Science: Pennsylvania 8, Kansas 0

Mao Tse Tung (or however it's fashionable to spell that now) needed to reform his country's feudal agrarian society, so he carefully studied the greatest minds in Communist philosophy, and came up with the Great Leap Forward. Mostly, it involved stopping people from growing food, and having them mine and smelt iron in little backyard smelters instead. Lo and behold, within three years, 30 million Chinese people died, mostly from starvation. The Chinese government, being what it was, declared it a Great Success (And We're Never Going To Mention This Again, Right?). One lesson that could be learned from that delightful time could be about trying to make reality conform to a philosophy, instead of using philosophy to explore the nature of reality.

Apropos of nothing, I'd like to mention here that on Tuesday, the Kansas School Board voted 6-4 in favour of creationism being taught as science. Balloon Juice has a lively little conversation about it going right now. This marks the second time in ten years they've tried this. Last time (1999), voters replaced the anti-science members of the board...

Speaking of Pennsylvania, ALL EIGHT school board seats that were up for election in Dover (where a certain court case is going on) have new members. The new members were all against creationism being taught in science classrooms, and the old memberswere in favour of it.

God, of course, promptly removed His protection from Dover, PA. Who knows what God's going to do if the court case Kitzmiller et al v. Dover School Board goes against Him? Well, I suppose Pat Robertson does, but I mean normal people...

"Sixty four percent of Americans think Der Monkey is doing a bad job,
The other 34 percent think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to Church."

That was from a commentator on Bartcop, and you can understand why I had to steal it.