The United States is rapidly losing our edge as a technological superpower. Emerging tech powerhouses like China and India are slurping up our high-tech jobs through outsourcing and telecommunications, thanks to aggressive investment in math and science education. According to the IndusSciTech.net:

Last year India produced 350,000 engineers, US 70,000 and China 600,000. The numbers from India and US are roughly in proportion to their population whereas China seems to be in an aggressive mode.

So, what do you do in Bush’s America when you can’t measure up to high standards? Change the standards.

(AP) TOPEKA, Kan. – Risking the kind of nationwide ridicule it faced six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public-school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

The new standards say high school students must understand major evolutionary concepts. But they also declare that the basic Darwinian theory that all life had a common origin and that natural chemical processes created the building blocks of life have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology.

In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

So, according to Kansas standards, astrology, tarot, demonic possession, seánces, spirit channelling, and ghosts are now scientific explanations for phenomena. I wonder if the babbling Biblical literalists thought of that.

You know, while they are at it, they should just redefine the value of π equal to three. And what other good science can we glean from the Bible?

Plants can be created before the sun exists to drive their photosynthesis. (Genesis 1:11)

The earth can be consumed suddenly by enough water to cover the highest mountaintops with fifteen cubits to spare (Genesis 7:20), and then that water just disappears later.

Hares and coneys “chew the cud” (Leviticus 11:5-6), bats are birds (Leviticus 11:13, 19), and a warning about insects reminds us to avoid “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (Leviticus 11:23)

A ten-day journey from Egypt to Canaan takes forty years. (Numbers 14:33)

Dragons (Deuteronomy 32:33) and unicorns (Deuteronomy 33:17) and cockatrice (Isaiah 11:8) once roamed the earth.

The earth’s rotation can be stopped with no ill effects to the planet, its rotation, or its orbit. (Joshua 10:12-13)

Astrology is true. “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” (Judges 5:20)

π IS equal to three! (1 Kings 7:23) (2 Chronicles 4:2)

Diseases are sent by God to punish sin. (Psalms 38:3)

Natural disasters (earthquakes, storms, fires, tsunamis) are caused by, and are a sign of, God’s wrath. (Isaiah 29:7)

The world is flat and has four corners. (Ezekiel 7:2)

…and there’s so much more! So hurrah, Kansas, from freeing science from the shackles of logic, facts, observation, testing, experimentation, hypothesis, theory, and proof. High school science finals will be so much easier now that the kids can just write down “God did it!”