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I'm gonna pitch another fit. If these sorts of entries bother you, get out now.

Yesterday, the Kansas Board of Education rejected evolution as a scientific principle, and adopted a new curriculum guideline that eliminates evolution as a way to describe the emergence of new species. You know, like people from the apes. They're leaving intact the theory of "microevolution", which is about changes that occur within a species.

I'm so angry about this I can barely type. What the hell was the Board thinking? Don't get me wrong -- this resolution doesn't just say that evolution can't be proved. I can almost accept that. Individual teachers can still teach it, but it has been removed from the required curriculum, and no knowledge of it will be required to pass state-sanctioned tests (I'm pretty much quoting from CNN here). Another minor consolation is that the branch of pseudo-science known as "creation science" hasn't been brought in to replace evolution (although it sure was proposed!).

What is the matter with the religious conservatives who can't accept that the reason "because it says so-and-so in the Bible" isn't valid for anything outside of their own private religious practices? Science is done with hypotheses, experimentation, data analysis, and then forming conclusions about the original hypothesis. And you know what? IT WORKS! We haven't found a cure for polio, landed people on the moon, or kept Dick fucking Clark alive by praying to the invisible man in the sky. Science. We did it through science.

I just want there to be a big nationwide survey, where all sorts of basic scientific questions get asked, and every idiot who says that he's sure that God created mankind, the earth, and the whole shebang about 10,000 years ago will get carted off to some remote dirt farm in Idaho where they can spend the rest of their lives doing plain, ordinary things, and teaching their slope-browed, mouth-breathing children the same stupid things their parent's taught them, and people who answer that they believe that the Big Bang sounds like a pretty good theory to them, and evolution looks all right too can live in regular, science-enabled places, and teach their bright-eyed, smiling children about science, and questioning things, and let them to go on and live happy lives. Is that possible?

Of course not. It's not fair to banish children to the 13th century just because their parents are cluon repellers. But I so want to...

One final note here, just a little paragraph from CNN's article on this, to let you know that not only did we lose this fight, but we're outnumbered by the idiots, too.

A recent survey by the National Science Foundation found that 52 percent of adults believe early humans lived alongside dinosaurs, 65 percent do not believe the Big Bang theory, and 55 percent do not believe that humans evolved from animals.

How's them apples?