FOX News: The Most Powerful Smell in News.

The Dumbth of Politics, FOX Style
When actual analysis is just too darned inconvenient

Political Move: when, without resorting to illegal or unethical practices, a politician attempts to outmaneuver her or his opponents.

Brilliant Political Move: when, without resorting to illegal or unethical practices, a politician cleverly outmaneuvers his opponents.

Political Stunt: when, without resorting to illegal or unethical practices, a politician's opponents successfully outmaneuver him or her.

Ever notice how, when the talking heads on FOX News are forced
to deal with an issue like the Feingold hearing on censure, they
seldom seem to acknowledge political science's many quirks?

Are the FOX nutsacks really that simple, or do they recognize the
only folks they can fool on such an issue are their dumb viewers?

America's Education System is Failing Us
Intelligent Design nonsense has a handful of intelligent supporters. Why?

It's in the news again. In Arkansas. In Lancaster, California. And still in Scranton, PA. Unfortunately, it ain't going away any time soon. Not while the American education system continues to produce students who, although reasonably bright, have no clue whatsoever as to the role or function of science.

If you look around long enough, you'll find not all Intelligent Design proponents are Bush-esque, double-digit IQ midgets. But don't let that fool you: none of these people actually understands the role of science. Indeed, their insistence ID be taught in the science classroom is proof they overestimate what science purports to do.

In the latest Mensa Bulletin a Mensan named Ronnie Dubs expressed his support for ID. Numerous PhDs and theologians have prepared clever, though duplicitous and scientifically devoid, "theories" on creationism. And just a couple days ago an intelligent woman named Lynn Barton wrote eloquently about ID in an article she called "Why intelligent design will change everything."

I've been debunking things like this for years. In fact, before my web presence became political, I spent most of my online time debating science & philosophy with some extremely intelligent people.

Sorry to digress. The point was to establish this: I've seen plenty of ID proponents' essays on the matter, and many of the well-thought-out ones come with the following caveat: "science is inherently political" (Barton's mental circuit breaker is placed somewhere near the top, as most of them are). This is a pre-emptive attack, pursued in order to

defray the true and valid point that ID supporters are never mainstream scientists; and that no mainstream scientist thinks Intelligent Design belongs in the science classroom,
give the writer - not a scientist - more credibility, and
diminish any doubt the reader might have that political differences are entirely irrelevant to science itself.

In fact, however, the vast majority of science is apolitical, and it has
always been so. Worse still, for the ID proponent, as in the exceptional example of Galileo, the force that has historically made political hay out of science has always been religion. And in its battles with science, religion has always been on the wrong side of history.

You'd think ID supporters would at least realize this. After all, that is the stuff the American public education system teaches our kids about science. Galileo did this. Geology is the study of rocks. Einstein discovered that. This is a flagellum. That is a comet. The American curriculum approaches science from an effects-first position. Only after a student enters college (or, in occasional cases, the advanced high school student) is the scientific process stressed. Until that time it's all about, "oooh! Look at all this cool stuff," without any focus on how science works, and how it played a crucial part in humankind's understanding of this "cool stuff."

The scientific process is barely touched upon, and therefore many Americans grow up completely ignorant of the function of science. High school graduates can go on to college, flourish in many areas, pursue numerous graduate-level degrees, and still never fully comprehend the fundamental mechanisms behind basic scientific pursuit.

In order for a scientific hypothesis to become a theory, it must be falsifiable, testable, and predictive. Intelligent Design is none of those things. I think ID would lose 99.9% of its supporters if only everyone who believes it were familiar with these three basic principles of science:

ID is not testable. What experiment can be used to "test" this idea? ID proponents don't propose any; there can be none. Behe, one of ID's principle advocates, has even admitted he can provide no means by which to test the ID hypothesis. Instead, Behe has come up with scientific-sounding concepts, like irreducible complexity (which, in terms of logic, is itself established within the argumentum ad ignorantium fallacy; the faulty claim that a statement is necessarily true if it can't be proved as false).

ID is not falsifiable. In order for a hypothesis to become a theory, it has to be conceivably falsifiable. There has to be the possibility that a condition might occur which would prove the hypothesis wrong. If I hypothesize a molecular theory of water that posits water at sea level under normal atmospheric conditions always boils at 100 degrees Celsius, and not less, then it could be conceived that water might actually boil at 99, therefore proving my theory wrong. So long as water, under these conditions, always boils at 100 degrees Celsius, my molecular THEORY remains intact (in science, it is never a FACT. THEORY is the highest level a hypothesis can become). However, my theory is still falsifiable: there always exists the possibility water could mysteriously start boiling at a lower temperature. On ther other hand, ID is synonymous with Divine Intervention. That is, by its very complexion Intelligent Design is equipped with a "loophole" - a way to circumvent the rules that govern the rest of reality. Indeed, the creationist argument is crafted so that any violation of the requirements of science actually bolster the claim. After all, only an omnipotent Designer could perform the impossible.
ID is not predictive. Even if there can be no practical use for it, any proper scientific theory is, by nature predictive. If I warm a pot of water at 10,000 feet altitude, I can predict - using the molecular theory of water - that my water will, in fact, boil at 99.x degrees Celsius. Using the theory of gravity, scientists regularly plot the courses of meteors/asteroids, to see if they will impact, or zoom by, the earth. But ID is so far removed from what constitutes an actual hypothesis that even its most ardent supporters have no idea how to use it in a predictive way. After all, who knows what "god" will do next?

Aside from the pseudoscience, one of the most far-fetched claims ID proponents make is this: the uproar by the scientific community "proves" how very powerful and revolutionary Intelligent Design is! "Otherwise," they manage with a straight face, "why would pro-evolution folks be so scared of Intelligent Design?"

Well, it's simple, really: the fact so many intelligent people are ignorant of basic scientific principles is what scares me about this. The notion our nation is scholastically falling behind the rest of the world scares me.

The prospect of our nation's impressionable kids -- already not getting the basics on science itself -- growing up, thinking ID is actually scientifically valid scares the shit out of me. This ID crap underscores our collective ignorance, and it's an embarrassment to think the Chinese, Russians, Europeans, and everyone else are watching us shoot ourselves in the foot. And they're patiently waiting for the USA to turn into the USJ, United States of Jesus, where science is only allowed when it agrees with a 2,000 year old mythology.

What the hell are you going to do about it?