The moral and ethical trainwreck that is Newton Three-wives Gingrich took to the podium this week and let us lefties have it over our stubborn unwillingness to accept modern science and the spirit of discovery. I kid you not.
(RightWingWatch) — The Left has believed for at least forty years now in a concept called Peak Oil that says ‘gee, we’re about to run out.” Well, it turns out that our reserves in the US, because of new technology, which is something that the Left rejects – they don’t believe the Wright Brothers invented flying, they don’t believe Edison invented electric light, and they don’t believe we’re about to invent the next generation of interesting things.
Well golly-gee-willickers, Leroy, I’ve seen that there artificial lightning at the state fay-er, but what does that have to do with candle lanterns and who is this Edison feller? /hick
For starters, I’m pretty sure the Wright Brothers didn’t invent flying. Jesus, there were flying insects back in the Carboniferous Period, which means, for the fundie crowd Gingrich was trying to reach anyway, flying predates the Wright Brothers by hundreds of years. But if you want to get technical about it, there were definitely some intrepid humans flying before the Wright Brothers, we have photographs and newspaper accounts of this, and in some cases we even have the machines used on display. They just didn’t fly far, or very well, and those brief flights often ended abruptly and badly.
Sat update: And as Tis Himself links in comments below, the Wright’s put together a heck of a lightweight engine, too. Another critical development in powered flight. — DS
We can give the Wright Brothers credit where credit is due: they invented a reliable, workable system to precisely control their flying machines, converting them from a near certain death ride into what we would all recognize as an airplane. It’s not the system of movable control tabs on the wings and tail widely used today, but it worked beautifully, and being able to safely steer your airplane in three dimensions was a pretty damn important development in aviation no matter how it was done.
And does Gingrich even know what Peak Oil means, that it’s a tried and true empirical data set based on simple facts of petrology and extraction techniques, or that it’s used by reservoir managers all over the world to maximize yield and profit margin? Because the way Newt used that term, it sounds like the good Professor may have confused Peak Oil with oil depletion.