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The Royal Wedding, A Thoughtful Theologian and the Faith/Science Conundrum

Source. On April 29, Prince William and Kate Middleton will exchange wedding vows with Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury presiding. More than two billion viewers are expected to witness the event with well wishes for this handsome couple, with Britain's future in mind. I wish them all the best, with opportunities and joy that they cannot even imagine today. Archbishop Williams is a learned theologian but is not without controversy with his statements about the 9/11 attacks, Muslims and British law. My focus here, however, is to explore his thoughts about faith and science. I…

Thoughts on Dr. Rashid Buttar and the failure of state medical boards

One of the most contentious and difficult aspects of trying to improve medical care in this country is enforcing a minimal "standard of care." Optimally, this standard of care should be based on science- and evidence-based medicine and act swiftly when a practitioner practices medicine that doesn't meet even a minimal requirement for scientific studies and clinical trials to support it. At the same time, going too far in the other direction risks stifling innovation and the ability to individualize treatments to a patient's unique situation--or even to use treatments that have only scientific…

The placebo narrative: Justifying integrative medicine through exaggeration

I write quite a bit about placebo effects. Of course, part of the reason is that placebo effects are just plain interesting from a scientific perspective. After all, if one can relieve symptoms with inert sugar pills or other ineffective interventions because of the power of expectation, that’s something we should want to understand. Also, given the mission of this blog, another major reason is that placebo effects are inextricably bound to the question of whether the alternative medicine modalities that are being “integrated” into medicine through the brand of integrative medicine actually…

Two For One: Crackpot Physics and Crackpot Set Theory

I was asked by a reader to take a look at yet another crackpot theory of everything. This time, it's the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe. This one is as cranky as any, but it's actually got some interestingly silly math to it. Stripped down to its basics, the CTMU is just yet another postmodern "perception defines the universe" idea. Nothing unusual about it on that level. What makes it interesting is that it tries to take a set-theoretic approach to doing it. The real universe has always been theoretically treated as an object, and specifically as the composite type of object…

Reverend William Paley's Circadian Clock

An oldie but goodie (June 12, 2005) debunking one of the rare Creationist claims that encroaches onto my territory. ------------------------------------------------------- I got homework to do. PZ Myers alerted me to an incredible argument that the existence of circadian rhythms denies evolution! bryanm, the proprietor of the aptly-named The Narrow blog, describes himself as "...nobody who wants to tell everybody that there is somebody who can save anybody." In other words he is a know-nothing who keeps bothering everybody trying to push his idea that there is this non-existent being who…

Convergence, schmonvergence

I swore off reading Simon Conway Morris long ago, after reading his awful, incoherent book, Life's Solution, which I peevishly reviewed. He's the go-to guy for Cambrian paleontology, and he's definitely qualified and smart, but he's got two strikes against him: he's a terrible writer, making most of his output well-nigh unreadable, and he's one of those scientists with a serious god infection, which means much of what he writes collapses into babbling theology at some point. He's done it again. Simon Conway Morris has an opinion piece in the Guardian, and it's his usual tirade: atheists are…

On Fear

In Mildred Kalish's brilliant memoir, _Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression_ she writes of the ways that children and adults alike were blindsided by fear in a crisis. For children, the fear was that events out of their control terrified and shook the stable human anchors of their lives. For the adults, events were just is incomprehensible, but they had the added burden that they were supposed to understand what was going on: "Though we didn't understand them, we children were seldom protected from the harsh realities of the period, and…

Pink Petunias in the Snow: The Basics of Fall and Winter Gardening

Garden Calendar When the dogstar is aglow plant petunias in the snow. When the snow begins to melt Wrap your hollyhocks in felt. When the felt begins to bloom pick the apples off your broom. When the broom begins to wear weed the turnips in your chair. When the chair begins to rock prune the snowdrops in your sock. When the sock is full of holes blame the whole things on moles. When the moles inquire: "Why pick on us?" say simply "I will instruct you how to grow pink petunias in the snow. - NM Bodecker Note: Today is the first day of my month-long fall gardening class, which will help more…

The Nobel Prize conundrum

I rarely jump on the blogging hype of noting the new Nobel Prize winners every year. Exceptions are cases when I have a different slant on it, e.g., when a Prize goes to someone in my neighborhood or if the winners have published in PLoS ONE and PLoS Pathogens (lots of loud cheering back at the office). But usually I stay silent. Mainly because I am conflicted about the prizes in science in general, and Nobel in particular. On one hand, one week every year, science is everywhere - in newspapers, on the radio, on TV, all over the internet. And that is good because it is a push strategy (…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 54 new articlespublished in PLoS ONE today. Here are my picks: Climate Extremes Promote Fatal Co-Infections during Canine Distemper Epidemics in African Lions: Extreme climatic conditions may alter historic host-pathogen relationships and synchronize the temporal and spatial convergence of multiple infectious agents, triggering epidemics with far greater mortality than those due to single pathogens. Here we present the first data to clearly illustrate how climate extremes can promote a complex interplay between epidemic and endemic pathogens that are normally tolerated in isolation…

Reverend William Paley's Circadian Clock

An oldie but goodie (June 12, 2005) debunking one of the rare Creationist claims that encroaches onto my territory. ------------------------------------------------------- I got homework to do. PZ Myers alerted me to an incredible argument that the existence of circadian rhythms denies evolution! bryanm, the proprietor of the aptly-named The Narrow blog, describes himself as "...nobody who wants to tell everybody that there is somebody who can save anybody." In other words he is a know-nothing who keeps bothering everybody trying to push his idea that there is this non-existent being who…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Lots of new articles in four of seven PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Impact of Ocean Warming and Ocean Acidification on Larval Development and Calcification in the Sea Urchin Tripneustes gratilla: As the oceans simultaneously warm, acidify and increase in PCO2,…

Birds in the News 56 (v2n7)

Male Painted Bunting, Passerina ciris. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Judd Patterson. Click image for larger view in its own window. Birds in Science The European starling, Sturnus vulgaris (pictured) -- long known as a virtuoso songbird and expert mimic - may also soon win a reputation as something of a grammatician, researchers say. Timothy Gentner, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and his team found that the bird can learn language patterns formerly thought to be unique to humans. They discovered that starlings can understand…

Tangled Bank 49, The Science, Nature and Medicine Blog Carnival

Welcome to the 49th issue of Tangled Bank. Honestly, I was blown away by the large number of contributions that I received (if I counted correctly, there are 34 essays in this issue). This response was unexpected, and I was awake almost all night preparing this for you, so I hope you are ready to settle in with a glass of wine while you devote your time and brain space to reading and thinking about science, nature and medicine. If there are any broken links, please notify me via email and I will fix as soon as humanly possible (well, after I wake up from my nap). Evolution My drinking pal and…

Repeatability of Large Computations

Some parts of the discussion of Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: chaos, weather and climate confuses denialists have turned into discussions of (bit) reproducibility of GCM code. mt has a post on this at P3 which he linked to, and I commented there, but most of the comments continued here. So its worth splitting out into its own thread I think. The comments on this issue on that thread are mostly mt against the world; I'm part of the world, but nonetheless I think its worth discussing. What is the issue? The issue (for those not familiar with it, which I think is many. I briefly googled this and…

Congressmen: Do we shoot them or do we not shoot them? (Updated at the request of Senator Paul)

Short answer: No, we do not shoot them. But the argument that we don’t shoot them is not as simple as it seems. Rand Paul: Shoot the CongressmanRight Wing: The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to allow us to be armed, so we can shoot at the government when we need to. (This section has been heavily modified at the request of Senator Paul) The purpose of the second amendment, and the reason to stay heavily armed and to be prepared to use the firearms the Constitution guarantees we can keep, is to lift tyranny should it befall the land. An increasing number of people now realize that a president…

From Graduate School to Prison: What is the rational argument for ELF or ALF?

When I heard the news that day ... Oh boy. I had received an email from a man whom I knew only as the father of a (now former) student. We had met once, a few years ago when his son graduated, and he gave me a very nice bottle of wine, which I shared with a select group of wine experts only last Christmas. The wine had aged well and was outstanding. He gave me the wine as a gift for having "done so much for his son" while he, the son, was an undergraduate student. It was true. I had done a lot for the young man. I had many long conversations with him about lofty sciency concepts, and…

Evolution and the Second Law

I'm sure we're all familiar with the creationist chestnut that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. For people with a basic science education it is something of a litmus test. As soon as you hear someone make this argument you can be certain that you are dealing with a crank. You see, if someone says that he has considered the evidence for evolution and finds it unconvincing, we might shake our heads in disbelief or wonder how seriously he has studied the matter, but in the end it is a matter of opinion whether the evidence is compelling. But if someone says that evolution…

Basics: NOT

It is often said that one of the most significant discoveries in mathematics was the concept of zero, in the Indus valley sometime in the pre-Christian era. An equally important concept in logic is the operator NOT. While Aristotle, the founder of western logic, had discussed groupings of things in terms of what they are not in the Categories, chapter 10, the importance of NOT seems to have been realised first by George Boole in the nineteenth century. In this post I want to discuss it in the context of classification. Aristotle wrote of four kinds of "contrarieties": We must next explain the…

Book review: Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science.

Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics by Renée Bergland Boston: Beacon Press 2008 What is it like to be a woman scientist? In a society where being a woman is somehow a distinct experience from being an ordinary human being, the answer to this question can be complicated. And, in a time and place where being a scientist, being a professional -- indeed, even being American -- was still being worked out, the complexities of the answer can add up to a biography of that time, that place, that swirl of intellectual and cultural ferment, as well as…

Tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement (2014 edition)

With very few exceptions, antivaccinationists labor under the delusion that they are not antivaccine. The reason is simple. Deep down, at some level, even the most dedicated antivaccine advocate knows that society quite rightly views it as a bad thing to be against a preventative intervention that has arguably saved more lives than any other medical intervention. Of course, as I've documented many times in the past, there are some who are openly antivaccine and proud of it, but they seem to be the minority. Most antivaccinationists, like Jenny McCarthy, hide behind a mantra resembling, "I'm…

Andy Wakefield exonerated because John Walker-Smith won his appeal? Not so fast there, pardner...

I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine crankosphere. Actually, maybe "disturbance" is the wrong word. Unabashed whooping it up is closer to correct. High-fiving is perhaps a better term. Or maybe partying like it's 2005. The question, of course, is what is the inciting event was that sparked such widespread rejoicing in the antivaccine world. I'll give you a hint. It has to do with the hero of the antivaccine movement, the man who arguably more than anyone else is responsible for the MMR scare that drove down MMR vaccine uptake in the UK to the point where measles, once vanquished, came…

A canary in the coal mine? Or a bird pining for the fjords?

Why is it that so many bloggable items tend to pop up right before holidays? Whatever the reason, whether my perception that this is the case is accurate or simply the result of confirmation bias on my part, last Friday a little tidbit of popped up that seriously tempted me to blog about it. But I was good (mostly). I resisted, figuring that, first, readership plummets during holiday weekends anyway and, second, anything worth giving an Orac-style dissection to will still be worth giving an Orac-style dissection to three days later. If it isn't, then it probably wasn't worth the full Orac…

No, vaccines almost certainly did not kill Elijah Daniel French

It's been a long time since I bothered to care if readers know where I live or who I am. That's why when a newbie troll shows up in the comments, as newbie trolls periodically do, and castigates me for somehow being a "coward" or "hiding" my identity, I generally get a hardy laugh out of it. My retort is usually that my "real" identity is among the worst kept secrets in the skeptical blogosphere. And so it is. If a reader can't figure out who I am with one or two Google searches, truly he is too dim-witted for me to take seriously. Be that as it may, I now take particular interest in…

Are you are real skeptic, or are you just faithing it?

And by faithing it, I mean using faith rather than critical analysis of the available information to make important decisions about what to regard as valid. Let's do a couple of informal experiments to explore this issue more closely. For the present discussion, I'm assuming that you are a non-scientist and non-medical person who self identifies as a skeptic. Do you know the following terms, without looking them up (which you can do, in part, by clicking on them)? In some cases you may be able to guess meanings, in some cases you may have a vague idea from prior reading. But that's not…

Primitive Cultures are Simple, while Civilization is Complex: Part 1

A "falsehood" is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling of the belief, even if much of that belief is in fact true, can be a learning experience in which future thinking about the issue is transformed. If the examination of the falsehood is accomplished in a thoughtful manner and without too much sophistry, this can be a rewarding experience. (If not, it can be rather awaste oftime.) In order for a falsehood to "work" as a learning…

Elizabeth Edwards and Kim Tinkham: A tale of two victims of breast cancer

Two women died of breast cancer yesterday. One was named Kim Tinkham. One was named Elizabeth Edwards. In some ways, these women were similar. True, one was older than the other, but both of them died far sooner than they should have, one at age 53, the other at age 61. Both engaged in activism about breast cancer. Both were ambitious, driven women. Both died in the presence of their friends and family. Both died within hours of each other. Both demonstrated the implacable killer that breast cancer can be. There the similarities end. One of these women (Kim Tinkham), for example, died…

Mark Hyman deceives about "science research deception"

One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous "science was wrong before" gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We've seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it just yesterday, when promoters of quackery and anti-vaccine cranks leapt all over the revelation that American scientists had intentionally infected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis without their consent as part of an experiment in the 1940s. They didn't attack…

One more time: Vaccine refusal endangers children

One of the claims of the anti-vaccine movement that most irks me is that their actions do not risk harm to anyone other than their own unvaccinated children. Given that vaccination against many infectious diseases also depends on the concept of herd immunity to provide protection to members of the population who either cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, are too young to be vaccinated, or who belong to the minority who do not develop adequate immunity to vaccination, such claims are patently false. However, another frequently stated belief is that vaccines are ineffective, that they are…

Pseudoscience, quackery, crankery, and the ad hominem

Over the weekend, it appears that a post of mine, in which I included a link to a video of comic Tim Slagle doing the comedy routine that, in my never-ending effort to live up to the stereotype of the humorless skeptic that the credulous like so much, I castigated for its misrepresentations of science in the pursuit of a punchline, has been invaded by a number of "skeptics" of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, it makes me wonder if someone e-mailed the link to my post to a Libertarian mailing list or something, given that, as of this writing, no one that I can detect has linked to the…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: These boots were made for detoxifyin'

I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't want Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) to become to repetitive. Of course, a certain amount of repetitiveness is unavoidable, given that there are only a few major themes running through medical woo. First, there's the belief that "toxins" (rarely specified and almost never with any hard evidence linking them to any specific diseases) are causing disease and that you--yes, you!--need to be "detoxified," whether this "detoxification" is supposedly accomplished through enemas…

Vox Day: Too much of a wingnut even for WorldNet Daily

I'm sorry to do this to you again, kind readers, to subject you to Vox Day a second time in the same week. However, I just couldn't let this pass. Hopefully my traffic won't fall precipitously as people turn away in disgust at being subjected to too much Vox, but I have to take that chance. Besides, it is about bad historical analogies regarding the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, which I have a hard time resisting replying to when they're bad enough. In retrospect, I almost wish I had sicced the Hitler Zombie on Vox a couple of days ago, because Vox is showing more and more signs of having had…

Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, by Renée Bergland

Originally posted by Janet Stemwedel On March 26, 2009, at 11:58 AM What is it like to be a woman scientist? In a society where being a woman is somehow a distinct experience from being an ordinary human being, the answer to this question can be complicated. And, in a time and place where being a scientist, being a professional -- indeed, even being American -- was still being worked out, the complexities of the answer can add up to a biography of that time, that place, that swirl of intellectual and cultural ferment, as well as of that woman scientist. The astronomer Maria Mitchell was not…

Say it ain't so, Barack! Say you ain't seriously considering Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to run the EPA!

One of the aspects of the Barack Obama candidacy that raised my hopes and those of so many of my fellow ScienceBloggers, as well as scientists tired of the crass politicization of science under the Bush administration, was the prospect of an Administration in which science and reason were valued and in which cranks were not allowed to impose their agenda on agencies whose policies should be driven by the science. That's one reason why I was very disturbed when I read a post on Election Day suggesting that antivaccinationist crank and activist extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was being…

Science and the AAAS sell their souls to promote pseudoscience in medicine

NOTE: There is a follow up to this post. The holidays are over. Time to start dishing out fresh Insolence, Respectful and, as appropriate, not-so-Respectful for 2015. I do, however, feel obligated to deal with one painfully inappropriate action by a major science journal left over from 2014. It happened in an issue that came out just before Christmas, and, with all the festivities, being on call last week, and having houseguests; so, unfortunately, I just didn't get around to addressing it, either here or on my not-so-super-secret other blog (where I might crosspost this later in the week).…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Naturopathy and "bioresonance"

It’s been a long and entertaining week. Well, at least part of the week was entertaining. After all, it was hard not to be mightily amused at what happened when Dr. Mehmet Oz, known to the world as America’s Doctor but to skeptics as America’s Quack, asked his Twitter followers to ask him anything under the hashtag #OzsInBox. It was, to put it mildly, a train wreck, but to skeptics it was an enormously entertaining train wreck. It seems fitting to finish it off with yet another example that provides compelling evidence of just how quacky naturopathy is. Why? Because it’s a point that can’t…

The annals of "I'm not anti-vaccine," part 11: Vaccination portrayed as rape

One of the things you can say to someone who is antivaccine that will really tick them off is to “call it like you see it” and call them antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccine activists who are unashamed of being antivaccine, but most antivaccinationists, sensing that society in general quite correctly takes a dim view of people who threaten to allow the return of dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out many times before, that’s why antivaccine activists try to hide behind claims that they are “vaccine safety advocates,” often signified by saying, “I’m…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Homeopathic gene therapy?

It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. Besides indulging my taste for shamelessly working lyrics from Led Zeppelin and other classic bands into my post, what am I talking about? Simple. Things have been way too serious lately. I mean, just look at yesterday's post. Sure, I framed it semi-humorously, with The Evil Skeptics infiltrating the screening of the Burzynski sequel, but part of the reason that I did that is because the subject matter is so unrelentingly depressing. That's why when a reader sent me a link to the victim target subject of…

And now for a little tooth fairy science on meditation...

Back in the day, Deepak Chopra used to be a frequent topic of this blog. He still pops up from time to time, such as when irony meters everywhere immediately self-destructed after Chopra criticized Donald Trump for being insufficiently evidence-based or when, after I wrote a post asking why medical conferences keep inviting Chopra to speak, Chopra was so displeased that he actually posted a video attacking me (and other skeptics who’ve criticized his pseudoscience). Unfortunately, Chopra truly is one of the most influential people in “integrative medicine” today. To be honest, I’ve never…

Are unvaccinated children more healthy than vaccinated children?

There are many myths that undergird antivaccine beliefs, such as the myth that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, and basically anything antivaccinationists like to blame on them. Basically, if you believe antivaccinationists, there’s nothing bad thta vaccines can’t do to children. The flip side of this myth is perhaps the central myth of the antivaccine movement, which is that unvaccinated children are somehow so much healthier than vaccinated children and that fewer vaccines equates to better health. This one pops up time after time after…

Paleontological Profiles: Robert Bakker

Dr. Robert Bakker is one of the most famous paleontologists working today, an iconoclastic figure who has played a leading role of rehabilitating our understanding of dinosaurs from the inception of the "Dinosaur Renaissance" through the present. He is currently the curator of paleontology for the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Director of the Morrison Natural History Museum in Colorado, and has recently been involved in the study of the hadrosaur mummy "Leonardo." In 1986 he published the classic book The Dinosaur Heresies, fully bringing his revolutionized vision of dinosaurs to…

In Which I Disagree with Jerry Coyne

On Monday I posted a reply to Jerry Coyne's clique-ish and philosophically naive report on a talk he didn't see. I thought this would be a useful exercise because: Coyne is a former professor of mine, I respect him, and don't want to see him embarrass himself. High school-level cliqueishness seems unbecoming in a tenured professor. Philosophically naive claims about the nature of science are unbecoming in a tenured biology professor. Launching invective-laden attacks on a talk one hasn't seen is entirely unbecoming. I reply again because efforts to address some of the issues underlying the…

Lying Losers and Cheap Victories: Uncommon Descent at its best

I just had to promote this to the top level of the blog. If you remember, way back in December, I posted something about Sal Cordova's new blog. (As an interesting sidenote, Sal started his blog after supposedly resigning from Uncommon Descent, claiming that he was returning to school, and that the evil darwinists would sabotage his academic career if he continued to be associated with UnD. But of course, now, he's back with the UnDs.) Anyway... I was mocking him because on his blog he was posting something about how math and physics were going to prove his young-earth creation rubbish.…

Almost Friday Recipe: Carmelized Onions, Mushroom, and Sausage Stuffing

Because of the holiday, I'm posting my recipe early this week. It's actually too late, but I don't let little things like reality worry me. This is my thanksgiving turkey stuffing. The origins of this stuffing date back to my discovery of the "black turkey" recipe. I tried it one year, and the stuffing was really good, but the whole thing was just insanely overdone - everything about it was overcomplicated, and there were so many spices muddled up in the stuffing that I just didn't believe that there was any way that you could taste all of them. So over the next few years, I experimented,…

Fractal Pathology: Peano's Space Filling Curve

One of the strangest things in fractals, at least to me, is the idea of space filling curves. A space filling curve is a curve constructed using a Koch-like replacement method, but instead of being self-avoiding, it eventually contacts itself at every point. What's so strange about these things is that they start out as a non-self-contacting curve. Through further steps in the construction process, they get closer and closer to self-contacting, without touching. But in the limit, when the construction process is complete, you have a filled square. Why is that so odd? Because you've…

Ave atque vale

I'm a fan of the comic strip Lio — the one with the weird little kid with the pet squid and whose antics clearly make him a descendant of the Addams Family. The strip for Christmas eve was a little different, though. It hit home for me because the day after Christmas is my day of melancholy. It was the day after Christmas, 1993, that I got a phone call from my mother to let me know that Dad had died, unexpectedly, suddenly, quietly. It's a memory that colors my holiday season every year, and it's a strange thing — the grief and sadness never go away. One of the lies we always tell ourselves…

Bush Obstructs Justice...

...and are you in any way, shape, or form surprised? Has anything in the last six years suggested to anyone in the Coalition of the Sane that the Bush/Cheney Administration has any sense of shame or propriety? Of course not. It should be clear that this administration will do anything and everything it can get away with. Bush now appears to have 'accepted' his 28% approval ratings, and won't try to do anything to raise them. The group that I'm truly disappointed in is the Democrats. They still seem to think that if they point out El Jefe Maximo's outrageous and illegal behavior that the…

The Republican War on Art

Lest the humanities feel neglected, the Republican War on Art keeps chugging along. In Bush's 2009 budget, the arts take massive hits across the board, with the sole exception of much needed maintenance funding of the Smithsonian. But first, by way of the Boston Phoenix, let's look at the most unconscionable part of the budget: ...nothing exemplifies the right wing's embrace of public ignorance more than its opposition to funding arts education in the schools. This position is beyond primitive. Even cave dwellers probably delighted in the animal figures they painted on their walls; not Bush…

California crazy

Two distressing news stories out of that wealthy western state: Berkeley High School has a serious problem: it's a good, relatively well-funded school, but black and latino students aren't doing as well as white students. Their solution: kill those expensive science labs and redirect the money to remedial classes. Science classes with no labs? Inconceivable! That's what a body of earnest, well-meaning, and apparently scientifically illiterate parents and teachers have decided to do. You cannot learn about science without doing science. It's like deciding to continue to teach theater and…

I Don't Deserve This Government, but...

...the morons at Bucky's Family Restaurant do. From some actual NY Times reporting: "I wish there was somebody worth voting for," said Buford Moss, a retired Union Carbide worker sitting at the back table of Bucky's Family Restaurant here, with a group of regulars, in a county seat that -- as the home of the 11th president, James K. Polk -- is one of the ancestral homelands of Jacksonian Democracy. "The Democrats have left the working people," Mr. Moss said. "We have nobody representing us," he continued, adding that he was "sad to say" he had voted previously for Mr. Bush. He was…