Kansas election returns

It wasn’t a clean sweep that threw all the rascals out, but the Kansas school board election did return a little more balance and helped out the pro-science side. Thoughts from Kansas summarizes the results:

The Board is back in moderate hands no matter what. The night is, on balance, a victory. It’d be nice to further marginalize the extremists by winning the remaining races in November, but we’ve got a majority that will implement the science standards recommended by the scientists, educators and parents of the science standards committee. The Board can focus on bigger issues. They can dig into ways to address the special challenges of rural districts, and to find solutions to the problems faced by the students in poorer urban districts. Real challenges, not fake controversy. Helping kids, not fighting culture wars.

Best of all, it looks like Connie Morris has lost her seat on the board. That’s good news right there.

News from the Lakeway Hotel

A while back, I mentioned these hate-filled loons in Kansas who were harassing a hotel owner because he was flying a rainbow flag—Pandagon has an excellent summary of the contretemps—in short, he had the flag in memory of his son, the local paper talked up the association of the rainbow with gays, and boy howdy, all of a sudden he was getting boycotted and abused by the community. In the latest news, some Kansas bigot has cut down the flag.

I had a letter from the hotel owners forwarded to me.

[Read more…]

Hello, Kentucky

The daughter is flying away to lovely Paducah, Kentucky today (another drive to the airport for me, bleh), so I was thinking of suggesting that she visit Ken Ham’s brand-new creationist museum for me, as a kind of mole…darn it, though, Paducah’s almost as far out in the boonies as Morris, and it’s nowhere near the ‘museum,’ which is up somewhere near Cincinnati, and still has a year to go before it opens…so no super-secret evilutionist missions for Skatje this time, other than to temporarily increase the average IQ of the state for a little while.

I do have to say that that article ends on a nice note.

Scientists say fossils and sophisticated nuclear dating technology show that Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the first dinosaurs appeared around 200 million years ago, and they died out well before the first human ancestors arose a few million years ago.

“Genesis is not science,” said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were.”

Ham said he believes most fossils are the result of the Great Flood described in Genesis.

That ought to be media policy: anytime they do a story on a creationist, get a strong, sharp quote from someone who knows some science to slap ’em down.

Today is the day

Kansans, remember to get out and vote today—a low turnout is expected for the primary election for the Kansas school board, and you really want to dump Connie Morris, right?

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.

“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”

Evolution is the only story backed up by science. You don’t really want a school board run by ninnies who don’t know that, do you?

Oh, yeah…there are other races besides the school board.