He may be crazy – but he ain’t (completely) stupid.
juliansays
The especially fucked up part is, that’s actually how they think.
“Where can we cut spending? Hmmmm… The right to an education isn’t anywhere in the constitution… *lightbulb moment* Out it goes!”
tominwvsays
When ever I listen to anyone from wingnuttia I feel we’re faced with two not necessarily exclusive alternative explanations:
1) Darwin got something wrong and we have to question evolution, or, 2) Earth has encountered a wormhole and it has been invaded by beings from a strange and frightening parallel universe, thus ironically confirming some controversial theoretical physics.
The Republican “Theory of Everything”: God did it, so why question it?
criminysays
/double facepalm Republicans put me in mind if the one Simpsons episode where Flanders was the “supreme ruler” or something and required a full frontal lobotomy for all.
You have to admit, the average Republican would see your unemployment as a win.
Burnt at the stake more like it. It fits in with their program for a new Dark Age.
And it is a real possibility. Bush and his gang hated and still hate the EPA. So they gutted it, cut the budgets. Lots of scientists and others were laid off, including two of my friends.
They were never rehired.
During a major flood, their former office was asked to analyze the water for chemicals and pathogens. They couldn’t do it. The people who knew how to run the analytical instruments, HPLC’s and so on, had been laid off. Which didn’t really matter. The people who maintained the instruments had also been laid off and most of them were nonfunctional.
Kevin Alexandersays
Why does almost everyone assume that the Republicans are nuts? Their strategy looks very clever to me. Put yourself in their position. Say you had money enough to send your own kids to a good school where they will get a good education. Information is power.
Look at it from a darwinian perspective; If your kids competitors could be denied that education, that power, wouldn’t you act to effect that? In other words, wouldn’t you try to cripple your kids competitors chances?
Crazy like foxes (or Fox News), those Republicans. They may be evil, but they’re not nuts.
Most but not all Republican candidates for president are evolution deniers, but even the pro-science candidates, Romney and Jon Huntsman, call this basic fact of science a belief and they always stick their dead Jeebus in there somewhere. For example Huntsman said “I believe in evolution. I think it’s part of God’s plan.”
According to the polls the science denier from Texas has the best chance of winning the Republican nomination despite, or perhaps because of, his extraordinary stupidity.
TonyJsays
Aha! So you admit that you continue to prop up the theory of EVILution based solely upon your own financial self-interest.
It all makes sense now.
TonyJsays
Nemo: You have to admit, the average Republican would see your unemployment as a win.
Yep, damn ivory tower liberal academic elitists.
Rudisays
That is exactly how these monsters seem to think.
I’m especially reminded of Governor Palins’ “Research into fruit flies…I kid you not!” speech.
TonyJsays
Zeno: The Republican “Theory of Everything”: God did it, so why question it?
Well they do have that stupid bumper sticker that says pretty much the same thing:
“God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”
Antiochus Epiphanessays
Your job? I’m half-hoping* that this wingnut gets elected so he can’t do any more harm in my state.
*Half-hoping. Jeeze.
juliansays
I’m especially reminded of Governor Palins’ “Research into fruit flies…I kid you not!” speech.
Or Sen. McCain’s ‘2 million to study DNA in bears. Now I don’t know if that was a paternity issue…’
sundiversays
Maybe, just maybe, someone can convince this empty suit that since gravity IS just a theory skydiving without a parachute isn’t necesarily fatal. Fuck me running, cretins like him will do to us what Lysenko and his lackeys did to Soviet genetic studies and agriculture. Give the teatards 8 years and USAnians won’t be fit for much more than grunt labor.
JJsays
@criminy #7
Thar would be Treehouse of Horrors V, where Homer makes a time machine from a toaster, screws up the past (multiple times) and ends up in a world where Flanders is dictator.
Loqisays
The sad thing is that this cartoon isn’t an exagerration at all. I’ve spoken with people who have said things like this. In addition to putting scientists out of work, the Republicans are putting satirists out of work. There’s nothing to satirize when they’re actually saying the ridiculous things you were going to use as a punchline.
M Groesbecksays
UAS @ #8 —
Wait…that strip has actually been posted to Answers in Genesis? What do they think is going on there?
Palin’s fruit fly comment neatly illustrated that she knows nothing about the history of scientific research for the last, oh, eighty years. And before that I imagine it’s all Ben Franklin and his kite to her.
Did the story about the non-functioning lab get any news play at all? Because if I’d been one of the surviving lab rats, I’d want the biggest muck-racking newspaper in town to get the story.
Richard Fortey, in his Dry Store Room No. 1, an informal history of the British Natural History Museum, makes the point over and over that, even in the obscure bug-studying reaches of research, something that people think is useless beetle-sorting suddenly turns out to be vital to the economy or people’s health. And you don’t know in advance which bit of research it will be.
The most alarming to me is that those people are standing on a pinnacle of human progress, health, security, and wealth undreamed of by kings made possible by science and yet they want to drag our understanding of the world back to the days before the industrial revolution.
ravensays
Science is responsible for US preeminence in the world. As well as the basis of modern 21st century civilization.
Those are just facts.
“Well over half of US economic growth in the past century can be traced to investments in science and technology.”
This quote is from a federal report. Commissioned and produced during the Bush administration no less.
The fundie xian death cultists and the Tea Party really do hate the US and really do want to go back to the Dark Ages. That is just another fact.
Oh, you must read the Woo to get the Total Experience.
I threw up a little in my mouth when I read this:
But in this example, it was known that this resistance to the antibiotic was already in the bacterial population right from the beginning of the experiment. In other words, some bacteria already had the information in their genes to be resistant. The bacteria had inherited information; so the resistance has nothing to do with evolution.
—AIG
I’d rather he’d said something like “evolution is foundational to all life sciences” rather than “the foundation of all life sciences.” Arguably, there are other “foundations,” like chemistry and physics, and a competent creationist should be able to, say, understand human anatomy reasonably well without evolution (not as well, of course).
Evolution’s crucial to science, of course, and a creationist is lacking the understanding necessary to do good cutting-edge biology (ok, there are a few who understand and use evolution while denying that it’s true in the end, but they’re rare). I just don’t want it to be oversold, though.
Gary Trudeau knows his audience. If he had written “foundational,” he would have lost them at the curve as the lower quartile would have read “foundation” anyway. (The spell-checker flagged both “foundational” and “quartile” as unknown words. I rest my case.)
The foundation of life is hydrogenating carbon, sulphur, etc.
Speaking of clever plots, is it a clever plot to get more page hits that I have to go to another page and then come back to see my recently posted comments?
During a major flood, their former office was asked to analyze the water for chemicals and pathogens. They couldn’t do it. The people who knew how to run the analytical instruments, HPLC’s and so on, had been laid off. Which didn’t really matter. The people who maintained the instruments had also been laid off and most of them were nonfunctional.
Name of lab, people, event, dates? In other words, any sources I could refer to in publicizing this debacle? This has to go into the history of How Not to Manage Disaster Preparedness.
ravensays
Name of lab, people, event, dates? In other words, any sources I could refer to in publicizing this debacle? This has to go into the history of How Not to Manage Disaster Preparedness.
The big flood was actually the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans, Katrina.
Sorry, I could. But won’t for their and my safety and future continuing existence. A lot of scientists down here get death threats on a routine basis and it doesn’t take much to set the crazies off.
However, you don’t need it. The same thing happened in New York during 9/11. The air was full of dust. The EPA wasn’t capable of analyzing the dust and said it wasn’t very dangerous. It turned out to be toxic as all hell and a lot of people there ended up with large amounts of permanent health damage.
The head of the EPA at the time, a former governor and Republican from New Jersy, Christie Whitman, resigned shortly thereafter with nothing good to say about the Bush administration.
uncle frogysays
I liked the cartoon it really is the “strategy” that the republicans have been using for some time now. Palin and her fruit flies I kid you not speech a perfect example.
That business uses science and takes advantage of the basic research that is done in universities for products and processes is clearly there for all to see. That agribusiness does not want to know what the insects that they battle are all about and how they live is ridicules. So the majority of the people that pay for the republican political campaigns, that would be corporate persons, do understand science and the need for it in our economy pay for politicians who run anti-science and anti-intellectual anti-elite campaigns? What they get out of it hopefully is less, regulation less taxes, no unions and an ignorant workforce that can not afford the manufactured goods that they have made in foreign countries and imported here because it is cheaper.
do I have it right or did I forget something?
The obvious strategy to protect science in the US is to link it to the military. After all the Republicans fetishise the military as pretty much the only government department that should not be questioned.
Midnight Ramblersays
I’m especially reminded of Governor Palins’ “Research into fruit flies…I kid you not!” speech.
Don’t forget Bobby Jindal’s attempted mocking of “something called ‘volcano monitoring'” line – which, IIRC, was followed shortly by a volcanic eruption in Alaska.
Also, the fruit fly research that Palin refers to wasn’t about Drosophila like everybody assumed (which is important enough), but Mediterranean fruit flies. So it wasn’t even research that could be important for human medicine down the line, but was work with actual, direct, applied outcomes for controlling agricultural pests that cause millions of dollars of damage.
Therrinsays
Monado, FCD
And before that I imagine it’s all Ben Franklin and his kite to her.
The kite was part of the early warning system to let people know the British were coming to take away their guns, doncha know.
Coyotenosesays
Raven said:
It’s a fundie thing. You wouldn’t understand. Or want to.
We must now print this as a bumper sticker in honor of the obnoxious “It’s a [insert group] Thing. You wouldn’t understand” meme.
Kagehisays
Their strategy looks very clever to me. Put yourself in their position. Say you had money enough to send your own kids to a good school where they will get a good education. Information is power.
This presumes that they are secretly ruining education for the rest of us, while sending their kids to places that actually “do” teach them good science. Oddly, its more like the stupid kids finding Special Ed to be so fun they think everyone else should enjoy it too.
Then it should all be on record along with that Dutch scientist who used to beg them to do something before a bad storm came along.
I attended a lecture by the office (major?) in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of restoring New Orleans’ safety net of canals and levees after Katrina. I remember him saying how much it had all been improved. Then about a week later there was a news story saying that they’d plussed when they should have minused and it would only take six inches’ rise to flood it again. I wondered if he’d known that at the time.
(This is all my very inaccurate recollections of a lecture several years ago.)
And here I thought they knew the dust was bad and were just constrained from telling people because they were overruled by some misguided authority that wanted everyone to feel as safe as possible.
GODISNOWHEREsays
Revisionist history, or factual history? That is the question. I do not need, nor want a government agency to provide food, shelter, clothing, or an education for me. Just protect me from enemies, both foreign and domestic, I’ll handle the rest. If the government education system is good for anything other than grant writing skills, please indulge me.
If it is so necessary, a human right, or (fill in the blank), that the Federal, State, and Local governmental agencies take from the masses and fund public education for the betterment of our society, how is it that it is so broken?
How is it that at each election cycle we are bombarded with the need for more money to fix the broken education machine (monopoly)? Can’t the public educated masses figure out this political highway robbery at every successive election cycle?
I sense that “free thought” has been redefined here under the guise of the tolerance scam. If we agree with the majority opinion, no matter how ridiculous, or fact-less, then opinions are tolerated. But stray from the reservation of controlled thought, and well, let the insults begin, please…
amphioxsays
That is the question. I do not need, nor want a government agency to provide food, shelter, clothing, or an education for me. Just protect me from enemies, both foreign and domestic, I’ll handle the rest.
Part of protecting you from enemies, both foreign and domestic, is to reduce the rate and likelihood at which those enemies are created.
And providing food, shelter, clothing, and education for those who need it is one of the very best ways of doing so.
chigau ()says
GODISNOWHERE
I’ll handle the rest.
you would not last until morning coffee on any jobsite I’ve ever been on
amphioxsays
If it is so necessary, a human right, or (fill in the blank), that the Federal, State, and Local governmental agencies take from the masses and fund public education for the betterment of our society, how is it that it is so broken?
Basic category error.
The necessity, or general moral rightness, of doing something in principle has absolutely nothing at all to do with whether or not any specific actual attempt to do it has been done well.
But perhaps consider the alternative. What do you envision a society without ANY public education would be like? What do you envision will happen to all the children whose families cannot afford private schooling? To all the children whose families can only afford poor private schooling?
And when those uneducated and poorly educated children grow up into ignorant, bitter, angry adults, what do you plan to do when the enormous raging mob storms your gated community with pitchforks and torches?
Are you planning on stockpiling enough assault rifle bullets to mow them all down?
amphioxsays
In a democracy, the Federal, State, and Local governments ARE the masses. They are chosen by the masses, empowered by the masses, and remain in power only at the sufferance of the masses (though this sufferance is often passive, and there are lots of forces at working trying to keep it that way).
Government doesn’t “take” from the people. At least in a democracy, the people select and empower the government as an instrument for collecting and equitably and effectively distributing donations the people have already collectively consented to giving.
It’s true of course that the equitable and effective part does not always live up to intent, but that’s because government is a human creation and humans are not perfect.
hotshoesays
Revisionist history, or factual history? That is the question. I do not need, nor want a government agency to provide food, shelter, clothing, or an education for me. Just protect me from enemies, both foreign and domestic, I’ll handle the rest
Oh, of course you will, you precious little cupcake.
Leaving aside that you demonstrate your total lack of compassion towards your fellow humans who can’t quite “handle the rest” for whatever reason – you’re stupidly shortsighted as to your own best self-interest. You think it would be gravy for you living in a society with no publicly-funded education, with no literacy except among the tiny minority who could afford tutoring and who valued it enough to force their children to learn when everyone else’s children were sent out to work, or to run wild in the streets. Yes, you would no doubt rise to the top in such a society, like the cream you are, goody goody for you.
But you’re stupider than you look if you think teens with no education, no public help whatsoever, are going to be able to keep your society running without it breaking down around your ears in the next generation. Who’s going to staff the counter at the DMV or be the receptionist to book your doctor’s appointment for you when the only people who can read and write are the cream like you who are tough enough to “handle the rest” and educate themselves from scratch ? Who’s going to even stock the shelves at the grocery when they can’t read well enough to figure out which boxes go where ?
There’s a reason why all advanced nations have public education and it’s not just because they’re all in the thrall of the American “broken education machine”.
ravensays
And here I thought they knew the dust was bad and were just constrained from telling people because they were overruled by some misguided authority that wanted everyone to feel as safe as possible.
Not quite. The EPA had no idea whether the dust at 9/11 was toxic or not. And no way to find out.
So they just said it was safe. And guessed wrong.
There is a huge amount of info about this and a lot of court cases. Read them.
ravensays
That is the question. I do not need, nor want a government agency to provide food, shelter, clothing, or an education for me. Just protect me from enemies, both foreign and domestic, I’ll handle the rest.
Probably not. The leading libertarian society today is Somalia. How good are you at killing people? Even if you’re good, you won’t necessarily live too long. It only takes one bullet to take out a pirate or warlord.
“Well over half of US economic growth in the past century can be traced to investments in science and technology.”
Our “broken system” as you refer to it has resulted in the last superpower and the greatest nation on earth by many criteria. Who broke it was…the libertarian influenced Tea Partyoid morons who elected George Bush twice. Clinton left us with a roaring economy and a budget surplus.
How is it, that you missed that?
amphioxsays
The system has always been broken.
Every system has always been broken.
Some systems are more broken than others, some are less.
Some systems become more broken with time, some become less.
When considering the “brokenness” of the system, one must always pause and consider the alternative.
What would things be like if the system was not there? Completely gone?
And then we can get around to improving the system, and making it less broken.
ichthyicsays
I do not need, nor want a government agency to provide food, shelter, clothing, or an education for me.
Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us?
ichthyicsays
I’m curious…
it seems that every time there is a thread with the word “republican” in the title, self-claimed “libertarians” show up to tell us what they think.
strangely, I don’t see the reverse trend in threads with the word “democrat” in the title.
My conclusion is that 99% of all Glibertarians have drank the Rehtuglican kool-aid that convinces them that the GoP is somehow for SMALLER government, when over the last 40 years, ALL of the big increases in government spending have been done under GoP lead administrations.
ALL of them.
and this last rethuglican administration created the single largest government agency ever created in the history of mankind, bar none.
yet, five bucks says that most glibertarians will end up voting republican in the next election cycle, and did in the previous congressional elections.
ichthyicsays
let the insults begin, please…
clever dogs don’t ask to be kicked.
Gordonsays
I bet taxing the churches would give a budget surplus!
John Moralessays
I’d rather tax the churches than church the taxes.
ravensays
it seems that every time there is a thread with the word “republican” in the title, self-claimed “libertarians” show up to tell us what they think.
Worse than that. GodisNonexistent is one of Bob Lieyarts followers or maybe Bob the Sociopath himself.
He believes all of modern science is wrong, the earth is 6,000 years old, and being a pathological liar is a good thing. A lot of Bob the Sociopathic Liar’s followers are members of violent fringe groups, the forced birthers/female slavers who have a long history of xian terrorism and murder.
You won’t get anything coherent out of someone operating beyond our society on the fringes of sanity.
I really wish these Xian Theocrats and Gibbertarian kooks would find a theocratic hellhole* or gibbertarian paradise* somewhere and join it. And leave our society the hell alone.
The usual, they are all hypocrites who won’t walk their talk.
*Of course, these don’t exist. We left theocracies and gibbertarianism behind centuries ago because there weren’t enough people who wanted to live in human created hells.
ravensays
We will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you. I mean every word of it.
[Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, at the Aug 8, 1995 U.S. Taxpayers Alliance Banquet in Washington DC, talking about doctors who perform abortions and volunteer escorts
Terry’s sympathizers have, in fact, murdered more than a few health care workers.
Randall Terry isn’t even the worst of the xian terrorists by a long ways. He wants to kill people but he would rather someone else kill them for him. He wants his followers to go to prison for life, not him.
People like Terry, Duffy, Enyart, and whoever GodisNonexistent is are just monsters. The best that can be said, they are closely watched by the FBI and arrested and convicted when they break the laws. Which happens a lot.
Anrisays
GODISNOWHERE:
Assuming that this poster will be following the Great Libertarian Tradition of dropping a single orifice-rupturing turd of a post in a thread and then, (in a bravely self-reliant manner), slipping away into the faceless sea of the internet, never to be squeaked from again, I shall limit myself to responding:
He may be crazy – but he ain’t (completely) stupid.
The especially fucked up part is, that’s actually how they think.
“Where can we cut spending? Hmmmm… The right to an education isn’t anywhere in the constitution… *lightbulb moment* Out it goes!”
When ever I listen to anyone from wingnuttia I feel we’re faced with two not necessarily exclusive alternative explanations:
1) Darwin got something wrong and we have to question evolution, or, 2) Earth has encountered a wormhole and it has been invaded by beings from a strange and frightening parallel universe, thus ironically confirming some controversial theoretical physics.
OY
Happy New Year Y’all
Didaktylos, let’s hope so. I’m not convinced.
You have to admit, the average Republican would see your unemployment as a win.
The Republican “Theory of Everything”: God did it, so why question it?
/double facepalm Republicans put me in mind if the one Simpsons episode where Flanders was the “supreme ruler” or something and required a full frontal lobotomy for all.
This one is better (courtesy of our friends at AIG, of course):
http://www.answersingenesis.org/assets/images/articles/2005/12/1218doonesbury_lg.gif
Burnt at the stake more like it. It fits in with their program for a new Dark Age.
And it is a real possibility. Bush and his gang hated and still hate the EPA. So they gutted it, cut the budgets. Lots of scientists and others were laid off, including two of my friends.
They were never rehired.
During a major flood, their former office was asked to analyze the water for chemicals and pathogens. They couldn’t do it. The people who knew how to run the analytical instruments, HPLC’s and so on, had been laid off. Which didn’t really matter. The people who maintained the instruments had also been laid off and most of them were nonfunctional.
Why does almost everyone assume that the Republicans are nuts? Their strategy looks very clever to me. Put yourself in their position. Say you had money enough to send your own kids to a good school where they will get a good education. Information is power.
Look at it from a darwinian perspective; If your kids competitors could be denied that education, that power, wouldn’t you act to effect that? In other words, wouldn’t you try to cripple your kids competitors chances?
Crazy like foxes (or Fox News), those Republicans. They may be evil, but they’re not nuts.
Most but not all Republican candidates for president are evolution deniers, but even the pro-science candidates, Romney and Jon Huntsman, call this basic fact of science a belief and they always stick their dead Jeebus in there somewhere. For example Huntsman said “I believe in evolution. I think it’s part of God’s plan.”
According to the polls the science denier from Texas has the best chance of winning the Republican nomination despite, or perhaps because of, his extraordinary stupidity.
Aha! So you admit that you continue to prop up the theory of EVILution based solely upon your own financial self-interest.
It all makes sense now.
Yep, damn ivory tower liberal academic elitists.
That is exactly how these monsters seem to think.
I’m especially reminded of Governor Palins’ “Research into fruit flies…I kid you not!” speech.
Well they do have that stupid bumper sticker that says pretty much the same thing:
“God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”
Your job? I’m half-hoping* that this wingnut gets elected so he can’t do any more harm in my state.
*Half-hoping. Jeeze.
Or Sen. McCain’s ‘2 million to study DNA in bears. Now I don’t know if that was a paternity issue…’
Maybe, just maybe, someone can convince this empty suit that since gravity IS just a theory skydiving without a parachute isn’t necesarily fatal. Fuck me running, cretins like him will do to us what Lysenko and his lackeys did to Soviet genetic studies and agriculture. Give the teatards 8 years and USAnians won’t be fit for much more than grunt labor.
@criminy #7
Thar would be Treehouse of Horrors V, where Homer makes a time machine from a toaster, screws up the past (multiple times) and ends up in a world where Flanders is dictator.
The sad thing is that this cartoon isn’t an exagerration at all. I’ve spoken with people who have said things like this. In addition to putting scientists out of work, the Republicans are putting satirists out of work. There’s nothing to satirize when they’re actually saying the ridiculous things you were going to use as a punchline.
UAS @ #8 —
Wait…that strip has actually been posted to Answers in Genesis? What do they think is going on there?
Palin’s fruit fly comment neatly illustrated that she knows nothing about the history of scientific research for the last, oh, eighty years. And before that I imagine it’s all Ben Franklin and his kite to her.
Did the story about the non-functioning lab get any news play at all? Because if I’d been one of the surviving lab rats, I’d want the biggest muck-racking newspaper in town to get the story.
Richard Fortey, in his Dry Store Room No. 1, an informal history of the British Natural History Museum, makes the point over and over that, even in the obscure bug-studying reaches of research, something that people think is useless beetle-sorting suddenly turns out to be vital to the economy or people’s health. And you don’t know in advance which bit of research it will be.
The most alarming to me is that those people are standing on a pinnacle of human progress, health, security, and wealth undreamed of by kings made possible by science and yet they want to drag our understanding of the world back to the days before the industrial revolution.
Science is responsible for US preeminence in the world. As well as the basis of modern 21st century civilization.
Those are just facts.
“Well over half of US economic growth in the past century can be traced to investments in science and technology.”
This quote is from a federal report. Commissioned and produced during the Bush administration no less.
The fundie xian death cultists and the Tea Party really do hate the US and really do want to go back to the Dark Ages. That is just another fact.
We all know what US politics are these days.
Dems. We are incapable of governing.
GOP. We want the worst for you.
M Groesbeck @ #21 –
Oh, you must read the Woo to get the Total Experience.
I threw up a little in my mouth when I read this:
Make sure you wear the googles. ;)
raven @ #23:
I thought the GOP’s Vision was I got mine, so $%*&^ you!
It appears the Dem’s Vision is Victim before, victim now, victim forever!
Wrong word. They don’t think. They hate and lie.
It’s a fundie thing. You wouldn’t understand. Or want to.
Hey, you know, he did get a C- in his Vertebrate Anatomy class, meaning that someone must have taken pity on him……
I’d rather he’d said something like “evolution is foundational to all life sciences” rather than “the foundation of all life sciences.” Arguably, there are other “foundations,” like chemistry and physics, and a competent creationist should be able to, say, understand human anatomy reasonably well without evolution (not as well, of course).
Evolution’s crucial to science, of course, and a creationist is lacking the understanding necessary to do good cutting-edge biology (ok, there are a few who understand and use evolution while denying that it’s true in the end, but they’re rare). I just don’t want it to be oversold, though.
Glen Davidson
e.racer wins the thread @27!
Gary Trudeau knows his audience. If he had written “foundational,” he would have lost them at the curve as the lower quartile would have read “foundation” anyway. (The spell-checker flagged both “foundational” and “quartile” as unknown words. I rest my case.)
The foundation of life is hydrogenating carbon, sulphur, etc.
What goggles are those? Protective against flying bullshit?
Speaking of clever plots, is it a clever plot to get more page hits that I have to go to another page and then come back to see my recently posted comments?
Raven typed
The big flood was actually the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans, Katrina.
Sorry, I could. But won’t for their and my safety and future continuing existence. A lot of scientists down here get death threats on a routine basis and it doesn’t take much to set the crazies off.
However, you don’t need it. The same thing happened in New York during 9/11. The air was full of dust. The EPA wasn’t capable of analyzing the dust and said it wasn’t very dangerous. It turned out to be toxic as all hell and a lot of people there ended up with large amounts of permanent health damage.
The head of the EPA at the time, a former governor and Republican from New Jersy, Christie Whitman, resigned shortly thereafter with nothing good to say about the Bush administration.
I liked the cartoon it really is the “strategy” that the republicans have been using for some time now. Palin and her fruit flies I kid you not speech a perfect example.
That business uses science and takes advantage of the basic research that is done in universities for products and processes is clearly there for all to see. That agribusiness does not want to know what the insects that they battle are all about and how they live is ridicules. So the majority of the people that pay for the republican political campaigns, that would be corporate persons, do understand science and the need for it in our economy pay for politicians who run anti-science and anti-intellectual anti-elite campaigns? What they get out of it hopefully is less, regulation less taxes, no unions and an ignorant workforce that can not afford the manufactured goods that they have made in foreign countries and imported here because it is cheaper.
do I have it right or did I forget something?
uncle frogy
The obvious strategy to protect science in the US is to link it to the military. After all the Republicans fetishise the military as pretty much the only government department that should not be questioned.
Don’t forget Bobby Jindal’s attempted mocking of “something called ‘volcano monitoring'” line – which, IIRC, was followed shortly by a volcanic eruption in Alaska.
Also, the fruit fly research that Palin refers to wasn’t about Drosophila like everybody assumed (which is important enough), but Mediterranean fruit flies. So it wasn’t even research that could be important for human medicine down the line, but was work with actual, direct, applied outcomes for controlling agricultural pests that cause millions of dollars of damage.
Monado, FCD
The kite was part of the early warning system to let people know the British were coming to take away their guns, doncha know.
Raven said:
We must now print this as a bumper sticker in honor of the obnoxious “It’s a [insert group] Thing. You wouldn’t understand” meme.
This presumes that they are secretly ruining education for the rest of us, while sending their kids to places that actually “do” teach them good science. Oddly, its more like the stupid kids finding Special Ed to be so fun they think everyone else should enjoy it too.
I think that may be the Koch strategy. The lower orders (*) will have a bright future as slave labour.
(*)ie, anyone who isn’t a billionaire.
Then it should all be on record along with that Dutch scientist who used to beg them to do something before a bad storm came along.
I attended a lecture by the office (major?) in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of restoring New Orleans’ safety net of canals and levees after Katrina. I remember him saying how much it had all been improved. Then about a week later there was a news story saying that they’d plussed when they should have minused and it would only take six inches’ rise to flood it again. I wondered if he’d known that at the time.
(This is all my very inaccurate recollections of a lecture several years ago.)
We need something like this for science stories. I bet you all could suggest some good candidates.
And here I thought they knew the dust was bad and were just constrained from telling people because they were overruled by some misguided authority that wanted everyone to feel as safe as possible.
Revisionist history, or factual history? That is the question. I do not need, nor want a government agency to provide food, shelter, clothing, or an education for me. Just protect me from enemies, both foreign and domestic, I’ll handle the rest. If the government education system is good for anything other than grant writing skills, please indulge me.
If it is so necessary, a human right, or (fill in the blank), that the Federal, State, and Local governmental agencies take from the masses and fund public education for the betterment of our society, how is it that it is so broken?
How is it that at each election cycle we are bombarded with the need for more money to fix the broken education machine (monopoly)? Can’t the public educated masses figure out this political highway robbery at every successive election cycle?
I sense that “free thought” has been redefined here under the guise of the tolerance scam. If we agree with the majority opinion, no matter how ridiculous, or fact-less, then opinions are tolerated. But stray from the reservation of controlled thought, and well, let the insults begin, please…
Part of protecting you from enemies, both foreign and domestic, is to reduce the rate and likelihood at which those enemies are created.
And providing food, shelter, clothing, and education for those who need it is one of the very best ways of doing so.
GODISNOWHERE
you would not last until morning coffee on any jobsite I’ve ever been on
Basic category error.
The necessity, or general moral rightness, of doing something in principle has absolutely nothing at all to do with whether or not any specific actual attempt to do it has been done well.
But perhaps consider the alternative. What do you envision a society without ANY public education would be like? What do you envision will happen to all the children whose families cannot afford private schooling? To all the children whose families can only afford poor private schooling?
And when those uneducated and poorly educated children grow up into ignorant, bitter, angry adults, what do you plan to do when the enormous raging mob storms your gated community with pitchforks and torches?
Are you planning on stockpiling enough assault rifle bullets to mow them all down?
In a democracy, the Federal, State, and Local governments ARE the masses. They are chosen by the masses, empowered by the masses, and remain in power only at the sufferance of the masses (though this sufferance is often passive, and there are lots of forces at working trying to keep it that way).
Government doesn’t “take” from the people. At least in a democracy, the people select and empower the government as an instrument for collecting and equitably and effectively distributing donations the people have already collectively consented to giving.
It’s true of course that the equitable and effective part does not always live up to intent, but that’s because government is a human creation and humans are not perfect.
Oh, of course you will, you precious little cupcake.
Leaving aside that you demonstrate your total lack of compassion towards your fellow humans who can’t quite “handle the rest” for whatever reason – you’re stupidly shortsighted as to your own best self-interest. You think it would be gravy for you living in a society with no publicly-funded education, with no literacy except among the tiny minority who could afford tutoring and who valued it enough to force their children to learn when everyone else’s children were sent out to work, or to run wild in the streets. Yes, you would no doubt rise to the top in such a society, like the cream you are, goody goody for you.
But you’re stupider than you look if you think teens with no education, no public help whatsoever, are going to be able to keep your society running without it breaking down around your ears in the next generation. Who’s going to staff the counter at the DMV or be the receptionist to book your doctor’s appointment for you when the only people who can read and write are the cream like you who are tough enough to “handle the rest” and educate themselves from scratch ? Who’s going to even stock the shelves at the grocery when they can’t read well enough to figure out which boxes go where ?
There’s a reason why all advanced nations have public education and it’s not just because they’re all in the thrall of the American “broken education machine”.
Not quite. The EPA had no idea whether the dust at 9/11 was toxic or not. And no way to find out.
So they just said it was safe. And guessed wrong.
There is a huge amount of info about this and a lot of court cases. Read them.
Probably not. The leading libertarian society today is Somalia. How good are you at killing people? Even if you’re good, you won’t necessarily live too long. It only takes one bullet to take out a pirate or warlord.
Our “broken system” as you refer to it has resulted in the last superpower and the greatest nation on earth by many criteria. Who broke it was…the libertarian influenced Tea Partyoid morons who elected George Bush twice. Clinton left us with a roaring economy and a budget surplus.
How is it, that you missed that?
The system has always been broken.
Every system has always been broken.
Some systems are more broken than others, some are less.
Some systems become more broken with time, some become less.
When considering the “brokenness” of the system, one must always pause and consider the alternative.
What would things be like if the system was not there? Completely gone?
And then we can get around to improving the system, and making it less broken.
I do not need, nor want a government agency to provide food, shelter, clothing, or an education for me.
Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I’m curious…
it seems that every time there is a thread with the word “republican” in the title, self-claimed “libertarians” show up to tell us what they think.
strangely, I don’t see the reverse trend in threads with the word “democrat” in the title.
My conclusion is that 99% of all Glibertarians have drank the Rehtuglican kool-aid that convinces them that the GoP is somehow for SMALLER government, when over the last 40 years, ALL of the big increases in government spending have been done under GoP lead administrations.
ALL of them.
and this last rethuglican administration created the single largest government agency ever created in the history of mankind, bar none.
yet, five bucks says that most glibertarians will end up voting republican in the next election cycle, and did in the previous congressional elections.
let the insults begin, please…
clever dogs don’t ask to be kicked.
I bet taxing the churches would give a budget surplus!
I’d rather tax the churches than church the taxes.
Worse than that. GodisNonexistent is one of Bob Lieyarts followers or maybe Bob the Sociopath himself.
He believes all of modern science is wrong, the earth is 6,000 years old, and being a pathological liar is a good thing. A lot of Bob the Sociopathic Liar’s followers are members of violent fringe groups, the forced birthers/female slavers who have a long history of xian terrorism and murder.
You won’t get anything coherent out of someone operating beyond our society on the fringes of sanity.
I really wish these Xian Theocrats and Gibbertarian kooks would find a theocratic hellhole* or gibbertarian paradise* somewhere and join it. And leave our society the hell alone.
The usual, they are all hypocrites who won’t walk their talk.
*Of course, these don’t exist. We left theocracies and gibbertarianism behind centuries ago because there weren’t enough people who wanted to live in human created hells.
Terry’s sympathizers have, in fact, murdered more than a few health care workers.
Randall Terry isn’t even the worst of the xian terrorists by a long ways. He wants to kill people but he would rather someone else kill them for him. He wants his followers to go to prison for life, not him.
People like Terry, Duffy, Enyart, and whoever GodisNonexistent is are just monsters. The best that can be said, they are closely watched by the FBI and arrested and convicted when they break the laws. Which happens a lot.
GODISNOWHERE:
Assuming that this poster will be following the Great Libertarian Tradition of dropping a single orifice-rupturing turd of a post in a thread and then, (in a bravely self-reliant manner), slipping away into the faceless sea of the internet, never to be squeaked from again, I shall limit myself to responding:
Not sure if trolling or just very stupid.
Thank you again for your support.