Wikiality

Last night on The Cobert Report, Stephen Colbert's word for the night was "wikiality." That's a view of reality based on the internet encyclopedia "Wikipedia," which can be changed by readers--if enough readers agree that something is true it is published in the encyclopedia. It is supposed to democratize knowledge, but it runs afoul of an old axiom, that if you tell a lie often enough people will believe it and eventually it will become the accepted "truth."

Case in point: AP ran a story this morning about the immanent opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, a natural history museum filled with dioramas in which dinosaurs and people walk side by side. Why do people believe this completely un-scientific crap? Because enough Christian loonies out there keep insisting that it's true. It's kind of like Weapons of Mass Destruction and Sadaam's link to Al Queda.

Well, I've always said faith trumps reason. So, I've discovered, did Thomas Aquinas, who said that faith was superior to reason because, while reason is required to comprehend the material world, faith is required to comprehend God. But these loonies are now officially a threat to America, to our economy and to our national security. It's not just that intelligent people all over the world will continue to laugh at us. Who cares? It's that these continued attacks on science could eventually destroy our nation, by further eroding our education system and our national intelligence. This country and this nation hates science and scientists. We attack climatologists as "doomsayers" and paleontologists and physicists as "unbelievers" and then we wonder why China and India are catching up to us and passing us as producers of technology. We latch on to whatever pseudo-science makes us feel good or doesn't challenge our faith and now Russia is arguably leading the building of the international space station. We declare evolution to be "just a theory" and stand by while most of the important AIDS research is being done in France (AIDS is just God's scourge anyway).

conservatives are destroying America.

Conservatives like to say that liberals are "unrealistic" and then turn around and insist that Adam and Eve rode vegi-saurs in the Garden of Eden. It's ridiculous. And it's got to stop.