opponents of evolution have lost their majority on the kansas state board of education.

well, thank god. who, no doubt, also believes in evolution, because she let it evolve after she set the big bang in motion, or whatever. so now schoolchildren in kansas will hopefully at least have a clue about what the scientific method entails.

and the subhead of this post is “but kentuckians lose theirs”. their common sense, that is.

it’s in kentucky, you know. the new creation museum. where you can see exhibits depicting dinosaurs co-existing with adam and eve, and other anachronistic anomalies.

thanks to this article and the efforts of this museum, i now know that all fossils on earth are a result of the great flood described in genesis.

who knew? screw that carbon dating stuff, right?

i may just be an alarmist. or a fatalist. or a pessimist. or whatever ist you prefer.

but this article about india and pakistan has me thinking.

the article quotes sources in india as saying that pakistani intelligence is responsible for the recent bombings in mumbai that killed over 200 people.

great. just what the world needs. another region of the world destabilized based on probable conflict between islam and non-islam, which is what this comes down to. there’s suddenly an awful lot of this type of thing going on in a lot of different places all at the same time.

was pakistan involved? is india setting up pakistan as a straw man? does it matter? it matters not. what matters is the perception on both sides, and trust me, if this accusation gains a foothold there’s going to be major friction involving islam in yet another area of the world.

to add to the current issues in iraq.

and israel.

and iran.

and any of a host of other areas of the world. throw north korea into the mix as an unrelated wild card, and i’m now suddenly more nervous about an unstable world than i have been in quite a while, and that’s really saying something.

and, to put it mildly, i’m less than confident in our current government’s ability to navigate the tricky waters that may be ahead.

and, to put it bluntly, i’m less than convinced that our government is not the wizard behind the curtain, pulling levers.

i may just be paranoid. it’s hard to tell anymore.

the supreme court has blocked president bush from ordering military war crimes trials for detainees at guantanamo bay in cuba. it’s a major blow to his so-called “war on terror” which thus far has caused more worldwide terror than it has stopped, if you ask me.

and the result was 5-3, meaning that even though chief justice roberts sat out the case, his vote either way would not have changed the outcome. too bad justice scalia doesn’t have the same set of ethics as does roberts–scalia, as he’s proven time and again, would never have recused himself even if he should have.

and as i’ve said so many times, the supreme court ends up being an independent institution, no matter how much effort presidents put into stacking the deck in their favor.

those people are independent cusses, and, if you think about their decisions impartially, they get it right nearly all the time.

good for scotus. go scotus.

have homosexual sex, that is.

and more than just birds and bees. evidently bighorn sheep, giraffes, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, west indian manatees, japanese macaques, and hundreds of other species are getting their same-sex jollies.

that’s been a known fact for some time, though. but the scientific community, through their outright homophobia or maybe just their squeamishness, has not thought through the impact of this.

but now joan roughgarden has, and the implications are staggering.

staggering as in shaking the very foundations of darwinism.

as the article says, “For too long…biology has neglected evidence that mating isn’t only about multiplying. Sometimes, as in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality…is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden’s theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution.”

this article is an absolute must-read…one of the most fascinating accounts of divergent thinking that i’ve run across in some time. the kind of article that not only forces you to consider what you think of ms. roughgarden’s thesis, but also to reconsider the basic tenets of what you’ve believed to be true all your life.

like this, for instance: she believes that there is proof that bisexuality is the norm in the animal world (we are animals too, you know), and that “the hetero/homo distinction is a purely cultural creation, and not a fact of biology”.

or this: “At this point, we have thousands of species that deviate from the standard account of Darwinian sexual selection. So we get all these special case exemptions, and we end up downplaying whatever facts don’t fit. The theory…clearly has the trajectory of a hypothesis in trouble.”

she’s currently being shouted down by much of the entrenched scientific community for what are ostensibly valid (to them) reasons, but behind their official objections, there’s the fact that ms. roughgarden used to be mr. roughgarden. unofficially, they think that colors ms. roughgarden’s conclusions.

maybe it just takes one to know one?

the senate is preparing to vote, yet again, to write discrimination into the constitution. will it happen? not a chance. but the republicans see it as a sop to their religious faithful (people whom, to my mind, are actually neither).

from an ap news article on the subject:

“The Republican leadership is asking us to spend time writing bigotry into the Constitution,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record) of Massachusetts, whose state legalized gay marriage in 2003. “A vote for it is a vote against civil unions, against domestic partnership, against all other efforts for states to treat gays and lesbians fairly under the law.”

Hatch responded: “Does he really want to suggest that over half of the United States Senate is a crew of bigots?”

do i really need to respond to hatch? or is the answer to his supposedly rhetorical question self evident?

update: as expected, the proposal failed. with 48 senators voting for passage, hatch is technically correct. instead, just under half of the senate is a crew of bigots.