Nearly two thirds (65 percent) of Americans think that President Obama would be a better leader than Mitt Romney if an alien invasion were to happen. Hm, well, yes… and? So?
A survey for National Geographic finds extraterrestrial visits not that crazy an idea to most Americans. Thirty-six percent of Americans think aliens have visited Earth, and almost 80 percent believe the government has kept information about UFOs a secret from the public.
Sigh. Mr. Sci Fi and aliens here… and I am in the 12% who say “not!” But that hasn’t stopped me from issuing taunts at alien lurkers. Which you can laugh at (aloud!) in Existence.
Is this a sign of the times—correlated with the public’s attitudes toward science?
For Congress now speaks a full grade level lower than it did in 2005. Falling from grade 11.5 to 10.6. Using the Flesch-Kincaid test that gives your kids the “reads at a 10th grade level” score, the Sunlight Foundation has measured the vocabulary used in Congressional speeches over the years and found that the level has dropped suddenly. For both parties, but particularly amongst Republican Congressmen, particularly amongst the newest batch, such as Rand Paul (3rd worst, speaks at an 8th grade level.) Indeed the entire worst ten are Republicans (eight of those are freshmen.) And the more conservative they are, the worse their speech (dropping by three full grades from center to fringe.) Interestingly, amongst Democrats with less than 10 years in Congress, the trend is similar, those closest to the political centre have the most complex speech, while those further to the left drop by about a grade. But for Democrats in Congress for more than 10 years, the trend is sharply reversed. Are candidates dumbing down their speech, or are parties dumbing down their candidates?
And North Carolina legislators want to stop planners from using the state’s own science panel’s prediction of sea level rise (about 1m by 2100, fairly conservative). Alack! There is one potential salvation from this madness. For the insurance companies to make clear that, in 20 years, they plan to go after all the doofuses who delayed prudent measures by squelching the reasonable advice of the scientists who actually knew what they were talking about.
Part of the hysterical incantation that “government is never good” comes from folks who actually believe we would have had jets, rockets, telecom, weather forecasting, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, the Internet, or countless other things, without the advanced R&D that we, as citizens, agreed to pay for because the benefits and ROI lay beyond any plausible Return on Investment horizon of major corporations. (And if we - as a people - had drawn only a small “businesslike” 5% royalty on those things, all red ink in the budget would today be erased.) HALF of economic growth in the last 60 years is attributed to Science and Technology. And here is just one of many documents making that point.
Hence, the War on Science... and on all other intellectual or knowledge castes is a lot more than just politics. It is a stab at the very heart of any chance for your grandchildrens’ prosperity. Think about it. (But then, people who come here are already thinkers. You already HAVE thought about it. So I’m wasting breath.)
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