro-Evolution – there is a mad logic to it but one wonders about its empirical reality
However, is this series of cartoons fairly representing what is actually happening in Kansas Schools ????
eg are they really refusing airbags or safety glasses ??
eg are they really banning science lessons ??
OR is this a deceitful mis=representation of what is happening in Kansas
I ask merely in a spirit of scientific enquiry and in the interests of intellectual rigour & honesty
I expect the knowledgeable Senor FFE is able to tell us
AND who is Heloise
AND warum does my SchPell-Checker prefer “inquiry”
So viele Fragen [so many intellectual conundrums]
At our age, so little time
Your obedt servt etc
und Alles Gute
G Eagle
LikeLike
Herr EaGle:
Kansas has indeed refused to teach science lessons, opting instead for dogma lessons and mythology with no scientific support. I’m sure you’re aware of the manufactured controversy. Others have covered it better and more thoroughly.
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/
But worse, the madness is spreading: http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2007/07/oh_joy.php
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7013405/
The Kansas school board, other states’ school boards, and the White House appear to govern on the principle that if you stick your fingers in your ears and scream loudly enough, you can ignore anything.
Witness: “Heckuva job, Brownie.”
Witness: “The Surge is working.”
Witness: “Abstinence-only education for our kids–and the Third World–is the only allowable course.”
Witness: “Teach the ‘controversy’.”
But what they’re ignoring is science. And since science describes how the real world works, what they’re fighting to exclude from classrooms is reality.
For the Republicans, there’s a bright side in the long term: by creating a couple of generations of idiots with no sense of reality, no grasp of history, and a conviction that truthiness is more important than fact, they will one day get re-elected. Or rather, elected.
LikeLike
The trajectory and the Geo Metro is what got me.
LikeLike
Well, you all will be happy to know that the email in question is rather obsolete. The people of Kansas, in their last election, voted the idiots on their state school board who promulgated the moronic “teach creationism doctrine and make sure that everyone knows that it is just as good a theory as the Theory of Evolution” policy OFF that school board. Immediately and forthwith, the policy about teaching creationism was reversed.
Frankly, I believe that being the laughingstock of the whole world helped accomplish this.
LikeLike
Buff, Bush is a symptom, not a cause!
Herr G eaGle, while I recognise the gulf between us in the matter of Mr Darwin, I dare to suggest that evolution is no longer the concern. It is the flight from reality which concerns me. Abstinence as a form of birth control, war as a form of peace, fiction as a form of history.
Metro, a sound and worthy contribution to the debate – now get you to Guantanamo! We don’t allow clear thinking!
Ian, you shouldn’t stand in front of Geo Metros!
hmh, I’m pleased to hear that. Now all we have to do is to educate the educators in the other jurisdictions which are still going down that pathway. Oh, and to educate the occupants of the White House.
LikeLike
Guten Tag, Herr AerChie
I flatter myself that (apart from Politics, Religion, dEvolution & Australian Football) I agree with you and Monsieur Metro on so many things, including (most of) the contents of both your last Komments
… but isn’t it pScientifically established that abstinence is a most effective form of Birth Control and that it avoids the Komplications of Veneral Disease & the emotional confusions of Promiscuity, when one has the great Happiness of meeting one’s True Love
I do not entirely understand M Metro’s suggestion that “science describes how the real world works”
I take a more tentative approach to pScience – surely it is more rigorous to say that pScience ATTEMPTS to describe the World ever more accurately
eg there are clear evidences for a Geo-Centric Worldview, because the Sun does indeed APPEAR to go round the Earth = thence (or is it whence) the “naive” expression “hWat a lovely Sun-Rise”
eg currently I favour a Helio-Centric Worldview – I am not too sure why – perhaps I am too much a follower of current popular fashion – but it does seem to produce an understanding of the Solar system which is SIMPLER than the Geo-Centric Worldview
eg Einstein seems to suggest that all motion is relative – this would seem to require a subtler approach than the foregoing Views
I am not entirely clear what “got” Senor Ian, but while he is menacingly holding those Eggs in his throwing hand and that pre-Kansas textbook on Rocket-Powered Napoleonic Pond-Crossing Trajectories in the other, can I suggest that we should not menacingly cross-examine him on this point SAVE AND EXCEPTING the impertinent observation that Ian’s Golb is entertaining and well-worth visitation
I remain your (et M Metro’s und Ian’s) obedient servant etc
G Eagle
LikeLike
This discussion and the cartoon (I loved the panel about the wood chip in the eye) makes me think of what Milan Kundera said when he accepted the Jerusalem prize in 1985: “Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas. Flaubert’s discovery is more important for the the future of the world than the most startling ideas of Marx or Freud. For we could imagine the world without the class struggle or without psychoanalysis, but not without the irresistible flood of received ideas that–programmed into computers, propagated by mass media–threaten soon to become a force that will crush all original and individual thought and thus will smother the very essence of the European culture of the Modern Era.” Substitute “Western” for “European” and there you have it…that people are already arguing that science is as believable as the tales of Harry Potter gives this quote a lot of weight 22 years later.
LikeLike
mmmm
und I still know not who is Heloise …. and what was Flaubert’s discovery …
and are not the ideas of Marx und Freud a load of (if you’ll forgive the Latin) Bollockes that do not stand up to rigorous intellectual examination
I have the honour to remain Frosty’s obedient servant etc
G E
LikeLike
Heloise?
M. EaGLe, I was not certain myself. She was so much a part of the background noise of my life that I never thought of her at all ’till now. Hers is a name I associate with cooking and housekeeping back in the dawn of time, before Martha Stewart spray-painted her first pine cone.
http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/heloise/
LikeLike
Hey guys, carry on – this has gone way past my level of expertise. Wasn’t Flaubert a writer who kept looking for the exact word? Something of which I shall never be found un-innocent.
LikeLike
I’ve got a match. Please line up to have your books burned.
LikeLike