Okay, let me rephrase that: do you have specific evidence that Muslim schools in the US are using public money to teach religiously-motivated pseudoscience? Because if they are, please, by all means name and shame, and complain to the NCSE and ACLU and appropriate school boards. I can pretty much guarantee that no actual scientist is going to defend them.
So, as long as it's a valid school, you can use state money (in a roundabout way) to pay for their creationism.
That's hardly unique, though - contributions to approved* religious institutions are tax-deductible, presumably on the basis that many religions require tithing (by those who can afford it, anyway), and taxing people on their religious contributions would be interfering with their religious practices. That's always been my assumption, anyway; maybe it was part of a deal to get the income tax enacted. Obviously such a policy may create perverse incentives, but even as an atheist I don't find it very objectionable.
(* Which is basically all of them in the US - with the caveat that certain activities such as electoral politics are off-limits.)
For an attack piece nigh bereft of any actual science. Well shit, if that's what the uber-left-wingers consider "science," I don't guess I can fault the uber-right-wingers for disagreeing.
Why does opposition to teaching pseudoscience with public money need to be considered a "left-wing" thing? I don't consider myself a left-winger, but I am a scientist, and I certainly find it infuriating that we're wasting tax dollars on this shit.
people still pick up a fossil and say "nope, this must be the sole explanation."
No, they pick up a fossil and say "this must be the sole explanation that does not rely on introducing multiple additional non-testable hypotheses". I know you're upset that scientists won't simply wave their hands and say "God did it" in response to anything we don't understand, but that's not really how the scientific method works. Technically, we haven't actually proven that the entire universe isn't actually the complex masturbatory fantasy of a pimply 13-year-old superintelligent extradimensional being, but we don't feel guilty about discounting that explanation when we're trying to figure out how modern life forms originated. If we didn't apply this parsimonious approach to scientific investigation, we'd still be using candles and horses and enjoying a 25% infant mortality rate.
But you go ahead and make that tired old argument.
We don't need to - the Supreme Court already made it for us, long before most of us were born. If you're unhappy with this, start working to repeal the 14th Amendment.
What I find interesting on the map is the lack of "other religious" institutions that also support the ideology. They don't list muslim schools in VA, MD, or DC, or those in TN, or WI(many of which get public funding or falls under vouchers. But they list the various christian denominations...odd...how very odd. They don't list the Jewish schools either.
Maybe the Muslim and Jewish schools don't waste time teaching pseudoscience?
Apparently you've never run across a your average non-westernized muslim(or standard conservative muslims), they're more than happy to shove their opinions down your throat. While doing so, they'll also demand that you directly accommodate them.
Most Americans I know could say the same thing about the average fundamentalist Christian. God knows I (an unrepentant atheist and blasphemer) wouldn't want to live in any majority-Muslim country, but in the US, the only people campaigning to have religion taught in biology class are Christians.
Not just large companies. Employee defections are potentially much more damaging to smaller businesses, where the knowledge and skillset at risk of being poached is distributed among many fewer people. Companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are worried about labor costs, but losing a key engineer is far more damaging to a 20-person startup, where getting to market quickly is essential.
(Again, I'm not arguing against the CA law - it's just such a weird anomaly. I'd be curious to know if there's any hard evidence for direct effects on salaries in different industries.)
Which other states have similar labor laws? I find it hard to believe that CA is unique.
Based on a few minutes of half-assed Googling, California appears to be nearly unique. Most governments are unwilling to interfere with contract law to such an extent; I'm a little surprised that it hasn't fallen to legal challenges. (Not that I'm complaining - as a CA resident working in a highly technical field, I think it's a terrific innovation.)
why are you doing FREE work for a proprietary company that has no obligation to you other than to possibly hide your name at the bottom of a long list of credits buried in the help menu? This is what the BSD license allows.
The most obvious answers are that a) in practice things often work out to the advantage of the original author, at least often enough that people keep using BSD, and b) there are many specific instances where the long-term success of a project absolutely depends on getting companies that wouldn't touch GPL'd software with a ten-foot pole to adopt your work. In many cases companies have eventually found it desirable to contribute back to the development of liberally licensed open-source packages despite having no legal obligation to do so. They do so because a) they want to stay on good terms with the developers, b) they want to nudge development in directions favorable to them, and c) maintaining your own proprietary fork of a third-party package is actually a pain in the ass, especially if you want to incorporate future improvements. From what I've seen, the freeloader problem is not nearly as bad as you imply - or at least the existence of a few bottom-feeders is not enough to detract from the value of greater commercial involvement.
I would also argue that start-ups tend to be in California because employment agreements that prevent you from moving to a competitor are not enforcable in CA.
This is often cited as a major reason why Silicon Valley (and probably the Bay Area and San Diego biotech clusters) even exists in the first place.
I find humanity's ability to eradicate previously deadly and epidemic diseases to be something to wonder at. Personally I rate this little wonder of the world higher than the Moon landing.
Seconded! The elimination of smallpox is probably the single greatest triumph of modern medicine; in the 20th century alone, it saved more lives than were lost in every war put together. And contrary to the claims of the racist naysayers who think we should have left epidemics alone so they could control third-world populations, people actually have fewer children when they're not worried about an appallingly high infant mortality rate.
And seems like you have never seen research communities in theoretical fields.
No, as a biologist I ignore these completely.
There is some politics involved in getting your work published into those journals. If you are a foreigner, then there is absolute no chance that you will be published there because nobody will know who you are.
Perhaps this is still true for obscure theoretical fields, but it has not been true in the biological sciences for some time now. I see papers in my field from groups I've never heard of in China with increasing regularity. They get published because ultimately their results are actually worth publishing - taken at face value, anyway. If they didn't publish in English-language journals they'd be ignored by at least 95% of the field, which means they'd barely get cited no matter how awesome their work was. (Of course some of these groups are led by professors who did postdoctoral work in the US or Europe, or in a few cases were even professors before being lured back to China. But this isn't uniformly the case.)
Plus, most Chinese would probably publish in Chinese journals.
Nope. Segregating your country's scientific literature from the rest of the world is a good way to ensure that your scientific community remains isolated and disconnected. Besides, publishing in big-name Western journals like Science/Nature/Cell is a prestige thing, and above all the Chinese want to be taken seriously as a Major Power. (Otherwise they wouldn't be wasting time and effort trying to grab a handful of uninhabited rocks from Japan.)
Seems like the hatred that a lot of Americans have for Americans is so extreme, it almost seems cultivated by way of plan. I'm not aware if Snowden has released any info pertaining to this.
I've read allegations elsewhere that the FBI has infiltrated the Occupy movement - whether these have any basis in fact, I have no idea. They've certainly infiltrated other extreme-left groups at times, but most of these are bush league affairs. However, there's scant evidence that the government ever resumed the kind of insanity that Hoover engaged in, which was really unique to Hoover. They've done no shortage of other sleazy stuff, but the combination of Watergate and revelations like the ones resulting from this burglary were pretty successful in putting the FBI out of the business of internal politics - as far as we know.
In any case, the demonization of "the other" in American politics - or any other country - has been going on for decades if not centuries, and is usually done openly. Rush Limbaugh built his career on it, among many others. We get a somewhat blinkered view of what it was like in the past, simply because most of us weren't around to remember the vitriol, and all we get is the historical summaries. I seriously doubt that Americans hate each other any more than they did in the 1960s, or much earlier, and in some cases, such as anti-immigration activists, the modern version is considerably milder. I heartily recommend the book "Nixonland" for a more comprehensive view of what American politics were like back then; the Tea Party movement seems almost quaint in comparison.
Unlike in the Soviet Union, we have individual choices here. We can choose to learn anything from creationism to evolution or anything else we wish -- unless the government controls the schools and censors the lessons. We should learn to avoid the Soviet Union's failures.
Teaching pseudoscience and political ideology in biology classes is exactly how the Soviet Union fucked up. We can choose to pursue intellectual inquiries that expand our knowledge of natural processes and inform our efforts to control our environment and treat our illnesses, or we can ignore these subjects in favor of religious doctrine. Which do you think will do more to improve our quality of life? Should we also be encouraging aspiring doctors to go into faith healing instead of modern Western medicine? Obviously in America people are free to do exactly this, just as they are free to lobby against GMOs, or vaccines, or general relativity. I can't stop them, nor would I if I had the power, but I won't stop calling them out as anti-progress misanthropes either.
That's exactly what the anti-GMO idiots are doing. Don't turn a blind eye just because the idiots are on your side of the fence!
They're not on my side of the fence. As a biologist, I find both revolting; I am only slightly more tolerant of the anti-GMO activists - the ones who aren't actively vandalizing scientific experiments, that is - because in my experience, they spend less time actually lying outright about the scientific evidence than creationists do, and at least some of their claims are actually testable hypotheses.
I just thought of the other analogy: the Soviet Union, for all of its many unredeemable flaws, did manage to rack up some impressive scientific accomplishments. But not in biology or agriculture, because its leaders made a conscious choice to embrace Lysenko's pseudo-science and demonize genetics. The result was to set back progress by decades, because an entire generation was trained to be scientifically ignorant in that particular field. Russia still produces some excellent mathematicians and physicists, but it's never recovered in biology and medicine.
(Another contemporary example would be Hitler's opposition to much of physics research as being "too Jewish", and his own support for less rigorous science, but it was ultimately his anti-Semitism that caused the most damage to Germany's scientific community, rather than his embrace of pseudoscience.)
I'm not sure why being "dependent on other nations" in an interconnected future world is a huge tragedy that must be avoided.
No matter how interconnected the future world is, there will still be winners and losers. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that the nations that embraced Enlightenment principles of secularism, rational inquiry, and the scientific method are immensely richer than the nations that remained mired in superstition. (Like most of the Islamic world, for instance, which is just about the only part of the world where you can find people similarly obsessed with spreading ignorance.) I can't predict the future, but I'm guessing that the US will be a much nicer place to live in 100 years if we continue to lead the world in scientific advances, versus if we're a nation of superstitious fools waiting for knowledge and technology to trickle down from, say, China.
Are you for reforming the FDA to make US medical technology research more competitive?
Of course, as long as there remain severe financial (and perhaps criminal) penalties for companies that knowingly push dangerous and/or unproven treatments. I use the exact same arguments with anti-GMO activists. I find them slightly less nauseating on an intellectual level only because they're campaigning primarily against consumer products rather than an entire body of knowledge. (The vandalism of the golden rice study in the Philipines is an exception.) The former is short-sighted but possibly correctable - scientists will continue to experiment as long as that remains legal (I say this as someone who has personally spilled transgenic organisms all over my lab bench), but if the scientists disappear altogether...
Plus, the PATENTS! It's not about science, it's about freedom of seed! Banning GMOs is an important first step to getting rid of life-patent laws. Seeds should be part of the public trust. If they become public again, I'd have no problem with GMOs that were open to people looking at them and doing real research on them
If you'd read the article, or paid any attention at all to the subject, you'd know that many GMOs are unencumbered by IP laws and/or were always intended to be given away. This includes both golden rice (which was specifically intended for the third world - developed nations don't really have endemic vitamin A deficiency) and virus-resistant papayas, which Hawaii currently grows. Banning them does nothing at all to advance the cause of open science.
The creationists are actively trying to increase scientific illiteracy among American children - that's their entire reason for existence. In the short term, this doesn't really hurt anyone; in the long term, it would lead to the US being far less economically competitive, and more dependent on other nations for new scientific advances, especially medical technology. That has a very real impact on people's lives.
they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
Yes, but within that region - which is certainly not exclusively populated by Han Chinese - they've never been shy about aggressively claiming territories that were once independent, or are held by other nations. And under the Manchus, at least, any nation wishing to do business with China had to essentially pay tribute to the emperor, which resulted in basically every European colonial power being officially considered a vassal state. China's current brand of imperialism is a big reason why the Vietnamese, who have every reason to hate us, are on surprisingly good terms with the US right now.
A handful of nations had their military and military production destroyed. Among them Great Britain, which alone accounted for over one-quarter of worldwide exports in 1950.
The European colonial empires basically disintegrated as a result of the war. Great Britain also had food rationing well into the 1950s (possibly even into the 60s), which gives you some idea of what the economic situation was like, and it was basically a command economy at that point. People forget this now because the word "socialist" has been horribly abused by the American right, but the UK really was socialist back then, and its economy was predictably sluggish as a result.
And you didn't address the rest of my point: the countries that have sucked the manufacturing jobs out of the US were mostly incredibly poor 50 years ago. It took several decades for any of them to make real economic progress, during which time we had a huge advantage.
We didn't conduct genocide against the Axis.
No, we merely bombed them into submission, eliminating a large chunk of their industry in the process - including some unfortunate occupied nations. (Go visit Rotterdam some time - the city dates back to the 13th century but there are hardly any prewar buildings because we blew up the rest to prevent the Germans from using the port.) The Russians pretty much strip-mined their chunk of Germany (and then mismanaged that and everything else they occupied).
We also rebuilt their economies.
Which basically illustrates my point: the US - and no one else - was in the position to rebuild the economies of what had been (and still are) major industrial powers.
So what my grandparents and parents built from 1950 to 1970 was luck?
No, the fact that their wages were unusually high was luck.
Wow, you are one towering arrogant asshole aren't you? Don't like America much either it seems.
Says the guy who started his post with "America is confronted by its absence in matters of competence, courage, integrity and enterprise." I'm attempting to defend America against your charge that it sucks compared to the good old days when men were real men, gays stayed in the closet, blacks knew their place, and the threat of nuclear war was ever-present. I like it here just fine, and I'd vastly prefer to live in the US of 2013 than the US of 1963, even if I now have to compete with people in China and India and can't afford to drive a car that gets 8 MPG like your grandparents could.
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Okay, let me rephrase that: do you have specific evidence that Muslim schools in the US are using public money to teach religiously-motivated pseudoscience? Because if they are, please, by all means name and shame, and complain to the NCSE and ACLU and appropriate school boards. I can pretty much guarantee that no actual scientist is going to defend them.
So, as long as it's a valid school, you can use state money (in a roundabout way) to pay for their creationism.
That's hardly unique, though - contributions to approved* religious institutions are tax-deductible, presumably on the basis that many religions require tithing (by those who can afford it, anyway), and taxing people on their religious contributions would be interfering with their religious practices. That's always been my assumption, anyway; maybe it was part of a deal to get the income tax enacted. Obviously such a policy may create perverse incentives, but even as an atheist I don't find it very objectionable.
(* Which is basically all of them in the US - with the caveat that certain activities such as electoral politics are off-limits.)
For an attack piece nigh bereft of any actual science. Well shit, if that's what the uber-left-wingers consider "science," I don't guess I can fault the uber-right-wingers for disagreeing.
Why does opposition to teaching pseudoscience with public money need to be considered a "left-wing" thing? I don't consider myself a left-winger, but I am a scientist, and I certainly find it infuriating that we're wasting tax dollars on this shit.
people still pick up a fossil and say "nope, this must be the sole explanation."
No, they pick up a fossil and say "this must be the sole explanation that does not rely on introducing multiple additional non-testable hypotheses". I know you're upset that scientists won't simply wave their hands and say "God did it" in response to anything we don't understand, but that's not really how the scientific method works. Technically, we haven't actually proven that the entire universe isn't actually the complex masturbatory fantasy of a pimply 13-year-old superintelligent extradimensional being, but we don't feel guilty about discounting that explanation when we're trying to figure out how modern life forms originated. If we didn't apply this parsimonious approach to scientific investigation, we'd still be using candles and horses and enjoying a 25% infant mortality rate.
But you go ahead and make that tired old argument.
We don't need to - the Supreme Court already made it for us, long before most of us were born. If you're unhappy with this, start working to repeal the 14th Amendment.
What I find interesting on the map is the lack of "other religious" institutions that also support the ideology. They don't list muslim schools in VA, MD, or DC, or those in TN, or WI(many of which get public funding or falls under vouchers. But they list the various christian denominations...odd...how very odd. They don't list the Jewish schools either.
Maybe the Muslim and Jewish schools don't waste time teaching pseudoscience?
Apparently you've never run across a your average non-westernized muslim(or standard conservative muslims), they're more than happy to shove their opinions down your throat. While doing so, they'll also demand that you directly accommodate them.
Most Americans I know could say the same thing about the average fundamentalist Christian. God knows I (an unrepentant atheist and blasphemer) wouldn't want to live in any majority-Muslim country, but in the US, the only people campaigning to have religion taught in biology class are Christians.
Not just large companies. Employee defections are potentially much more damaging to smaller businesses, where the knowledge and skillset at risk of being poached is distributed among many fewer people. Companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are worried about labor costs, but losing a key engineer is far more damaging to a 20-person startup, where getting to market quickly is essential.
(Again, I'm not arguing against the CA law - it's just such a weird anomaly. I'd be curious to know if there's any hard evidence for direct effects on salaries in different industries.)
Which other states have similar labor laws? I find it hard to believe that CA is unique.
Based on a few minutes of half-assed Googling, California appears to be nearly unique. Most governments are unwilling to interfere with contract law to such an extent; I'm a little surprised that it hasn't fallen to legal challenges. (Not that I'm complaining - as a CA resident working in a highly technical field, I think it's a terrific innovation.)
why are you doing FREE work for a proprietary company that has no obligation to you other than to possibly hide your name at the bottom of a long list of credits buried in the help menu? This is what the BSD license allows.
The most obvious answers are that a) in practice things often work out to the advantage of the original author, at least often enough that people keep using BSD, and b) there are many specific instances where the long-term success of a project absolutely depends on getting companies that wouldn't touch GPL'd software with a ten-foot pole to adopt your work. In many cases companies have eventually found it desirable to contribute back to the development of liberally licensed open-source packages despite having no legal obligation to do so. They do so because a) they want to stay on good terms with the developers, b) they want to nudge development in directions favorable to them, and c) maintaining your own proprietary fork of a third-party package is actually a pain in the ass, especially if you want to incorporate future improvements. From what I've seen, the freeloader problem is not nearly as bad as you imply - or at least the existence of a few bottom-feeders is not enough to detract from the value of greater commercial involvement.
I would also argue that start-ups tend to be in California because employment agreements that prevent you from moving to a competitor are not enforcable in CA.
This is often cited as a major reason why Silicon Valley (and probably the Bay Area and San Diego biotech clusters) even exists in the first place.
I find humanity's ability to eradicate previously deadly and epidemic diseases to be something to wonder at. Personally I rate this little wonder of the world higher than the Moon landing.
Seconded! The elimination of smallpox is probably the single greatest triumph of modern medicine; in the 20th century alone, it saved more lives than were lost in every war put together. And contrary to the claims of the racist naysayers who think we should have left epidemics alone so they could control third-world populations, people actually have fewer children when they're not worried about an appallingly high infant mortality rate.
And seems like you have never seen research communities in theoretical fields.
No, as a biologist I ignore these completely.
There is some politics involved in getting your work published into those journals. If you are a foreigner, then there is absolute no chance that you will be published there because nobody will know who you are.
Perhaps this is still true for obscure theoretical fields, but it has not been true in the biological sciences for some time now. I see papers in my field from groups I've never heard of in China with increasing regularity. They get published because ultimately their results are actually worth publishing - taken at face value, anyway. If they didn't publish in English-language journals they'd be ignored by at least 95% of the field, which means they'd barely get cited no matter how awesome their work was. (Of course some of these groups are led by professors who did postdoctoral work in the US or Europe, or in a few cases were even professors before being lured back to China. But this isn't uniformly the case.)
Plus, most Chinese would probably publish in Chinese journals.
Nope. Segregating your country's scientific literature from the rest of the world is a good way to ensure that your scientific community remains isolated and disconnected. Besides, publishing in big-name Western journals like Science/Nature/Cell is a prestige thing, and above all the Chinese want to be taken seriously as a Major Power. (Otherwise they wouldn't be wasting time and effort trying to grab a handful of uninhabited rocks from Japan.)
Seems like the hatred that a lot of Americans have for Americans is so extreme, it almost seems cultivated by way of plan. I'm not aware if Snowden has released any info pertaining to this.
I've read allegations elsewhere that the FBI has infiltrated the Occupy movement - whether these have any basis in fact, I have no idea. They've certainly infiltrated other extreme-left groups at times, but most of these are bush league affairs. However, there's scant evidence that the government ever resumed the kind of insanity that Hoover engaged in, which was really unique to Hoover. They've done no shortage of other sleazy stuff, but the combination of Watergate and revelations like the ones resulting from this burglary were pretty successful in putting the FBI out of the business of internal politics - as far as we know.
In any case, the demonization of "the other" in American politics - or any other country - has been going on for decades if not centuries, and is usually done openly. Rush Limbaugh built his career on it, among many others. We get a somewhat blinkered view of what it was like in the past, simply because most of us weren't around to remember the vitriol, and all we get is the historical summaries. I seriously doubt that Americans hate each other any more than they did in the 1960s, or much earlier, and in some cases, such as anti-immigration activists, the modern version is considerably milder. I heartily recommend the book "Nixonland" for a more comprehensive view of what American politics were like back then; the Tea Party movement seems almost quaint in comparison.
Although COINTELPRO is remembered, few bother to remember the other side of the equation, which is the conduct of the radicals.
Stop changing the subject. What did infiltrating peaceful antiwar groups - or attempting to blackmail MLK - have to do with the Weather Underground?
Unlike in the Soviet Union, we have individual choices here. We can choose to learn anything from creationism to evolution or anything else we wish -- unless the government controls the schools and censors the lessons. We should learn to avoid the Soviet Union's failures.
Teaching pseudoscience and political ideology in biology classes is exactly how the Soviet Union fucked up. We can choose to pursue intellectual inquiries that expand our knowledge of natural processes and inform our efforts to control our environment and treat our illnesses, or we can ignore these subjects in favor of religious doctrine. Which do you think will do more to improve our quality of life? Should we also be encouraging aspiring doctors to go into faith healing instead of modern Western medicine? Obviously in America people are free to do exactly this, just as they are free to lobby against GMOs, or vaccines, or general relativity. I can't stop them, nor would I if I had the power, but I won't stop calling them out as anti-progress misanthropes either.
That's exactly what the anti-GMO idiots are doing. Don't turn a blind eye just because the idiots are on your side of the fence!
They're not on my side of the fence. As a biologist, I find both revolting; I am only slightly more tolerant of the anti-GMO activists - the ones who aren't actively vandalizing scientific experiments, that is - because in my experience, they spend less time actually lying outright about the scientific evidence than creationists do, and at least some of their claims are actually testable hypotheses.
I just thought of the other analogy: the Soviet Union, for all of its many unredeemable flaws, did manage to rack up some impressive scientific accomplishments. But not in biology or agriculture, because its leaders made a conscious choice to embrace Lysenko's pseudo-science and demonize genetics. The result was to set back progress by decades, because an entire generation was trained to be scientifically ignorant in that particular field. Russia still produces some excellent mathematicians and physicists, but it's never recovered in biology and medicine.
(Another contemporary example would be Hitler's opposition to much of physics research as being "too Jewish", and his own support for less rigorous science, but it was ultimately his anti-Semitism that caused the most damage to Germany's scientific community, rather than his embrace of pseudoscience.)
I'm not sure why being "dependent on other nations" in an interconnected future world is a huge tragedy that must be avoided.
No matter how interconnected the future world is, there will still be winners and losers. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that the nations that embraced Enlightenment principles of secularism, rational inquiry, and the scientific method are immensely richer than the nations that remained mired in superstition. (Like most of the Islamic world, for instance, which is just about the only part of the world where you can find people similarly obsessed with spreading ignorance.) I can't predict the future, but I'm guessing that the US will be a much nicer place to live in 100 years if we continue to lead the world in scientific advances, versus if we're a nation of superstitious fools waiting for knowledge and technology to trickle down from, say, China.
Are you for reforming the FDA to make US medical technology research more competitive?
Of course, as long as there remain severe financial (and perhaps criminal) penalties for companies that knowingly push dangerous and/or unproven treatments. I use the exact same arguments with anti-GMO activists. I find them slightly less nauseating on an intellectual level only because they're campaigning primarily against consumer products rather than an entire body of knowledge. (The vandalism of the golden rice study in the Philipines is an exception.) The former is short-sighted but possibly correctable - scientists will continue to experiment as long as that remains legal (I say this as someone who has personally spilled transgenic organisms all over my lab bench), but if the scientists disappear altogether...
Plus, the PATENTS! It's not about science, it's about freedom of seed! Banning GMOs is an important first step to getting rid of life-patent laws. Seeds should be part of the public trust. If they become public again, I'd have no problem with GMOs that were open to people looking at them and doing real research on them
If you'd read the article, or paid any attention at all to the subject, you'd know that many GMOs are unencumbered by IP laws and/or were always intended to be given away. This includes both golden rice (which was specifically intended for the third world - developed nations don't really have endemic vitamin A deficiency) and virus-resistant papayas, which Hawaii currently grows. Banning them does nothing at all to advance the cause of open science.
Because the creationists hurt ... who exactly?
The creationists are actively trying to increase scientific illiteracy among American children - that's their entire reason for existence. In the short term, this doesn't really hurt anyone; in the long term, it would lead to the US being far less economically competitive, and more dependent on other nations for new scientific advances, especially medical technology. That has a very real impact on people's lives.
America still has people literally shitting in the streets.
As a resident of the Bay Area, I can attest to this.
they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
Yes, but within that region - which is certainly not exclusively populated by Han Chinese - they've never been shy about aggressively claiming territories that were once independent, or are held by other nations. And under the Manchus, at least, any nation wishing to do business with China had to essentially pay tribute to the emperor, which resulted in basically every European colonial power being officially considered a vassal state. China's current brand of imperialism is a big reason why the Vietnamese, who have every reason to hate us, are on surprisingly good terms with the US right now.
A handful of nations had their military and military production destroyed. Among them Great Britain, which alone accounted for over one-quarter of worldwide exports in 1950.
The European colonial empires basically disintegrated as a result of the war. Great Britain also had food rationing well into the 1950s (possibly even into the 60s), which gives you some idea of what the economic situation was like, and it was basically a command economy at that point. People forget this now because the word "socialist" has been horribly abused by the American right, but the UK really was socialist back then, and its economy was predictably sluggish as a result.
And you didn't address the rest of my point: the countries that have sucked the manufacturing jobs out of the US were mostly incredibly poor 50 years ago. It took several decades for any of them to make real economic progress, during which time we had a huge advantage.
We didn't conduct genocide against the Axis.
No, we merely bombed them into submission, eliminating a large chunk of their industry in the process - including some unfortunate occupied nations. (Go visit Rotterdam some time - the city dates back to the 13th century but there are hardly any prewar buildings because we blew up the rest to prevent the Germans from using the port.) The Russians pretty much strip-mined their chunk of Germany (and then mismanaged that and everything else they occupied).
We also rebuilt their economies.
Which basically illustrates my point: the US - and no one else - was in the position to rebuild the economies of what had been (and still are) major industrial powers.
So what my grandparents and parents built from 1950 to 1970 was luck?
No, the fact that their wages were unusually high was luck.
Wow, you are one towering arrogant asshole aren't you? Don't like America much either it seems.
Says the guy who started his post with "America is confronted by its absence in matters of competence, courage, integrity and enterprise." I'm attempting to defend America against your charge that it sucks compared to the good old days when men were real men, gays stayed in the closet, blacks knew their place, and the threat of nuclear war was ever-present. I like it here just fine, and I'd vastly prefer to live in the US of 2013 than the US of 1963, even if I now have to compete with people in China and India and can't afford to drive a car that gets 8 MPG like your grandparents could.