We'd better hurry up and pass that law against rising sea levels before it's too late: "This acceleration refers to increasing rates of sea level rise, not to the rate of sea level rise alone.”

Comments

[justcorbly]

I saw a report today that California can expect a 5-foot rise by the end of the century. The issue there is aggravated by the fact that California is sinking.

I wonder how many of our fine legislators have property on the Banks. Bet it's a bigger precentage than the general population.

Meanwhile, The Dumb is spreading. Schools in Louisiana have plans to teach kids that the Loch Ness Monster is a real dinosaur, which, therefore, somehow, proves evolution is wrong.

[Bill Bush]

If Xerxes could do it, why can't we? After all, we're much more advanced today.

[Sean]

corporate executives are all about risk management/aversion, but i guess those conservative types aren't of the idiot variety.

[prell]

"Schools in Louisiana have plans to teach kids that the Loch Ness Monster is a real dinosaur, which, therefore, somehow, proves evolution is wrong. "

No shocker there. Every Republican I know thinks Nessie is real. Pretty sure most of the cons on here thinks he/she's as real as Ogo Pogo and Bigfoot. Shit's for ser!

[Ian McDowell]

I'm sure that Nessie's believers include Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Fascists, Libertarians and Anarchists. The fact that some Louisiana loonies use her presumed existence to "disprove" evolution does not mean that everyone who believes she exists agrees with them.

For the record, when I was an apolitical kid who believed in both God and evolution, having been taught, quite sensible, that the two don't contradict each other, I also believed in the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and Sasquatch, and I devoured every book on Cryptobiology I could find. I'm now an atheist and also don't believe any of the so-called cryptids are real (I held out some hope for the Fort Lauderdale giant octopus, but that seems to have just been a decaying mass of whale blubber), but there's no real correlation between those disbeliefs.

Be that as it might, even if Nessie did exist and was a plesiosaur (which is not a dinosaur, anymore than a pterodactyl is, but never mind that now), rather than a giant long-necked mammal, mollusc or salamander, I don't see how that would contradict evolution. Paleontologists don't claim the dinosaurs all disappeared because they evolved into something else; they claim they disappeared because they went extinct, as did 90% of life on Earth, either due to an asteroid strike or some other catastrophic change in the environment. The discover of living coelacanths was not considered to be a blow to evolutionary theory, any more than the existence of crocodiles or any other species that existed contemperaneously with the dinosaurs.

[Billy Jones]

"Schools in Louisiana have plans to teach kids that the Loch Ness Monster is a real dinosaur..."

Wouldn't they first have to prove that Nessie is a real anything?

[Lex]

The Texas GOP platform opposes critical thinking skills. I only wish I were making this up.