Rhinocrisy

The origin of the Nazi/evolutionist connection theory seems to be one Dr. Kent Hovind, a “creation scientist”, who has even earned the ire of other Christians over his idiocy. But Dr. Hovind isn’t all bad! He’s also the creator of an awesome theme park, Dinosaur Adventure Land, where you can learn about how dinosaurs and humans lived together in the Garden of Eden, how Noah’s flood formed the Grand Canyon, and other such goodness. Dinosaur Adventure Land is, of course, in Florida, where there is apparently some sort of rift in the fabric of normality these days.

Reminder: we DO live in the twenty-first century. But, like I said below… we’re perfectly capable of backsliding. Me, I’m looking forward to a nice Dark Age. Should be more entertaining than this blegging crap.

While I was looking around for pictures of the Scopes Monkey Trial, I came across this site, apparently put together by conservative Christians. I’m amazed that someone could be so startlingly wrong and still so utterly convinced. So amazed that I have to doubt. For example, check out this passage:

You may be interested, since the popular understanding of the Scopes trial is an illusion, what the reality is?

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?

1. William Jennings Bryan was opposed to evolutionism for several reasons, mostly because of what it had done in Germany under Hitler. He was opposed to the idea that natural selection based on violent competitive struggle, which had so recently influenced German intellectualism and led to atrocities against the Jews and against the world. He wanted to stop evolution, an unproved hypothesis, from being taught as true. He saw democracy as a workable form of government under a Christian belief system, but saw the teaching of evolution as a method of indoctrination into the doctrine of materialism, which is anti-Christian.

In case you don’t know, the Scopes trial was in 1925. Ayep.

I am mystified. Is there a specific faculty devoted to knowing that you’re ignorant that these site editors lack? That’s all I can come up with. Either that, or this site was created by Tom Lehrer.

A month ago, it looked like the Chinese National Overseas Oil Company, CNOOC, was going to buy Unocal. But people who have been around the block knew that the U.S. would never let a foreign company buy such a strategic asset. I asked around, “how do they do it?” That is, what invisible fist would they come up with to out-roshambo the invisible hand of an open auction? It didn’t make any sense.

But sure enough, a couple weeks ago, the news came down from the great green flatlands of the Hacienda Industrial Park in San Ramon, California, home of ChevronTexaco: All your Unocal are belong to us.

Whaaa? Why did ChevTex agree to spend a couple billion extra bucks outbidding the Chinese? Shareholders reacted badly, costing the company about $8 billion in market capitalization. (Market cap is the market price of the company, should you feel the urge to max out your gold card.)

(Here’s the math: Up to the April 4 announcement, the stock had been tracking the industry but with that money-wasting decision, the stock started its 11.9% drop in just over 2 weeks. In that period the industry as a whole lost only 7% of its value. With 2.1 billion shares outstanding, that 3.9% fall means about an $8 billion extra loss of equity. The company would have lost money either way over this period, as dropping oil prices mean that speculators are getting temporarily out of the market. But if the company had fallen in sync with the rest of the industry, it would have lost only $14 billion in equity, instead of the $22 billion it lost.)

But if you are among the legions of rhinocrites who hold ChevronTexaco stock, you have nothing to fear but Phil himself. For fume-huffers in Congress have found a way to pay back not just the patriots at ChevronTexaco, but the whole network of America-loving oil giants: an $8 billion tax cut. Now I have no idea whether this is intended as some sort of payback or not, but if so, it’s pretty heavyhanded.

I mean, usually, if a policy is opposed to the Bush Administration, it’s a good bet to support it first and ask questions later. But incredibly, this proposal attacks the Bush Administration for being too friendly to renewable energy.

The House legislation, approved last week by the Ways and Means Committee, is at odds with the Bush administration’s approach. The president’s proposed budget calls for $6.7 billion in tax breaks for energy, with 72 percent going toward renewable sources of energy and energy efficiency, compared with about 6 percent in the House plan…

House Republicans stood by the measure, which provides the $8 billion in tax savings over a 10-year period. It was approved by the committee in a 26 to 11 vote that was generally along party lines but with five Democrats supporting the legislation and one Republican voting against it.

The legislation was pushed by Bill Thomas, whose district includes the Kern County oilfields that produce more oil than the entire state of Oklahoma. The biggest oil producer in Kern County is also the company that first struck oil in the region, the same company that has run the county for a century. ChevronTexaco.

(And in case the feds don’t help enough, the company is also asking impoverished Bay Area counties for a $44 million property tax rollback. Of that reduction, the S.F. Chronicle reports, Chevron is seeking the biggest reduction, $21 million.)

One of my favorite subversive notions is the idea that knowledge gets lost.

An important myth in our society is that scientific progress, like entropy, defines the arrow of time. Without a doubt, we are learning more every day; our understanding of the world is greater, and better, than at any moment in the past. Thus, we have nothing to learn from history, no call to preserve ancient knowledge. On the contrary, we have an imperative to eradicate that inferior corpus and replace it with the more modern understanding of the world.

As a literate society we find it hard to imagine that knowledge could actually disappear. After all, everything we learn is recorded in such incredible detail that posterity will surely retain it. But recorded knowledge and functional knowledge are two separate things, as anyone who has struggled with a textbook can attest to. I’ve heard it said that if we wanted to go to the moon today, it would be impossible. Not because we lack the capacity; but we do lack the skills and the people with the necessary accumulated knowledge. Maintaining a body of people equipped with a specific expertise requires an active effort. In the absence of expediency, we let those skills atrophy; we let it decay. What would have been basic knowledge in the past - how to lead a horse, how to sow squash seeds - is forgotten now, because it became unimportant.

This need not always be the case. For example, in India knowledge of how to construct aquifers has largely vanished, thanks to the introduction of centralized irrigation systems. The enormous efficiency of a mechanized irrigation system means that the old (ancient) system of constructing dew collectors, wells, and so on, became outmoded. Obsolete. So naturally, with time, the knowledge of their value and their construction eroded away.

Now, in the era of water scarcity, the modern irrigation system is suddenly failing. Water tables are dropping, and ancient aquifers are almost completely drained of their accumulated treasure.* Here, those older techniques might be usefully resurrected. But that knowledge has vanished. It must now be rebuilt through active effort, relearned by the new generation.

This is a rather sad idea, but I find it compelling, and exciting, because it demands that we do NOT forget the past, that we reject the notion that newer is necessarily better, and that the way things will be done is an improvement on the way they were.

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* The same is an issue in the U.S., where agriculture draws heavily on underground aquifers without replacement. Eventually these supplies will be depleted, prompting a crisis. But, honestly, I don’t really care as much about the cattle industry as I do about Indian villagers.