Policy
pharyngula | January 8, 2008This is a strange one — some kind of weird political rant. I'm pretty sure this fellow doesn't care much for Hillary Clinton.
RE: Coming witchcraft of Senator Hillary RODHAM CLINTON in politics, also.
Like in the witchery, at her age of 61 years old Senator Hillary RODHAM CLINTON is to become overnight a candidate for a change, pulling a rabbit out of her hat. This can happen only in the witchcraft that she and her husband William J. CLINTON, former President reportedly believe in and practice. This is what comes up in the Google search under words of their names, witchcraft, satanic and/or…
cortex | January 7, 2008Sometimes, I feel like the only journalist/blogger in New Hampshire who isn't writing about politics. My street is littered with campaign signs, from Kucinich to Huckabee, that have been stuck haphazardly into the snow. My recycling bin is full of glossy campaign mailers. In the last 48 hours, Obama has appeared at the local high school and Richardson showed up at my favorite pub. McCain practically lives in my zipcode.
Over the last year, I've had the privilege of attending numerous political events. (And I say this as someone who grew up in LA and lived in NYC and never, ever saw a…
j7uy5 | January 7, 2008Several of the candidates have been found to have made egregious
misstatements in the
href="http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/05/nh.debates/?iref=mpstoryview">New
Hampshire debates. FactCheck.org, the organization
made famous by Dick Cheney when he
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12901-2004Oct6.html">erroneously
referred to it as Factcheck.com, has
href="http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/nh_debate_the_gop_field.html">an
analysis of the Republican candidates' statements.
There is a lot of material there. The one that really stands
out for me…
apalazzo | January 6, 2008Wow! All my friends from the Dean campaign went up to NH today to work in the Obama camp. I on the other hand have stayed behind (I'll be leaving for the lab soon to inject some cells). And I'm vacillating between Obama and Edwards (but leaning towards Obama).
So forget about the Sunday morning political talk shows, read these two items instead and you'll see the source of my inner dispute.
First up, Lambert on problems with Obama (HT: Coturnix). This essay reflects my problems with Obama's strategy. Over the last 27 years, the fiscal conservatives who head the GOP have been tearing down all…
jlynch | January 3, 2008Noting the increasing "God-talk" by candidates from both parties, Donald Kennedy comments:
Given this new focus on religious disclosure, what does this U.S. election have to do with science? Everything. The candidates should be asked hard questions about science policy, including questions about how those positions reflect belief. What is your view about stem cell research, and does it relate to a view of the time at which human life begins? Have you examined the scientific evidence regarding the age of Earth? Can the process of organic evolution lead to the production ofnew species, and how…
tfk | January 2, 2008If I were living in Iowa, I'd be caucusing for Barack Obama. It'll be a month before my primary, and by then it may all be academic, so I may as well talk about it now.
I'll start out by saying that I wouldn't feel bad about caucusing for John Edwards, and I won't have any problem campaigning hard on behalf of whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee. I think every one of them is competent to lead, has good ideas that will improve the nation, and would do vastly better than any Republican in the field could imagine doing. That's why it's taken me this long to settle down behind a…
catdynamics | January 2, 2008Now that I have joined the call for ScienceDebate 2008, what do I think...
NB: these are my personal opinions and representative of nothing more profound than the WVU vs OU game being rather uninteresting... ;-P
US politics are bistable - the two-party system is a design feature that is hard to break and is disturbingly entrenched in the infrastructure. Ok, it beats the one-party system by a large margin, but I still have an affinity for more general n-party problems...
Party annihilation/creation operations are rare, roughly once-per-century tunneling events. Typically political…
oracknows | December 28, 2007Lately, bloggers, including some of my fellow ScienceBloggers, have been expressing various concerns about the phenomenon that is Ron Paul, the Republican candidate who's ridden a wave of discontent to do surprisingly well in the polls leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. First, Jake and Greg have pointed out that Ron Paul apparently does not accept the theory of evolution. The other day, Ed Brayton and Sara Robinson discussed a story about an open letter by Bill White, the leader of the American Socialist Workers' Party, in which White claimed that Paul and his aides…
drorzel | December 26, 2007Hey, Mike. Rough month, eh? You're doing all right in the polls at the moment, but just getting hammered from all sides in the blogosphere. You're getting blasted for denying evolution, but also for not denying it fiercely enough for Ann Coulter. People are none too happy about your ill-informed ideas about public health, or your attempts to link law and religion. And to top it all off, you got dogged by a seven-year-old girl.
Dude, that's harsh.
I'm here to help, though, Mike. I've got your back at ScienceBlogs.
No, I don't actually agree with any of your goober-iffic views on science,…
cevans | December 26, 2007
In our increasingly worldaround world, it is a rare, if not obsolete, occurrence for two wildly disparate and equally sophisticated cultures to meet for the first time. That's probably for the best, of course, because when it did happen in spades, during the centuries on Earth before instantaneous global communication, all bets were off, and what went down was almost always marked with catastrophe (as with the indigenous people of North America) or powderkeg-and-a-match mutual distrust (as with the first United States naval expeditions to Japan in the 1850s, a cultural collision that is…
razib | December 25, 2007On this Sunday's Weekend Edition on NPR there was a piece titled Removing Religion from the Holidays a Tall Order. Much of the story focuses upon Greg Epstein, a Humanist Chaplain at Harvard, and his attempt to forge a new more humane secular cultural sensibility which does not reject all that that is religious because it is religious. On the other side there are others who say that the trends Epstein is promoting "sounds like religion and smells like religion." As I noted in earlier, these sorts of issues are not so cut & dried, and common sense is often a better guide to the "right…
goodmath | December 21, 2007 Look folks, I don't want to become an economics blogger! Stop sending me economics questions. I hate to disappoint my readers and not answer their questions, but this economics stuff is almost terminally dull to me.
The mortgage posts have gotten an insane amount of traffic, which has in turn brought in a huge number of questions. Most of them are about details of the whole mortgage situation - and honestly, I can't answer those. I don't know the details, only the basics, and I can't explain what I don't know.
On the other hand, a lot of people have used my down-to-earth explanation of the…
j7uy5 | December 19, 2007Now, if only they would offer these online for free...
10. Collegiate Sexualities at
Occidental College.
9. Body Politics: Power, Pain, and Pleasure at
Williams College.
8. Issues Dividing America at Columbia University.
7. Whiteness and Multiculturalism at Ithaca College.
6. Truth, Lies, Politics, and Policy at Portland
State University.
5. Introduction to Labor Studies at the University
of Washington.
4. Speaking Out at Bucknell College.
3. Imperialism in American History at the
University of California, Irvine.
2. Movements in Social Justice at Occidental
College…
jjacquet | December 19, 2007Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
Let me be the first one to say, "I was wrong." Jennifer asked a few weeks back whether fisheries subsidies were an issue for Ocean Champions, and I rambled on with a response about how it hasn't really been an issue since the original days of the Magnuson Act, when we over-capitalized our domestic fleets while we were kicking out the foreign ones, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.
Well, that was true until this weekend, when the Senate passed its version of the farm bill with an outrageous provision making fishermen eligible for the Farm Service…
sheril | December 14, 2007There's wonderful reason I've been quieter here than usual... ScienceDebate2008 has hit the ground running to so much enthusiasm and excitement, Chris and I are incredibly busy keeping up with all the hullabaloo! And we're also having a lot of fun working to make this incredible idea into a reality...
We've been following the blogosphere and media reports, and here's the latest from WIRED:
A Who's Who of America's top scientists are launching a quixotic last-minute effort this week to force presidential candidates to detail the role science would play in their administrations -- a question…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…
grrlscientist | December 12, 2007tags: science, public policy, politics, federal funding, research, reality-based government, 2008 American presidential elections, ScienceDebate2008
I have spoken with quite a few people from CraigsList and other places regarding the logistics and goals for ScienceDebate2008, and have found that there are plenty of misperceptions as to what scientists wish to accomplish. In short; ScienceDebate2008 is not a "science pop-quiz" that demands that the presidential candidates regurgitate a bunch of scientific theories and formulae on television.
Instead, ScienceDebate2008 is focused on…
denialism | December 12, 2007Reiterating our previous call for this debate, I'd like to point out two articles that have come out in the past day, that may address some of the negative commentary here.
The first is Chris Mooney and Lawrence Krauss at LA Times.
The second, by Sheril Kirshenbaum and Matthew Chapman at HuffPo. Note, I consider the Huffington Post a den of denialist iniquity, supporting the lies of Chopra, Kirby and various other conspiracy mongers. But I will consider this an act of saint-like walking amongst the sinners to spread the good word of science. Further, she does a pretty good job addressing…
jstemwedel | December 11, 2007In response to one of my science-related questions for the presidential candidates, Drugmonkey points out that the question might not work the way I want it to because of the chasm between science and politics:
"8. If sound scientific research were to demonstrate that one of your policy initiatives couldn't work (or couldn't work without tremendous cost in terms of money, health risk, negative environmental impact, etc.), what would you do?"
This almost, but not quite, hits the fundamental cultural problem between the two societies, science and politics. Your question should be reframed as "…
mixingmemory | December 11, 2007Sorry to bring this up again, as I'm sure most of you couldn't care less, but something about the idea of a presidential debate on science-related issues really bugs me, and I've been trying to figure out exactly what that is. Plus, part of me is hoping that someone will come along and explain to me why this is a good idea.
So far, though, there seem to be two main justifications for having this debate. The first, expressed in the quote from the Sciencedebate 2008 website (and elsewhere) is that we are utterly dependent on science and technology in virtually every aspect of our lives. This…