If you read my blog, you probably read other blogs that promote science and try to stamp out antiscience. If so, you’ve probably seen or heard of this incident last night in the Republican presidential debates, where the moderator asked the candidates who "does not .. agree/believe in evolution". Three candidates raised their hands.

I am not sure how to feel about this. As familiar as I am with antiscience in this country, I’m still appalled that anyone who would run for office would state that they think evolution is wrong. Even after six years of this White House, I am still shocked to see such a flagrant attitude against reality.

Maybe I should be happy that it was only three of them. Given that anti-evolution is a platform in some states’ Republican parties, a 30% disavowal rate of reality maybe isn’t so bad.

I’m certainly not surprised at the three who did raise their hands: Brownback (Kansas, natch), Tancredo (from Colorado; my work will be cut out for me when I move, certainly– though he’s not from my district), and Huckabee (Arkansas). McCain equivocated, saying he thinks evolution is real, but then pandered a bit to the young-Earth base by talking about religion and the Grand Canyon.

I remember when the Republican party stood for strong science. It doesn’t even seem that long ago. Wow.

I will be very interested to see what the Democrats have to say on this same issue. I don’t think too many of them will make a strong stand, since it seems these days that every politician feels the need to twist in the wind, and face whatever way each breeze blows. Al Gore has made some particularly galling comments lately, too. Update: Gore may have not been as serious as many say.

I am not a one-issue voter, but peoples’ attitudes toward science — toward reality — is very telling on many of their other attitudes.

And say it with me: evolution is not a belief system! You cannot believe in it or not. It is a matter of scientific fact. It exists, it is real, whether you stick your fingers in your ears and sing la-la-la or not.

Update: Chris Cillizza has written about this on the Washington Post blog. The comments are interesting. Thanks to Derek of Skepticality for the tip!

In the UK, some schools are dropping teaching about the Holocaust, for fear that it might offend Muslim students.

No, I am not kidding.

This is precisely why we must not waver, must not slow, and must not lower our gaze. The forces of antiscience, antithought, antirationalism… they lurk around every corner, hide in every dark spot. But now they walk around in the daylight, and have so slowly and perniciously built themselves up in our society that we hardly notice. They have successfully boiled a live frog.

But I see them. You should too.

Thanks to PZ for finding this.

Remember poor George Deutsch, the NASA PR guy who tried to, what was it again? Oh yes, suppress climate scientist Jim Hansen? And what was the other thing he did…? Oh yeah, he tried to make sure the word "theory" was put after every mention of Big Bang on a NASA site, specifically because of his religious leanings.

Yeah, that George Deutsch.

Well, he testified in front of Congress today. I would give a million bazillion dollars to have been there for that, but unfortunately my real life intervenes. Maybe I’ll catch it on a CSPAN rerun, or it’ll show up on YouTube sometime.

This oughta be very interesting.

I just watched a show on the Military Channel called "Futureweapons", and it was about nuclear weapons. it was an interesting show, though a little short on details (watch "Trinity and Beyond" for a fantastic review of the American nuclear program — and the music is phenomenal too).

But I bring this up, because the narrator, who was also the host, kept saying "nuke you lur".

The first time I heard it, I thought I was mistaken. By the fifth time, I realized it was the producers who were mistaken. They let a guy narrate a documentary who couldn’t pronounce a word? And not just any word, but the word, the one the whole show was about?

Mispronouncing the word nuclear does not make you stupid; I know an astronomer who pronounces it that way (as another prof once told me, he’s the smartest guy you’ll ever hear say it that way). I can certainly think of some not-so-smart people who mispronounce it, too.

But why oh why didn’t they train the guy to say it the right way? Maybe they did, and he refused, or couldn’t get it right, or they just let it slide. The world of documentary making is a weird one. I’ve only seen my little slices of it when I do a bit for some show or another. I know that they spend five hours interviewing me, and using me for like 20 seconds in the actual show. So maybe there is a level of insanity I can only glimpse.

But c’mon. Nuke you lur?

Sigh.

Is it possible that, one day, there will be a UFO story that makes me scratch my head and say, I cannot possibly conceive of an explanation for that besides an alien spacecraft?

Maybe. But that day is not yet here. In fact, given stories like this one, it’s a long, long way off.

Ever heard of the Phoenix Lights? 10 years ago, on March 13, 1997, a string of mysterious lights were seen hovering over Phoenix, Arizona. They were witnessed by a lot of people– Phoenix is a big town. For once, a UFO sighting was well-documented with lots of witnesses spaced out geographically, and with actual imagery and footage. Here’s a still from one amateur video:

This was big news. When I saw them, my first thought was, "Hey airplanes!" But I am a foolish NASA stooge planted by the CIA to brainwash the sheeple and keep under wraps THE BIGGEST STORY OF ALL TIME.

Or, maybe, they were, y’know, airplanes.

In fact, they were. Kinda. There was a practice flight going on at a nearby military air base. The squadron flying was dropping flares. The flares had little parachutes on them, so from a distance you’d see — GASP — a line of lights moving very slowly.

I saw a TV show where they proved beyond a doubt that’s what these things were. Video footage shot at night showed the lights disappearing one by one. Were they warping away, entering another dimension, or teleporting to some distant star?

No, they were falling behind a nearby mountain range. In the show I saw — a very rare skeptical look at UFOs — they went back to the location the person was shooting the video from, and took more pictures. When they superposed the video with their own pictures shot during the day, you could clearly see the line of mountains in the distance. When a light — sorry, "Light" — blinked out, you could plainly see it was falling below the top of the mountain. In other words, the flares were on the other side of that range as seen in the video, and when one got low enough, the mountain blocked the view. Wink! The light was gone.

I also saw (I think on the same show) a kid saying he was looking at the lights through binoculars or a telescope, and he saw that they were planes. But then someone else said (paraphrased) "Those weren’t planes! I know what I saw!" How many times have we heard that?

Sigh.

Well, now we also have one more nail in this coffin: a statement by one of the pilots who dropped the flares.

The lights were flares, said the Air National Guard, dropped during nighttime exercises at the Barry M. Goldwater Range.

That’s what they were, insists Lt. Col. Ed Jones, who piloted one of the four A10s in the squadron that he says launched the flares.

Jones, in his first interview with the news media concerning the night 10 years ago, says he can’t believe a decision to eject a few leftover flares turned into a UFO furor that continues to this day.

Lt. Col. Jones obviously doesn’t understand just how much people want to believe in UFOs. Faced with overwhelming evidence — even at the time, ten years ago — that these were flares, people still won’t wake up and see that’s precisely what these things were.

I absolutely 100% guarantee that when this story goes to UFO bulletin boards, people will claim that Lt. Cmdr. Jones is a) a disinfo agent, b) a government plant, or c) brainwashed. That’s a no-brainer.

Like Roswell, like Gulf Breeze, like a recent sighting of UFOs over London, and like a hundred — a thousand — other obviously mundane stories blown up into gigantic conspiracy theories, the Phoenix Lights will live on. And a little piece of the collective human intelligence starves to death.

Tip o’ the tin foil hat to James Oberg

A former Canadian Defense Minister wants to find out if secret alien technology being withheld from citizens by their governments can solve global warming.

People ask me all the time, what’s the harm in bad thinking? Who cares if someone wants to believe in astrology, or UFOs?

OK, go back up and read that first line of this post again. Slowly. Move your lips if you have to.

That’s the harm. That guy was the Minister of Defense of an entire nation. And he wants to use UFOs to solve our problems.

Sigh. Sigh¹⁰⁰.

This is so ridiculous, and a waste of time. Why look for alien technology to solve global warming? How stupid! We should be using it to find out who killed Kennedy, what really brought down the World Trade Center, and if Wernher von Braun was actually a Nazi or not.

Fox wants to remake one of the greatest SciFi movies ever made: The Day The Earth Stood Still.

All I really need to ask is, why? Why? Why remake one of the most perfectly made movies in history, science fiction or otherwise? Because it’s old? Because the son from "Father Knows Best" is in it? Because now we can CGI the spaceship landing on the White House lawn?

Grrrrrr.