Policy
cmooney | May 29, 2007In anticipation of the start of hurricane season, today's Science Times had a pair of great articles on hurricanes, global warming, and coastal defenses in the U.S. I have just put up a post at Huffington Post, entitled Risky Scenarios, that comments on the latest Times package. You can read it here.
Meanwhile, my forthcomig book about all of this, Storm World, has gotten another positive early review--this time from Booklist, which is published by the American Library Association. Here's what gets said:
Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming.
Mooney, Chris (…
grrlscientist | May 23, 2007tags: beliefs, Republican, politics
You might find yourself agreeing with this list (how could you not?), and possibly adding a few more of your own points to it after you've had a chance to read it. Of course, it wasn't always like this, as one commenter pointed out. But the Republican party has been hijacked by the same evil liars who hijack truth, freedom and everything else we hold dear in this country.
Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when…
grrlscientist | May 22, 2007tags: Julie MacDonald, Interior Department, politics
Julie MacDonald, a Bush appointee who resigned earlier this month as Interior Department deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, is being investigated by Democrats because she was involved with delisting an endangered species to protect her financial interests. According to the Contra Costa Times, MacDonald removed the threatened Sacramento splittail fish from the federal threatened and endangered species list while she was profiting from her farm that lies within the habitat area of the threatened fish.
Today,…
grrlscientist | May 19, 2007tags: immigrants, employment, labor, politics
As Congress debates an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, several economists and news media pundits have sounded the alarm, contending that immigrants are causing harm to Americans in the competition for jobs. But are they?
[A] more careful examination of the economic data suggests that the argument is, at the very least, overstated. There is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have caused any significant damage to the wages of American workers.
The number that has been getting the most attention lately was produced by George J.…
cmooney | May 18, 2007POLITICS Where are we headed? Do party loyalties mean much in the big picture?
SCIENCE Will science solve our problems? Perhaps the very nature of all conflict is a necessary aspect of humanity? Is it true environmentalists are a dying breed?
POP Does public opinion matter? Do films with a message like An Inconvenient Truth and Flock of Dodos open the dialog or are progressive ideas as fickle as the latest pop culture marriage?
COCKTAIL Who really influences our beliefs, actions, and ideals? What is moral obligation and does religion have a role? How might scientists inform policy to…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2007
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter. All religions were to be tolerated. Having done a good thing in the context of the religious wars of Europe, Locke then did a bad thing which continues to echo today. He wrote:
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in…
sb admin | May 11, 2007Several bloggers have been following the story of Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary who oversaw the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Serviceâs endangered species program and resigned in disgrace last week, after it was revealed that sheâd been giving industry lobbyists internal agency documents. GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life, James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt, and Andrew Leonard at How the World Works have details on this and other problematic MacDonald actions. The House Natural Resources Committee held a related hearing (âEndangered Species Act Implementation: Science…
tfk | May 8, 2007In addition to its flawed standards on science education, the previous Board of Education's major achievements involved hired an unqualified Commissioner of Education and imposing abstinence-only standards on sex ed classes. The new Board reversed the science standards debacle, is currently selecting a new Commissioner with an actual background in education policy, and will reverse the sex ed mistake. The old Board had recommended that sex ed only cover abstinence, and suggested that school districts require parents to opt-in to sex ed classes, rather than the more common opt-out system.…
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2007Last Thursday the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a debate on the subject of Darwinism and Conservatism. A video of the debate is available online, but I haven't had a chance to view it yet. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with this article from The New York Times.
Over the years evolution has been used in the service of a great many political viewpoints. In Darwin's time, what we might call the “pro-Darwinian right” argued for Social Darwinism. You can still find strains of this thinking in the political right today. Nowadays, however, the pro-Darwinian-right, as…
pharyngula | May 5, 2007That recent D'Souza article is a rich vein of lunacy that I have to tap once more. D'Souza has additional tools to woo conservatives in his toolbox: how about the naturalistic fallacy?
But if Christian anxiety is misplaced, conservatives are even further off the mark. That's because Darwin's theory actually supports conservative positions in all kinds of interesting ways. First, Darwin gives a dark and selfish view of human nature, which is why we need a tough foreign policy to deal with bad guys who cannot be talked out of their badness--even if U.N. cocktails are served. In addition, the…
jrosenhouse | May 3, 2007Via Larry Moran I came across this article, from the journal Cell, about the growth of the science blogosphere:
There are close to 50 million weblogs or blogs for short. Blogs provide an online discussion forum for issues of current interest and are updated regularly with new short articles on which readers can comment.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202…), an initiative of the Pew Research Center, reports that 8% of Internet users in the United States, or 12 million American adults, keep a blog and 39% read one…
purepedantry | May 2, 2007The Great Global Warming Swindle was a documentary that aired in March on UK TV organized by Martin Durkin of Wag TV. The documentary purports to debunk several of the claims made by climate scientists on global warming. (Just to be clear I have not seen this documentary.)
Anyway, Roger Pielke notes that several scientists and activists have issued an open letter to the Martin Durkin protesting his distribution of the film over DVD:
We do not dispute your right to make a programme that includes different opinions about climate change. We are not seeking the censorship of differing…
denialism | April 30, 2007Hello and welcome to denialism blog.
Here we will discuss the problem of denialists, their standard arguing techniques, how to identify denialists and/or cranks, and discuss topics of general interest such as skepticism, medicine, law and science. I'll be taking on denialists in the sciences, while my brother, Chris, will be geared more towards the legal and policy implications of industry groups using denialist arguments to prevent sound policies.
First of all, we have to get some basic terms defined for all of our new readers.
Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give…
jstemwedel | April 29, 2007I've been dawdling on this. I was tagged by not one but two of my blog pals for the Thinking Blogger meme. Here are the official rules of the meme:
If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).
Needless to say, I'm flummoxed by the fact that Zuska and Bill would have been in my list -- but they tagged me…
tfk | April 29, 2007The inimitable John B. of Blog Meridian answered five questions posed to him on his blog, and I volunteered to do the same. His questions are above the fold, click through to see the answers:
1) Recall your first politically-sentient moment.
2) Tell a little about your research at KU in language even a liberal arts major who took his last formal science course 26 years ago (that would be me) can follow. I ain't too proud to be talked down to.
3) Ginger or Mary Ann?
4) Pick an actual or potential political candidate for any office (local, state or national). Poof! You've been asked…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2007Friday, Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias resigned because he had received 'massages' from an escort service. One of Tobias' major effects on U.S. foreign policy was to promote abstinence-only sex education:
Tobias, who was in Berlin for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS' 2004 Awards for Business Excellence, said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are "far more effective" than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias said, adding, "It's been the…
tlambert | April 25, 2007After Martin Bryant murdered 35 people at Port Arthur, Prime Minister John Howard got new laws enacted that banned semi-automatic long guns. At the time, I felt that was bad policy. Since almost all most gun killings involve just one death it didn't matter whether whether the gun was a semi-auto or not, writing:
I think that the new laws are mostly a stupid waste of money.
In the years that followed, homicide, firearm homicide, suicide and firearm suicide all fell, but a paper published last year by Baker and McPhedran argued that the decline was not statistically significant. However,…
nisbetmc | April 25, 2007How do you influence conservative media outlets to take climate change seriously, re-casting the issue in a light that connects to their conservative audiences?
You got it: Framing.
It's a strategy that two scientists apply today in an op-ed published at the Washington Times. Bryan K. Mignone, a Science & Technology Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, and Mark D. Drapeau, a AAAS Fellow at the National Defense University, strategically piggyback on last week's military report on climate change to gain an audience at the notoriously conservative…
tlambert | April 20, 2007The Lancet authors have released the data to other researchers:
Six months have passed since the publication of the study and we feel the time is now right to make the data set available to academic and other scientific groups whom we judge have the technical capacity to objectively analyze the data. It is our desire that the data be used in a way that will advance the understanding of how to best assess mortality during conflicts and to improve the protection of those caught in conflict. Although conflict is inextricably intertwined with national and international politics, it is our very…
clock | April 19, 2007You may be aware that there is a huge discussion about framing science going on in the blogosphere. It has gotten out of hand. But, for those who want to dig in, or want to analyze the posts and comments (that is a lot of data!), here is the comprehensive list of links (excluded are links to Creationists' sites). Most of the posts also have long and interesting comment threads as well, worth reading through:
First, the source metarial, i.e., the stuff that appeared in non-blog media, and some background resources (which, if everyone have read them, would have reduced some of the…