How To Handicap Your Children

Step 1: deprive them of science. Or maybe just move to South Dakota.

The South Dakota senate has voted to turn the schoolhouse keys over to the crackpot community of global warming deniers, insisting that schools teach the science as "only a theory" and offer alternative explanations. Hmmm, this sounds remarkably like their denial of evolution--another "theory" that has universal support among educated people who simply look at the evidence.

I particularly like this bit of rationale for the resolution:

WHEREAS, the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints, which has complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global climatic change phenomena... [as if what politicians wanted had any affect on what science finds]

Here, let me handle that summary for you:

THEREFORE, because we don't understand the arcane science and because the conclusions to which the science points are discomfiting and inconvenient, we resolve to enforce a return to happy, oblivious equilibrium by letting the uneducated-but-loudest and politically-motivated contributors to the discussion trump the judgment of scientists whose working lives have been devoted to the minutiae of the subject matter, and thereby corrupt and pervert the process so that Our Fine State can spend yet another decade pretending that the data doesn't come down clearly and unequivocally on one side of this debate.

Sad, embarrassing and pathetic.