America! Motto: We Coulda Been A Contender

Frequent reader(s) of this blog realize the ultimate futility of rational expectations...erm...we mean know that our rather ragged and desultory career path has taken us through several of the institutional educorporate training facilities in this once great sovereign nation of ours, and that in so doing we have touched the lives of untold thousands of America's youth.

And yes that should concern you, however our point today is to metaphorically throw up our hands and say to the forces of backwardness, ignorance and cultural death by a thousand cuts of stupid, "You win."

Schoolchildren in Louisiana are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid by religious educators to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution. Thousands of children in the southern state will receive publicly-funded vouchers for the next school year to attend private schools where Scotland's most famous mythological beast will be taught as a real living creature.

This is how great nations become historical afterthoughts. Think about it. America, the single country that has been awarded the most Nobel prizes, the first nation to put men on the moon, to invent the mechanical reaper, the Internet, the MRI, hot pockets, is now reduced to telling children that the Loch Ness monster is real because to say otherwise would confirm what scientists have known for more than 150 years.

We're told there is a Bill in the Louisiana legislature that would make it a misdemeanor to tell children that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are not real.

Critics have damned the content of the course books, calling them "bizarre" and accusing them of promoting radical religious and political ideologies.

"Bizarre?" Is that the best you can do? How about "fatal?" Look, 98% of Climate Scientists agree that human generated greenhouse gasses are affecting the earth's climate, and we may in fact already be too late to do anything about it. We are years past peak oil, yet have not come to grips with what a post petroleum society might look like. Capitalist economic systems have been shattered by greed and corruption and none of the current crop of leaders seem to know what to do about it. We have become so ethically bereft that hardly anyone sees a problem with using robot bombs on civilians and creating a government hit list that rivals anything Al Capone ever came up with. And to prepare the next generation to step into this world, you're telling than that monsters live under the water.

The deficit as a burden on future generations is going to be the least of their problems.