Policy
j7uy5 | May 4, 2009The Union of Concerned Scientists
has issued a press release:
href="http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ucs-gives-obama-high-marks-on-0229.html">UCS
Gives Obama High Marks on Scientific Integrity for First 100 Days.
Granted, after suffering through eight years of the Bush II
Administation, they'd probably give high marks to Pee Wee Herman.
They believe that Obama has taken a personal interest in restoring
integrity to the interface between science and politics. While
acknowledging that he hasn't and couldn't take a lot of action in his
first 100 days in office, they express the…
drorzel | May 3, 2009
International Act Like A T-Rex Day
"Our trademark application for "Act Like A T-Rex Day" has been OPPOSED by a very large company. In other words, we got servedâ¦
The company opposing the trademark is a restaurant called "T-Rex Cafe, Inc.". They have trademarked the word "T-REX". Any merchandise with the word "T-REX" anywhere on it according to their Opposition, "is
likely to cause confusion as to the source or origin" and "mislead consumers" doing damage to their business "T-Rex Cafe, Inc.""
(tags: stupid law dinosaurs)
The perils of analyzing test scores by race. - By William Saletan -…
tfk | April 28, 2009There's a kerfuffle under way in which Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, Richard Hoppe, and a host of others are debating whether NCSE is too nice to theists. Since I work for NCSE, I'm trying to stay out of this, and my comments about NCSE will be based on publicly available information, not any internal discussions; I will also avoid referring to NCSE as "us" to avoid confusion on this point. As the disclaimer to the left says, nothing here reflects NCSE's official position, and if you disagree, your disagreement is with me, not NCSE.
While I don't intend any comprehensive or systematic reply to…
tfk | April 27, 2009Martin Cothran's difficulties with basic reading comprehension continue.
I'm putting most of this response below the fold, because sometimes someone on the internet is just wrong. All you need to know about Cothran's commitment to the truth is this reply to my claim that "I find [William F.] Buckley's condemnation [of Buchanan] significant because his political interests would have been best served by defending an ally against such charges."
Cothran insists that:
No one who is even vaguely familiar with the infighting that goes in the conservative movement could say that about Buckley (a…
tfk | April 23, 2009Martin Cothran is upset wroth. I pointed out that his defense of Pat Buchanan against charges of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are fallacious, and he replies with a post that show no actual signs of having read what I wrote.
Cothran's continued defense of Pat Buchanan against charges of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial is rather stunning. Apparently I "spend[] the majority of [my] time contorting [my]self into various interesting ideological knots trying to justify calling someone an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who clearly is not."
"Clearly not," huh? That's not what William F…
tfk | April 22, 2009Martin Cothran, presumably upset that I keep pointing out that the supposed logic teacher prefers logical fallacies to honest data, has now sunken to defending Holocaust denial. In replying to his repetition of a screed by Pat Buchanan, I noted that not only was Barack Obama rightly dismissive of that sort of armchair quarterbacking ("Even within this imaginative crowd, I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of us having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela."), but that it was a bit odd to quote a known…
tfk | April 21, 2009Martin Cothran, Discovery Institute blogger, Focus on the Family stooge, and generally unpleasant person, quotes Patrick Buchanan on Yom HaShoah. Buchanan, in addition to being a failed presidential candidate, is a conspiracy loon and a anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. In any event, Buchanan is on about how President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton didn't create a diplomatic spat when the President of Nicaragua complained about American military involvement with the terrorist Contras.:
After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Fidel Castro's…
scientificactivist | April 19, 2009Arguably the biggest news story of the week was the release by the Obama Administration of four Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 that were used to justify CIA torture of detainees. An analysis by Jeffrey Smith in today's Washington Post tries to explain the context and the mindset that led to the twisted logic found in these memos:
The four Justice Department memos to the CIA's top lawyer that were released last week reflect an effort by Bush administration appointees to create finely tuned justifications for harsh interrogation techniques, all under a blanket of secrecy covering…
drorzel | April 16, 2009
Bristol Palin and two kinds of virginity | TPMCafe
"Prior to the Palin blow-up, the evangelical wing and the traditional upper crust WASP wing of the party had a pretty basic agreement about the value of pure white virgin daughters. Having a few of these hanging around on podiums made politicians look good, and preserving the myth of the pure white virgin was of the utmost importance. Everyone thought they agreed on this topic. But Bristol Palin had to go have a baby, and the difference of opinion on what to do about girls who don't live by the standards of purity became harder to deny."
(…
sb admin | April 3, 2009There's new climate legislation in the House (Waxman-Markey), and bloggers have a lot to say about it:
David Doniger at NRDC's Switchboard explains what's in each of the bill's four titles.
Also at Switchboard, Melanie Nakagawa examines what the bill does for clean technology in developing countries.(And check the blog's US Law and Policy page for more NRDC analysis.)
Matthew Madia at The Fine Print warns that the bill will strip EPA of the power to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants, but Andrew Leonard at How the World Works suggests that might be smart politics.
Kate Sheppard at…
mikethemadbiologist | March 26, 2009The reason the AIG bonuses are upsetting isn't the amount of the bonuses--although the bonuses are larger than the entire National Endowment for the Arts budget--it's the complete impotence of and cooptation of the government by the financial sector (yes, we need banks and a financial sector, but they are means, not ends). So I'm thrilled to read this about Treasury Secretary Geithner's chief of staff:
Obama noted that he was quickly developing policies to prevent future AIG-like catastrophes.... Noting that he and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) had each introduced legislation on this front in…
sciencepunk | March 23, 2009
Last week the Independent newspaper reported on the case of Tim Nicholson, a UK executive claiming religious discrimination after losing his job because of his beliefs on climate change. Nicholson had been head of sustainability at Grainger plc, a residential property investment company, but claims his attempts at implementing environmental and corporate social responsibility policies were blocked by fellow executives.
This case is noteworthy because it reveals several things - that someone could be fired for doing their job too enthusiastically, that Grainger plc possesses an asinine…
drorzel | March 21, 2009
weir3 / Instant Mentor / Advice / Home - Inside Higher Ed
"Unless youâre a botanist or geologist thereâs no pedagogical reason to teach outside. The first gorgeous day of spring semester will bring a clamor to meet underneath the spreading maple students spy from the window. Donât do it! That hour will pass with female students tugging at short skirts to maintain modesty, men in khakis seeking not to get grass stains on their trousers, fidgeting when everyone realizes the ground isnât as comfy as it looks, attention lapses every time someone walks by, the cupping of ears to hear comments…
jrosenhouse | March 19, 2009The recent war in Gaza, coupled with the rejection of Israel-critic Charles Freeman for an intelligence post in the Obama administration, has led to a renewed round of hand-wringing over America's relationship with Israel.
Let's kick things off with this delightful article from today's New York Times. It reports on Israel's growing isolation from the international community:
Israel, whose founding idea was branded as racism by the United Nations General Assembly in 1975 and which faced an Arab boycott for decades, is no stranger to isolation. But in the weeks since its Gaza war, and as it…
catdynamics | March 18, 2009A couple of years ago I received a copy of Chris Mooney's "Storm World" and packed it in my carry-on to read on travel.
This month I finally read it, and about time too.
Storm World
Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt Inc
ISBN 978-0-15-101287-9
Storm World follows Chris's debut work, The Republican War on Science, and was written in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane season.
It is a timely, well written and very interesting book.
The approach is largely historical and from the perspective of following the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 17, 2009In the midst of all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the death and cooptation of business journalism inspired by John Stewart's skewering of Jim Cramer, it's important to remember one thing: that's the business model. Or to put it another way, the customer is always right.
If you ever read the biotech press, which is a subset of the larger business press, there is an obvious, inherent structural bias. The biotech press will never critique the fundamentals of the biotech industry as a whole. It will criticize individual approaches or companies. But it will almost never ask…
mikethemadbiologist | March 13, 2009I know I make the point a lot that much of movement conservatism/Modern Republicanism operates in a intellectuallycognitively similar manner to the creationist movement. But the reason the comparison is instructive is that creationism (whether young earth or intelligent design) is so obviously stupid that it forces you to confront what is actually going on. For many people, economics or foreign policy (or at least subtopics in these areas) are difficult enough that you are tempted to cede that they might have a legitimate point of view, but one that is nonetheless very different than yours…
tqa | March 10, 2009
As of this morning, the situation surrounding the Senate confirmations of John Holdren as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Jane Lubchenco as NOAA Administrator is somewhat confused. A number of new news articles and blog posts have appeared over the last couple of days. Unfortunately, some of them seem to be presenting new information, while others are several days behind the current situation. In the interest of trying to inject a bit of clarity, I'm going to review the full chronology, not just the latest information.
20 December 2008: President-elect Obama names…
bioephemera | March 9, 2009Yuval Levin has an editorial in today's WaPo that makes a very good point:
Science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. In science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so. There are, of course, different ways for politics to exert authority over science. To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities -- economic, political and ethical -- in…
gregladen | March 9, 2009I am reluctant to use the term "power couple" in reference to a pair of Minnesota leaders in the area of science and politics, but considering the contributions of Rebecca and Shawn Lawrence Otto, the term moves past cliché and into double entendre. Rebecca is the Minnesota State Auditor, an elected constitutional office that I consider to be second only to the governor in terms of authority and importance. Shawn has been one of the key figures involved in the organization Science Debate 2008, originally formed to spur the large field of 2008 presidential hopefuls to have at least one…