A sad few days for America

1. Telecom immunity
2. Louisiana and ID

I guess I don't strictly need to say more, but for those out there that don't know me, I'll give it a shot by rephrasing them.

1. It's OK to break the law and spy on your citizens as long as you're the government, since you can retroactively absolve the cooperating parties from any wrongdoing that you strong-armed them into complying with. The 4th amendment is just some words on a piece of paper that we don't have to abide by.

2. One of the dumbest states in the union (both the constituents and their elected officials) has once again proven itself as such by allowing Intelligent Design into the classroom. All you need to know is that Jesus loves you, and the rest is just details that can be easily ignored.

The Telecom thing just solidifies my view that we're living in Oceania.

The ID thing almost makes me laugh because it's the deep south and everyone knew that they were stupid. If you haven't ever heard of ID, it's the theory that if we can't currently explain something because it's more complicated than we can currently figure a way for it to have evolved, then it was probably done by an exponentially more complicated entity that you can't see, hear, or point to that (for whatever reason) is self-evident. A corollary is that people 2000 years ago who didn't know about the atom, electron, motions of planets, or calculus and who believed that the entire universe was created sometime after man stopped being nomadic had everything figured out and were spoken to by this entity. The extent of what he or she has done is inversely proportional to your level of education and intelligence.

I can't believe that I get to live through such an absurd time in our history.