Policy and Politics
tfk | March 9, 2010Casey Luskin, intrepid Upchucky also-ran, is aflutter. Last week's New York Times story about creationists and global warming deniers partnering up has the whole Disco. 'Tute in something of a tizzy, but Casey's outrage is of a special sort.
Casey, you see, thinks the the Times misdescribed Selman v. Cobb County. The article states:
The legal incentive to pair global warming with evolution in curriculum battles stems in part from a 2005 ruling by a United States District Court judge in Atlanta that the Cobb County Board of Education, which had placed stickers on certain textbooks…
tfk | March 8, 2010Larry Moran is unhappy with me. This is fine; I knew that posting "On the need for grownups" would get people angry, and it did. I hoped it would spark some productive discussion, and it has, at least via email.
What bothers me is that the reasons Larry is upset seem to entirely misconstrue what I wrote:
Joshua Rosenau has fired another shot in the accommodationist war. As usual, he focuses more on rhetoric and mudslinging than on the logical arguments that are presented by both sides. In this case, he demeans all those who disagree with him in On the need for grownups [Updated].…
tfk | March 6, 2010Attention conservation notice: This post should have been broken into about three parts, but it's written now and I don't care. Read it at your risk. Consists of points I've made before to little avail, thinly veiled disdain for people I respect, and cartoons.
As I've said before, reading anti-accommodationists is bad for the health and bad for the brain. It was a habit I kicked, and getting back to it, even slightly, has not been a cheering experience.
It reminds me of the reason I don't write about Israel/Palestine. One side commits some atrocity, and this leads the other side to commit…
tfk | March 5, 2010The Disco. 'Tute is displeased. Or perhaps not. They love attention, especially in a venue like the New York Times. But they hate having attention drawn to their agenda or the details of what they advocate. Thus, we getâ¦
Shorter Disco.:
Yes we think AGW and evolution are bogus, but how dare people draw attention to our views!
Disco had started calling for a wahmbulance even before yesterday's front-page-above-the-fold article about efforts to link global warming with creationism. Then it got published, and the calls to whine-one-one started rolling in. "Oh my ZOMG," the pearl-clutching…
tfk | March 4, 2010James Hrynyshyn has a great response to John West's quote in today's New York Times article on creationism and global warming:
Any efforts to ensure science education is "balanced," in any subject, must be accompanied by reassurances that science classes will stick to science, and not embrace misinformation from ideological or religious think tanks masquerading as proponents of science.
How can one tell the difference? It can be challenging for dilettantes not familiar with doing a little work. For example, when John West of Seattle's creationist Discovery Institute says things like this:
"…
tfk | March 4, 2010Looking through the raw data from Pew's surveys on science from last summer, I cannot make heads or tails of certain findings.
I started out looking at the correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of global warming. As one would expect, it was significant. But the survey handily also asked not just about people's personal belief regarding these sciences, but also their beliefs about the views of the scientific community. And again, people who think scientists reject evolution are more likely to think scientists reject global warming.
Then I got interested in whether people who…
tfk | March 4, 2010Shorter D'enyse D'ohLeary: Global warming transforms New York Times to toast:
My toes are smarter than I am.
No really! Actual D'ohLeary:
My toes think that the global warming people are wrong. Do I know? No.
Because she got frostbite. In Ottawa.
OMG! Global warming is a lie becauseâ¦Â Canada is cold!
Now to drink until visions of D'ohLeary's twisted toes are blotted from my memory.
tfk | March 4, 2010The latest addition to LA's food scene is apparently Top Chef winner Ilan Hall's Scottish/Jewish fusion restaurant The Gorbals. According to The Oklahoman (!), Hall is catching some flack:
Ilan Hall received his first piece of hate mail a couple of weeks ago. The writer expressed disgust with the chef's sacrilegious take on Jewish cuisine, specifically Hall's decidedly unkosher matzo balls wrapped in bacon.
Clearly some people have not been reading TfK. Bacon goes great with matzo.
On tonight's menu: latkes with smoked applesauce; marrow with mushrooms and walnuts; and Manischewitz-…
tfk | March 3, 2010For the last year or so, I've been in touch with a reporter at the New York Times about a growing trend of creationists adding global warming to their enemies lists. Tomorrow, her story â Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets â hits the front page of the paper of record:
Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nationâs classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.
In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss…
tfk | March 1, 2010It's true that there's a lot of overlap between creationists and global warming deniers. Lots of creationists have been conditioned to reject claims of scientific consensus, and so throw in with the deniers.
However, the global warming deniers know that creationism is bad science, and that linking themselves to it would just be embarrassing, which leads to the possibility of internecine warfare, as creationists try to glom onto global warming denial and global warming deniers try desperately to shake them loose.
To whit, this slide from a presentation by global warming denier Richard Lindzen…
tfk | March 1, 2010Tomorrow is the Texas primary elections, in which voters will have a chance to rid themselves of such scourges to public education as Don McLeroy and Ken Mercer. Cynthia Dunbar is, thankfully, leaving the Board, as is Rick Agosto. Bob Craig, a right-wing Republican, is being challenged by someone even farther to the right.
So, my suggested votes in the Republican primaries. As always, these are my own opinion, and do not reflect the views of NCSE or any other organization.
District 1: Rene Nunez has filed for re-election and runs unopposed in the primary, as does his presumptive…
tfk | February 27, 2010
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
No hint whether Rachel Maddow picked up this story from the Huffington Post, Science Progress, Think Progress, Bad Astronomy, Pharyngula, or your friendly neighborhood TfK, but the mockery is sufficiently abundant.
tfk | February 26, 2010I've got a column at Science Progress arguing just that (in my internal accounting, McLean was Scopes II, Kitzmiller was Scopes III):
Legislators in South Dakota seem bent on becoming anti-science pioneers. After a century of anti-evolution policies and legislation across the United States, the South Dakota legislature is set to become the only one in the nation to micromanage what teachers should say about global warming.
This attack on global warming was prefigured in the announcement last August by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it planned to gin up âthe Scopes monkey trial of the…
tfk | February 26, 2010Commenter SLC tricked me into violating my moratorium on reading anti-accommodationist blogs, curse him. The discussion, such as it is, focuses on an essay written by Francis Collins introducing a book of essays on religious belief. Naturally, this has various people up in arms, clamoring for Collins to resign from the NIH because he repeated his long-held and oft-stated belief that science and religious faith are compatible (for him, at least).
I'm not really interested in engaging the substance of Collins' claims, nor the counter-arguments by the anti-accommodationists. It's boring, no…
tfk | February 26, 2010A year into the administration, after the teabagging parties and record numbers of filibusters, senior Obama advisor Axelrod finally used the magic words:
The American people ... all they want is an up or down vote.
"Up or down vote" is the framing used by Republicans to break the last filibuster crisis, a fight over judicial nominations shortly before Republicans lost control of the Senate. Most Americans don't know what a filibuster is, or why some Senate votes take 60 yeas and some require a simple majority. Traditionally, the filibuster was used to bide for time, and as a show of…
tfk | February 25, 2010Shorter Fox's Shep Smith on the President's healthcare summit:
Democrats are partisan hacks for inviting the GOP to participate in healthcare negotiations even though they know GOP has nothing to offer.
Oy.
tfk | February 25, 2010This is his actual argument against allowing the Senate to pass healthcare reform by a simple majority:
the United States is not going to tolerate a group of people trying apply kind of a Hugo Chavez majoritarian rule
Is that why we hate Hugo Chavez now? Because of his profound commitment to majoritarian rule? Yes, that must be why conservatives dislike him.
tfk | February 25, 2010There are few things that Richard Dawkins and Matt Nisbet agree about regarding science communication in the internets, but apparently there's a general consensus that you're a douchebag.
I haven't got strong feelings on the RichardDawkins.net forum shutdown. Dawkins is right that people were dicks to him and his staff, but the self-righteousness of this opening to his announcement doesn't engender sympathy:
Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website…
tfk | February 21, 2010Even though there's a huge digital divide in Brazil, as many people use the Internet to gain science knowledge as use museums. And no other source approaches either of those.
If I had to pick one lesson from this morning's session and the afternoon session, it would be that the internet has arrived, and scientists should do a lot more to take advantage of that. The challenge is getting science content into unexpected contexts, so that people who don't know they want to learn about science still encounter some of it now and then.
tfk | February 21, 2010There's lots to delve into in Jon Miller's study of civic scientific literacy, not least that US student jump from poor science performance in high school to high science literacy as adults thanks largely to the mandatory year-long science course most colleges require.
More important, perhaps, is the fact that (using path analyses controlling for age, education, and other relevant social variables) TV viewership has a negative effect on science literacy, while print media consumption has a small positive effect and internet usage has a substantial positive effect. Could this be thanks to…