Policy
nisbetmc | July 22, 2006
Below I provide an overview of the Editorials printed at the national and major regional newspapers. Without exception, the newspapers denounce Bush's decision. Most go with the "moral inconsistency" angle: why prevent research that could save lives when the left over embryos at IVF clinics would be destroyed anyway? Only a few papers emphasize PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY, linking Bush's decision to a general "hostility to science" and a perceived tendency to decide public policy based on his religious beliefs and the preferences of Christian conservative groups. A few reference the difference…
clock | July 22, 2006Link found on Ed Cone's blog: The Fog of Cable:
As someone who lives and breathes Middle East politics and media, I have had the bizarre -- and frustrating -- experience of watching the current conflict play out on U.S. cable television, and I am reminded once again why many Americans have such a limited -- and distorted -- view of the world.
---------snip-------------
There is plenty of room on cable television for politicized talk shows of all stripes. But in allowing -- or, rather, ordering -- its respected news correspondents to appear on such shows, the networks are trading credibility…
j7uy5 | July 22, 2006I haven't done much frank political blogging since moving to
ScienceBlogs. But this is just too provocative to pass up.
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1826479,00.html">
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1826479,00.html">Afghanistan
close to anarchy, warns general
· Nato commander's view in stark
contrast to ministers'
· Forces short of equipment and
'running out of time'
Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday July 22, 2006
The Guardian
The most senior British military commander in Afghanistan yesterday
described the situation in…
oracknows | July 19, 2006Here we are, five and a half years into George W. Bush's Presidency, and he's not yet vetoed a bill. Not even a single bill. All sorts of bad legislation have been passed, from the bankruptcy reform legislation that makes it harder for people to start again after declaring bankruptcy, to budgets containing huge increases in spending, to a really offensive campaign finance reform package that restricts political speech.
All passed with nary a peep from the President.
So what gets Bush's dander up enough to finally pull out his veto pen and use his power to veto a bill he doesn't like?…
clock | July 17, 2006Mark Lindeman is a guy who did the statistical analysis of the exit polls and final numbers of the 2004 election and conluded that there was NO fraud, or at least not enough to make a difference. He is, thus, a liberal unloved by some other liberals. He is thus a liberal unhappy that his data show what they show - he would have been much happier if Kerry won. But data are data....
Anyway, TNG of Neural Gourmet blog did an exclusive interview with Dr.Lindeman. The first part is now up, the second one will come up tomorrow and the third part on Wednesday.
So, go and read the first part…
cmooney | July 17, 2006This CNN story is quite representative of an obnoxious genre: Stories about Bush's failed stem cell policy which pretend that the President's "more than 60" lines claim was only undermined by the passage of considerable time, rather than almost immediately. In fact, as I detail in The Republican War on Science and as others like journalist Stephen Hall have also detailed, the claim was never defensible. The only factor that delayed and defused outrage over Bush's dramatic misleading of the public on this subject was 9/11, which wiped the issue of stem cells completely off the map (and rightly…
retrospectacle | July 13, 2006The ScienceBlog-osphere has been abuzz lately with the current machinations the Bush administration's stem cell policy. As Nick Anthis, Matt Nisbet, and Ed Brayton have all mentioned, the controversy stems from Bush's threat to use, for the first time, a presidential veto to block a bill, passed by the House and expected to pass in the Senate, to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Obviously, a veto could delay that process indefinitely.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted 238-194 last year to pass the legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Rep…
clock | July 13, 2006. This is a post intwo parts - the second being a reaction to the responses that the first one engendered. They may be a little rambling, especially the first one, but I still think that there is quite a lot there to comment on.
Great Men and Science Education - Part 1
There is an interesting thread here about "faith" in science and the way science is taught. Why no science textbook is a "Bible" of a field. Here are some of my musings....
So much science teaching, not just in high school but also in college, is rote learning. Memorize Latin names for body parts, Krebs cycle, taxonomy of…
cmooney | July 12, 2006Just kidding...I'm not debating him, but I am appearing on a panel with the famous deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, this Friday at the "Bioethics and Politics" conference in Albany, New York. The panel set-up could lead to debate-like exchanges, certainly. Guess I'd better brush up on stem cells; I've been focused on climate for so long I suspect I'm a bit rusty. So anyway, here's a set of Google links on Doerflinger. Just like we've done with Ron Bailey and Tom Bethell in the past, I'd appreciate your reactions...
hrynyshyn | July 12, 2006No sign yet that the science-and-religion debate is heating (or, as the Brits say, hotting) up in the public sphere, but a continuing and expanding dialog on the subject in EOS has been brought to my attention. What started as an appeal to include some philosophy in NASA's mission planning has morphed into an exploration of just how cozy scientists should be with those more concerned with matters more spiritual.
It all began back in early 2005, when Robert Frodeman, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Texas, wrote an essay (PDF) on "Space Policy and Humanities…
razib | July 6, 2006I am a registered Republican. There, I said it. I'm not a particularly ardent one, but I am not ashamed of being a Republican. I have no idea if there are any other Republican bloggers here at Science Blogs, even nominal ones like myself. Additionally, my impression is that aside from David Ng everyone here at Science Blogs is pretty pale faced. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but someone should chi square this and see if they scry prima facie grounds for discrimination. I kid of course.
In any case, Bora has a long post about liberalism and the academy. He talks about a long…
hrynyshyn | July 5, 2006I'm sure Robert Samuelson isn't the only pundit who doesn't buy Al Gore's argument that climate change is a moral issue. The Newsweek editor and Washington Post columnist weighs in on "An Inconvient Truth" today by rejecting Gore's characterization of the problem.
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
Which got me to thinking: if climate change doesn't involve morality, then what does a public policy debate have to…
mixingmemory | July 4, 2006It's not uncommon these days to hear someone on the right side of the political spectrum refer to people on the left side as "America haters." It's a nice way to dismiss any criticism of the United States' policies or behaviors, and current administration in particular, because instead of addressing the criticism, one simply has to say, "They're just saying that because the hate America." Still, I think some people have come to genuinely believe that people on the left hate America, and aren't using the label as a rhetorical device designed to disarm one's opponent. To these people, the…
drorzel | July 3, 2006Poking through the archives to find some old physics posts to fill space while I'm away from the keyboard, I realize that back in 2002, I wrote a lot more about politics than I do now.This is largely because most of what I wrote about politics back then makes me cringe now. And, in fact, made me cringe about two weeks after writing it, which continues to be true of most of my writing about politics.
Here's one of the rare posts that doesn't make me cringe (I'm not entirely happy with it, but it's not completely embarassing), on the subject of political rhetoric (which seems vaguely…
j7uy5 | July 1, 2006{I actually started writing this weeks ago, got bogged down and
distracted, and never finished it. Now, I have decided to
just go ahead and finish it up, even though I am not entirely happy
with it. Hey, I am not getting paid for this, so so what if
it is not a polished piece of work.}
I just finished reading
rel="tag" href="http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/about.php">Chris
Mooney's column in Seed Magazine,
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/as_science_goes_so_goes_the_na.php?utm_source=SB-rightcol&utm_medium=linklist&utm_campaign=internal%2Blinkshare">As…
clock | June 29, 2006This week, it took me quite a while to figure out how to answer the Ask a ScienceBlogger question: "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?"
As a relative newcomer to the United States, and even more a newcomer to American politics, I was not around long enough to pay attention to various science-driven policies of the past. Most of what I know are far from "unsung" successes - from Manhattan Project, through Clean Air and Clean Water acts, to the EWndangered Species Act, to the international Kyoto Protocol. Dealing with DDT, DES,…
hrynyshyn | June 29, 2006Barack Obama is right. Barack Obama is also wrong. Not only should this not be surprising, it should be welcome. Because no other position is tenable when it comes to the subject of the role of faith in politics.
Obama, widely considered one of the brightest hopes for the Democrats come 2012 (if not 2008, as a candidate for Veep perhap?), gave a speech on appealing to secular voters at gathering of progressive Christians called the Call to Renewal Conference a couple of days ago. The reaction from the blogosphere includes some bewilderingly negative comments from those who want no truck nor…
clock | June 29, 2006WHY DAVID BRODER AND MARSHALL WITTMAN THREATEN DEMOCRACY:
If you look out over the landscape and think that both sides are equally bad and that the answer is somewhere in the middle, then you aren't looking very closely. In fact, you're not looking at all. You're letting a pre-existing concept (the vanity of your own conspicuous centrism and bipartisan goodness) warp your perceptions of reality.
AND ALL THE PUNDITS ARE INSANE :
The fact that the GOP isn't getting chased out of town and harassed endlessly by adopting this policy shows just how skewed everyone's center of gravity is. There…
purepedantry | June 26, 2006Keith Burgess-Jackson questions in his TCS column whether we should listen to people like Noam Chomsky's opinions on politics -- a realm notably outside their stated occupational expertise. I must admit that I haven't read what Noam Chomsky's opinions are lately -- although it is my suspicion that with respect to the present administration, they are hardly complimentary. To whit:
Noam Chomsky is, by all accounts, a brilliant linguist. Let me stipulate that this is the case, since I'm not a linguist myself. Let me also stipulate that he is a competent philosopher of language, although he has…
mixingmemory | June 25, 2006This week's "Ask a Science Blogger" question is, "What makes a good science teacher?" I don't know how to answer that. I've had many science teachers, some of whom were very good, some of whom were very bad, and most of whom fell somewhere in between. And they were all different. The only thing I can think of that the good ones had was a knowledge of the material and the ability to communicate it effectively, but that's pretty much the definition of a good science teacher (or a good teacher in general), so giving that as an answer for what makes a good science teacher would be pretty…