Policy and Politics
tfk | July 7, 2010Let's set aside contentious topics like the PepsiBlog wars and try a nice, soothing discussion of science and religion.
You'll recall that, a month ago, I agreed with Chad Orzel that it was OK for the World Science Festival not to put a New/Affirmative/Explicit Atheist on their panel about Science and Faith. Then people got angry at me and I responded angrily, after which I got more flack, and walked back my position a bit. Basically, I had originally thought the panel was meant to be one thing â a personal look at how science and religion interact in some scientists' livesâ but as I looked…
tfk | July 7, 2010More and more of the other ScienceBloggers have weighed in on the Pepsi-written nutrition blog being hosted here at SB. A few more have announced blogging sabbaticals or simply shuttered their SB blog and opened up shop elsewhere.
In addition to a mea culpa sent to the bloggers, the overlords have made some adjustments to the Pepsi blog to better reflect its advertising content. The blog's banner includes the PepsiCo logo, and the Profile now explains: "This blog is sponsored by PepsiCo. All editorial content is written by PepsiCo's scientists or scientists invited by PepsiCo and/or…
tfk | July 2, 2010So Chris Hitchens canceled his book tour in order to get cancer treatment, and some douchebag is crowing about it, saying that it's all part of God's great plan. You see, it's a slow-growing cancer, which will give Hitchens time to recant his neocon imperialism atheism. PZ's response is exactly right:
your god is clearly a dick, and so are you. I don't see why you're worshipping him, except that dicks seem to like other dicks an awful lot.
I mean, assume an all-powerful deity who can change human physiology in order to bring people from atheism to theism. Now religious belief is a property…
tfk | July 1, 2010In February, Penn State issued a report clearing climatologist Michael Mann of 3 charges of academic misconduct arising from the theft of emails from a server at a British university. More recently, a British parliamentary report dismissed claims that climate scientists had behaved improperly. And now, the fourth charge against Mann has been dismissed as well.
Penn State's press release explains: "A panel of leading scholars has cleared a well-known Penn State climate scientist of research misconduct, following a four-month internal investigation by the University." The first charges were…
tfk | June 29, 2010PZ is unamused. I criticized his criticism of prayer vigils in the Gulf, and he responds:
It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulfâ¦and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological…
tfk | June 29, 2010
Via ClimateProgress (who got it from Barefoot and Progressive), we get Kentucky's Republican nominee for the US Senate, Rand Paul, at an event for local homeschoolers. At the top of the Q&A, he's asked when he became a Christian and how old the earth his.
Paul has no trouble giving a detailed account of where his Christianity came from, giving a careful timeline of not just the origins of his Christian faith, but his anti-abortion position. When it gets time to answer the second part of the question he gets tongue-tied, answering:
Iâm gonna have to pass on the age of the earth. I think…
tfk | June 28, 2010Robert Byrd, the longest serving legislator in US history, died last night in a Washington hospital. He overcame the racial politics of his upbringing, repudiating his youthful flirtations with the Klan and championing a vision of the Constitution that secured rights to all Americans. He was a voice against needless war and against abusing the war on terrorism as an excuse to strip citizens of our Constitutional rights.
He will be missed for those reasons, and among the many other reasons, for his strident speeches, like this from September 13, 2006:
September 11 has come and gone, and as…
tfk | June 26, 2010PZ Myers is disappointed. There's a massive oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is incapable of stopping it, as is the federal government, and the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida (and soon on to Georgia and the Carolinas) are being coated in a chocolatey rainbow of crude oil. This is bad, and there's nothing that people who live in these areas can do about it, so there've been occasional calls for folks there to get together and pray.
Now it's indisputable that PZ is unhappy with all of that, but he seems somewhat more vocal in his unhappiness with the people praying than he is with…
tfk | June 24, 2010Martin Cothran, scourge of all deviation, whether from his ideal of "classical education," from his creationist beliefs, from his homophobia, from his misogyny, from his aversion to women who assert their own sexuality, or from his conservative ideals, wants us all to know:
My mother still keeps peacocks on her form in Kansas.
Thanks for sharing.
tfk | June 22, 2010I don't care that Gen. McChrystal and his aides got drunk and talked smack. I care that they were dumb enough to do so on the record with a reporter, and I care that McChrystal is behind schedule on in implementing his plan to win in Afghanistan. Neither speaks to his competence, or his staff's competence.
It's disappointing that it's easier to fire someone for doing something boneheaded but inconsequential than to screw up professionally.
Look, McChrystal and Vice President Biden were on opposite ends of an internal administration debate about Afghanistan last year. McChrystal wanted…
tfk | June 21, 2010Remember when Disco. spinner Casey Luskin rolled out this silly attempt at refuting critics of irreducible complexity?:
Car engines use various kinds of bolts, and a bolt could be seen as a small âsub-partâ or âsub-systemâ of a car engine. Under [Ken] Miller's logic, if a vital bolt in my car's engine might also to perform some other functionâperhaps as a lugnut--then it follows that my car's whole engine system is not irreducibly complex. Such an argument is obviously fallacious.
He wrote that in April of 2006. Little did I know at the time that the Department of Homeland Security had…
tfk | June 21, 2010Casey Luskin, Disco. 'Tute spinner, has recently relaunched a fight over whether and how textbooks use embryological drawings from Ernst Haeckel's 19th century popular works. In his two posts (excerpting from a jumbled essay he wrote for a law review), he repeatedly claims that those drawings are fraudulent. To wit:
textbooks in use today, in arguing for evolution, still use Haeckelâs fraudulent embryo drawings
That Haeckelâs drawings were fraudulent and have been used in textbooks is essentially beyond dispute
Stephen Jay Gould recognized that Haeckelâs drawings ⦠fraudulently obscured…
tfk | June 18, 2010You may recall a small brouhaha among science fans some time back when the clowns in Insane Clown Posse released a video of a song declaring their hatred for "scientist[s], y'all motherfuckers lying and getting me pissed." The offense of scientists? Trying to answer bog-simple questions like "fuckin' magnets, how do they work?"
When ICP did a show in San Francisco, folks from the Noisebridge technology/hacking collective took to the streets. They brought posters explaining science, labcoats, and ICP-style facepaint. And by all accounts, they were well received by the assembled ICP fans ("…
tfk | June 14, 2010His defense of mountain removal mining:
I donât think anybodyâs going to be missing a hill or two here and there.
Stupid hills, always getting in the way.
tfk | June 8, 2010In 2000, Will Saletan described Joe Lieberman's crusade against lurid Hollywood. Joe, he explained:
has spent years trying, through shame and intimidation, to cleanse movies, television, pop music, and video games of gratuitous sex and violence. [â¦]
When asked on Meet the Press about the possibility of "legal restrictions" on Hollywood, Lieberman swore allegiance to the First Amendment but added, "The average family feels as if it's in a competition with a lot of the stuff ⦠coming out of the entertainment industry, and government has to be on the side of standing with those people to help…
tfk | June 7, 2010For reasons passing understanding, people continue to listen to the Thomas More Legal Center. Listening to their nonsense cost the Dover Area School District a cool million, and now some buffoons in Michigan have taken TMLC's help in a suit challenging the Affordable Care Act. TMLC litigator Robert Muise defended the suit challenging the individual mandate by arguing:
Never in our history has the government sought to acquire for itself the authority to force someone to engage in a commercial transaction they wouldn't otherwise engage in. The government has very broad authority, but it's not…
tfk | June 7, 2010You remember Kris Kobach, right? Once a Congressional candidate with ties to white supremacists, before that a Justice Department staffer on a since-abandoned racial profiling scheme, after which he bankrupted the Kansas Republican Party, and is lately famous for authoring Arizona's "show me your papers" law. He's running for Kansas secretary of state, where he'd regulate state elections. At a recent event organized by the "Patriot movement" (which previously spawned domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh, and Scott Roeder), Kobach made some rather remarkable claims, not least that:
terrorists…
tfk | June 6, 2010Never let it be said that I don't acknowledge error. Ophelia Benson, responding in part to my earlier posts on the World Science Festival's science and faith panel, points out amistake I made:
Meanwhile â Josh Rosenauâs claim, in his post on why there shouldnât be any atheist scientists on the panel
Whoa, there. I can see how what I wrote implies that, but it wasn't what I meant, and thus I need to apologize and correct myself. My point was about Affirmative/New Atheists, not about all atheist scientists. Frankly, Francisco Ayala's religious views are fairly obscure, and according to some…
tfk | June 6, 2010Steve Matheson writes An open letter to Stephen Meyer:
Dear Steve:
â¦Yes, it would be great to follow up on our brief meeting onstage, and to find ourselves in situations in which topics of mutual interest are discussed by knowledgeable and intelligent people (at conferences, for example, or in multidisciplinary working groups). â¦
Right now, I don't see how you could be a thoughtful contributor to such an effort. It's not because you're stupid, or because you have "bad relationship skills," and it's not because you prefer ID-based explanations for biological phenomena. It's because you seem…
tfk | June 6, 2010So we're getting ready for another round of California's dysfunctional government by proposition. The ballot will include a proposal for Louisiana-style open primaries, in which the top two vote-getters proceed to a runoff in November.
It doesn't strike me as an intuitively awful idea, as it might make it easier to elect non-wingnuts to the legislature, and perhaps easier for candidates more closely aligned with third parties to get elected in places like San Francisco or Berkeley. In researching the matter, it turns out that the experience in Louisiana and Washington has been weaker…