After 8 years in the United States of the war on science by the Bush administration, things wouldn’t be much better during a McCain presidency. From the Bad Astronomy blog at Discover magazine: John McCain: literally antiscience. “I am not a fan of John McCain… I have had my doubts on his support for science, but my fears have been at least in part confirmed.”
Phil Plait goes on to quote McCain from an AP story, as he changes the subject away from his running mate to Obama:
“That’s nearly a million every day, every working day he’s been in Congress,” McCain said. “And when you look at some of the planetariums and other foolishness that he asked for, he shouldn’t be saying anything about Governor Palin.”
Plait continues:
I’m sorry, did he call a planetarium “foolishness”? Did he really say that?
Yeah, he did…
A planetarium is hardly foolishness. They excite tens of thousands of children about science every year. They teach science, and the wondrous joy of astronomy.
Add on top of McCain’s hatred for planetaria, Sarah Palin’s belief that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together. From Salon.com, The pastor who clashed with Palin.
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”
Oh boy… if these two ever get into power, the American “brain drain” is going to be a flood wave.
3 comments
who as a kid probably never figured out that his entire physical environment was built by other people, and who can never get that his whole world only exists because people learn and do science. No wonder Palin impresses him.
museums, libraries, public hospitals, public art, symphony orchestras, …