Rand Paul caught scrubbing transcripts from website after plagiarism charges

[freshwest]

37. Yes he did. As an extreme theocrat, his 'scientific' knowledge is a bit wobbly:

http://www.11points.com/Books/11_Eye-Opening_Highlights_From_a_Creationist_Science_Textbook

The Idiocracy won't build itself, you know. But with the help of Rand and his ilk writing 'scientific papers' for the youth of America, we're galloping on the road to it now.

Carl Sagan wrote The Demon Haunted World in 1996 as “a personal statement, reflecting my love affair with science. But there’s a second reason:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...”

It has come to pass, even worse than he wrote:

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan - a review

Carl Sagan may have believed in extraterrestrials, but he knew that belief is meaningless without testable evidence...

Oh, and the dumbing down of America was "most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second soundbites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." And that was before Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox News channel...

Nor is he afraid of going back to the things that matter, arguing in the next essay that Thomas Jefferson "believed that the habit of scepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving government to the wolves..."

Meanwhile, according to the most recent New York Review of Books, a Texas legislator is quoted offering this reasoned argument on the state's responsibility for education: "Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell."

Are we in such a very different world?

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jul/20/demon-haunted-world-carl-sagan-review