Kansas Devolves...

You know, it means something when the comments to my postings become more random than the postings themselves. It means I should probably be frightened. But, since I did watch the Pac Man cartoon series as a child, I must clear up some misconceptions on the Pac Man family.

We started with Pac Man, a cheerful yellow little fellow haunted by paranormal phenomena that could only be vanquished by eating a certain pill. Basically, the entire game was a metaphor for the benefits of lithium in today’s psychotic society. Then you had Ms. Pac Man, which shows that an amorphous cartoon character can be made female and attractive just by adding a bow. Now, it is correct that it was Ms. Pac Man. But, if you played the game sufficiently long enough you got a cut scene in which Pac Man makes an honest woman out of Ms. Pac Man and gets married. Soon later you have Baby Pac Man, which was this video game/pinball game abomination that resulted in Pac Man hanging out at bars, staying out all hours and finally hooking up with Lara Croft and becoming a deadbeat dad. Basically, it’s a Greek tragedy that goes “wokka wokka wokka”

(See, I knew all those hours at Haunted Trails miniature golf course and video arcade would come in handy someday.)

Anyway, we have some important news from the great state of Kansas today. By a 6 to 4 vote, the Kansas Board of Education decided to add language questioning the theory of evolution and to start teaching intelligent design. Excuse me for a moment while I bang my head against a wall.

(Bang. Bang. Bang.)

Hey, if I do that enough maybe I could make the school board. I mean, you can’t fault them too much since they are in Topeka which means that the members of the school board are, by definition, too dumb to get out of Topeka. But it is great to know that part of my taxes are going to be spent on teaching kids a theory in intelligent design that isn’t just wrong but ludicrously wrong at that.

I can’t respect a state that is basically going to teach children “Science is really hard and we don’t feel good about trying to explain all of it so we are just going to state that some mysterious outside force did it. Could be God. Could be that giant flying spaghetti monster. We’ll leave that up to you to decide.” It’s just really bad science by people who don’t appreciate the power of randomness. That’s part of their complaint, that life just couldn’t occur through random events. The thing is, randomness runs our lives and creates incredible patterns as it is. Study fractals and you’ll see beauty out of pure chance. Probability makes great things happen.

This stuff just angers me to no end. When I was growing up I was raised to want to be a scientist and to learn all about what makes the world work. Now it seems that we are spending all of our time questioning them and putting everything on faith, which really doesn’t create new inventions or cure diseases at the end of the day. Before someone uses that last sentence to question my beliefs, here is my philosophy in a nutshell. We were given incredible minds and deductive ability and free will to make the most out of life on this planet, not to sit around and say, “Don’t worry, someone will come and save us.” We’ve already been saved, the tools have been in our hands from the beginning.

So now I get to spend a lot of time in a state that is going to intentionally raise its children to be bad at science. And drive off pretty much any biotech company that would ever think about stepping foot in the state. And making us the laughingstock of the U.S. Thanks school board. It’s nice to know that incompetence rises to the level where it can do the most damage.

(Seriously, if I knew this was going to be the case I would never have left the trees in the first place.)