The Obama Presidency

[Melf]

Enough of teh gramur bulshit. Let's put this issue to rest with a classic gif!

[Othello Harrington]

On behalf of my president....your dictator...we the people appreciate your enthusiasm Melf!

[youandwhosearmy]

Wow Bobby Jindal is just, wow.

The jist of the article for those who don't wish to click.

February 25th, 2009 10:33 AM by Phil Plait
Here’s the transcript of what he said (emphasis mine):

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called volcano monitoring. Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C..

Are you freaking kidding me? Are these guys still trying to score points by being blatantly antiscience? I bet there are a few million folks in Seattle, Oregon, northern California, Alaska, and, y’know, Hawaii that think volcano monitoring is a fine and dandy idea.

Not to mention Yellowstone, potentially the scariest place on the planet.

What the heck is it with these guys? I don’t mean Republicans in general, I mean the ones running the party. Do they not get what’s really important, and what’s just rhetorical partisan garbage? I hope that this line by Jindal becomes his fruit fly, his planetarium-as-overhead-projector. Because when people in charge say things so mind-numbingly dumb, it is our duty to make sure everyone knows it.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...g-antiscience/

As it relates to Obama of course since this was his rebuttal.

[YellerDog]

I think it's double awesome Jindal is talking about the wastefulness of monitoring for oncoming natural disasters, considering the state he runs....

[Frogacuda]

What an asshole. "How is buying cars and investing in transportation infrastructure going to help the ECONOMY? TAX CUNTS PLZ!!!@!"

[Fe 26]

Buttcheeks included btw.

I'm fairly certain I'm better at math than you Mr. Manager.

[Space Pirate Roberts]

...half-assed defenses of intelligent design..

This bullshit again? Really? That's it, Squall is either the biggest idiot on the planet or one very committed troll.

[Frogacuda]

As for any hubbub about teaching intelligent design as a theory in schools, I won't see a problem with it until the scientific community can competently explain how the universe was created. You can't create matter from nothing; it's a simple law of physics. When science can prove that all the components necessary for the Big Bang were not, in fact, put in place by a higher power, then I will say that intelligent design's usefulness has come and gone.

Ok, Andrew, maybe this will work better coming from someone who doesn't hate your guts.

This is completely retarded. The notion that the matter in the universe "Got there by magic because of something that was always there" is not more useful than simply saying "the matter itself was always there." Either way your explanation involves something that we have to accept as always being there. Why is an intelligent being somehow "useful" in explaining this?

Frankly I think asking "What's before the big bang?" is as child-like a question as "what's on top of the sky?" We know time and space are interconnected in the sense that we move at a fixed rate through timespace and that time is essentially a dimension in the same way spacial dimensions are, so it stands to reason that as space compresses, time would decompress inversely (i.e. infinitely). Therefore, there needn't even be a "before" the big bang any more than there's an "outside" of the universe.

These questions do at the very least have credible theories surrounding them. If they haven't been dumbed down to pop-up book level to meet your satisfaction, it's really not a great reason to teach kids something that there's no evidence for whatsoever as a substitute. Creationists love to shout questions and not listen to the answers, and it's anti-intellectualism at its purist and most dangerous.

[Advocate]

Jesus loves me This I know.
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones who live belong.
They are weak, but he is strong.
YES Jesus Loves me.
YEESSSS Jesus loves me.
YES Jesus loves me.
For the Bible tells me so.

[youandwhosearmy]

Ok, Andrew, maybe this will work better coming from someone who doesn't hate your guts.

This is completely retarded. The notion that the matter in the universe "Got there by magic because of something that was always there" is not more useful than simply saying "the matter itself was always there." Either way your explanation involves something that we have to accept as always being there. Why is an intelligent being somehow "useful" in explaining this?

Frankly I think asking "What's before the big bang?" is as child-like a question as "what's on top of the sky?" We know time and space are interconnected in the sense that we move at a fixed rate through timespace and that time is essentially a dimension in the same way spacial dimensions are, so it stands to reason that as space compresses, time would decompress inversely (i.e. infinitely). Therefore, there needn't even be a "before" the big bang any more than there's an "outside" of the universe.

These questions do at the very least have credible theories surrounding them. If they haven't been dumbed down to pop-up book level to meet your satisfaction, it's really not a great reason to teach kids something that there's no evidence for whatsoever as a substitute. Creationists love to shout questions and not listen to the answers, and it's anti-intellectualism at its purist and most dangerous.

I think it's even simpler than that, especially when you're not all spun up into a rage like I was. The two sides simplified are...

Creationists are using the term Intelligent Design to try to get something that by the very definition of the term does not constitute a science, taught in a science classroom.

Scientists are trying to keep it out of the science classroom by pointing out that it is a belief system, and not a science, as it is supported by little to zero scientific data.

The argument scientists are using is that it was never science. It is the same Creationism from the 80's repackaged with "pretty lights" and "fancy terms" but still has as little scientific data to support it being taught as it had back in the 80's when it was initially rejected.

It doesn't help that nearly every aspect of the theory falls apart under scientific scrutiny. Dinosaurs, how old the universe is, how long people have been on this planet, how far away the stars are, how evolution works, etc...

Now since scientific theories pretty much by definition need to be repeatable, testable, and durable on a semi-regular basis by a multitude of very smart people doing everything they can to prove the theory wrong, and somehow still stand up to such scrutiny, you can see why Intelligent Design is very, very far from being an actual science. It simply has no place under that definition. If the people behind the idea genuinely want it spread, then they should be attempting to spread it as you would any other religion or belief system.

It's just scary to me that Louisiana said yes to this, especially when a state as backwards as Arkansas didn't fall for it this time, or hell even the last time. This case really could have some heavy repercussions for education in the future.