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The Decline of Science and Technology in America
puke76 writes "There's a good article over on the BBC about the decline of science and technology in the U.S.. Vint Cerf and others are going on record to voice their concerns about the current administrations recipe for 'irrelevance and decline.' Scientists are increasingly concerned about the White House's pandering to the religious right at science's expense. From the article: 'radically we have moved away from regulation based on professional analysis of scientific data ...to regulation controlled by the White House and driven by political considerations.'"
It isn't a matter of falling standards and laziness. It isn't the fault of too much TV or rap music.
There are forces in society who want science neutered and brought to heel.
"Intelligent Design," and the manufactured controversy over "junk science" . . . it's all part of a plan to:
You can find it all here, in a document called "The Wedge Strategy."
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
They didn't invent zero, the Indians did and you aren't using their digit, you're using Indian digits. The Arabs just brought it to Europe and that's why it's called "Arabic Numerals". Just Google for it, or look up the Wikipedia entry. And as a non-European, I'd say you're giving too much credit to them for your achievements (assuming that you're a European/American).
Not quite. Duffbeer703 may be referring to the "dollar hegemony", a global dynamic put in place in or around the end of WWII, which refers to how countries need stockpiles of US dollars in reserve to buy petroleum in an international market. Therefore, and by a wide margin, the main United States export is dollar bills, of BIG denomination.
As of recently, most countries obeyed this unwritten law: Iraq switched to Euros back in 2001, and the interim US government immediately switched back to dollars. Iran recently began valueing a good portion of its' oil reserves in Euros. Same with Venezuela. OPEC in general has been flirting with the Euro as of late.
So it that context, Duffbeer703 is right on the money.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
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George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli
Shame that is from Barlow's fraudulent translation. None of the existing copies of that treaty show that at all. See http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/5/9
BTW, it wasn't George Washington, but John Adams who signed that treaty.
Dammy
And no, I'm no a Christian, I am a Pagan.
Funny, I don't remember any liberal politics in my classes on circuit analysis, mechanics, electromagnetism, calculus, differential equations, tensor analysis, quantum mechanics, solid state theory, antenna design and analysis, electromechanical systems, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Perhaps you could explain to me the liberal bias inherent in a Greens Function or a multi-body gravitation problem? Perhaps hideous Communist ideologies are lurking inside Schroedinger's Equation?
Better yet, maybe you could explain something else to me. How does one go about parallelizing a finite-difference time-domain computational problem for an arbitrary antenna structure using conservative ideology?
Well anyway, you are probably right. After all, Rush Limbaugh says so and he went to college for like a year, right?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
regarding illitirate scribes, I don't know if that was true as a rule.
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Certainly I know that manuscripts produced and used in celtic-monasteries have margin notes and other additions that are not the work of illiterates:
c.f. pangur bán: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/16
There was also the preservation of written works for their own sake. Many non-religious classical texts were preserved and duplicated in monastic settings, and this went some way to preserving these works during the interregnum following the decline of the Roman empire.
Though surely coming from your personal experience, I think some of your other comments come across as a little prejudiced and over-general. I'd be interested to see the evidence for your origin of copyright laws thesis. And as another poster commented, there's no indication that Newton was by any means an atheist.