Policy and Politics
tfk | July 21, 2009Legislative conferences have better swag in the exhibits hall than do science conferences.
To whit: free beer in the hall itself. Also free condoms, free chocolate (including both M&Ms and chocolate Pill dispensers), toys from Toy Manufacturers of America, and no fewer than five versions of the US Constitution.
Also, the John Birch Society still exists, and is handing out both constitutions and DVDs inveighing against the national constitutional convention that unnamed forces are apparently agitating for. In Philadelphia.
The American Association for Nude Recreation is handing out pins…
tfk | July 20, 2009Shorter Longer Bill Dembski:
It's wrong to appeal to a judge's authority on federal law, but not to twist Thomas Jefferson's words to pretend we can know what he'd think of modern science.
Dembski is responding to Steven Pinker's reply to Disco. DJ Stephen Meyer's op-ed claiming Thomas Jefferson would totally have totally disagreed with Charles Darwin (who was 15 when Jefferson died). Pinker wonders why the Boston Globe keeps giving creationists op-ed space, even after Judge Jones ruled ID unconstitutional in science class. Dembski:
Is this vapid appeal to authority all the Darwinians have…
tfk | July 20, 2009If this is Monday, this must be Philadelphia. Any readers in the area who want to meet in person to tell me that I'm an accommodationist dick who must be incredibly stupid should leave a comment. We'll get a beer or something.
tfk | July 16, 2009Last December, I called for nationalizing the securities ratings firms, companies that propped up Big Shitpile through its heyday and actively encouraged the idiotic and destructive practices which brought us to the current economic crisis. Barry Ritholz reveals that the rating agencies may just get their comeuppance at last. Calpers, the giant California public employees retirement fund, is suing the raters:
Now, here comes the fun part: Calpers doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance)…
tfk | July 16, 2009Felix Salmon wades back into the moral morass that is Ben Stein. Stein has a new ad on the air. No longer content to shill eyewash and brain bleach, he's now pushing a credit report scam. Salmon explains:
“I went to freescore.com and found out my score for free”, says Ben, while an annoying squirrel holds up a sign with the word “FREE” in some horrible brush-script font.
A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What’s useful is the report — if there’s an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much…
tfk | July 16, 2009PZ Myers doesn't care for Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum. In objecting to it, he quotes Jerry Coyne's objection:
I could find little in Unscientific America that has not been said, at length, elsewhere.
Setting aside the merits of this claim for a moment (a full review will come shortly, but I'm in the midst of unpacking from one trip and getting ready to embark on another), this is a somewhat odd complaint for either of these men to level.
Coyne, after all, is blogging in support of his recent book Why Evolution Is…
tfk | July 15, 2009There are a number of people who, even when they are right, get things very wrong.
To whit, Michael Gerson, former Bush speechwriter, reacting to Francis Collins's nomination as NIH director (h/t Joel). He notes that Collins is well-qualified, and that it's odd how a few people are agitated that Collins is forthrightly religious. He makes the odd claim that this speaks to the state of evangelical Christianity, when it doesn't really. If Francis Collins were typical of evangelicals, it would be great, but he's a pro-evolution, pro-stem cell, egghead scientist. Not a lot of evangelicals fit…
tfk | July 14, 2009
The local Fox affiliate did a story on the controversial issues workshop I'm part of here in Florida. You can see me talking to the teachers about a minute into the video above.
Alas, the reporter got the story a bit wrong. Teachers were never forbidden from saying the word "evolution," the standards themselves simply avoided the e-word. The teachers know that, but the reporter missed the point.
More on the conference in a couple days.
tfk | July 10, 2009Back when Yoko Ono was suing the makers of Expelled over their use of John Lennon's "Imagine," the Discovery Institute was a hotbed of copyfighters. Disco. DJ Bruce Chapman called Ono a "censor" and pitched it as a battle for free speech. Chapman complains about an Ars.Technica post which rightly notes that "intelligent design is not a scientific theory so much as an attempt to create the appearance of controversy using flashy PR tactics," and that Expelled "greatly exaggerates the persecution of intelligent design advocates":
Notice the way the writer feels obliged to abuse free speech—by…
tfk | July 6, 2009Ross Douthat is reputed to be a pretty smart guy. He blogged for the Atlantic before being given Bill Safire's old op-ed column at the New York Times. Safire, despite being wrong in may ways, was a sharp observer with good sources in DC, an analytical eye, and a sparkling intellect. Safire was briefly replaced by Bill Kristol, whose uneasy relationship with the truth, sloppy writing, and tendency to bash his own paper led to a brief tenure. Douthat has risen above Kristol's sad mark, but not by much.
Consider his defense of Sarah Palin:
In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans…
tfk | July 3, 2009Sarah Palin is utterly batshit.
Look, I can see not running for reelection: she wants to run for president in 2012.
That alone is pretty dumb, since she was less popular than John McCain, and McCain/Palin couldn't beat Obama in 2008. In 2012, all signs suggest we'll have national health insurance and a growing economy, so why would anyone pick Palin to ruin it?
But she wants to run in 2012. Fine. Why resign from office now? She doesn't want to be a lame duck? Fine, then why stay in office for a month? I mean, her official resignation will happen on my birthday, which is thoughtful of…
tfk | July 1, 2009Martin Cothran has, he likes to remind people, written a book on logic, and teaches the subject at the high school level. Alas and alack, this stooge of the Disco. Inst. and Focus on (your own damn) Family cannot seem to apply it correctly in his writings. Today, he illustrates rather starkly the ecological fallacy while making the not-at-all revolutionary observation that wealthier Americans are skinnier than poorer ones:
Now comes more evidence that poverty in American is characterized chiefly by eating too much. The report, from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, has Mississippi,…
tfk | June 25, 2009In the course of a long and often annoying back and forth with Jerry Coyne, Chris Mooney comes up with a succinct explanation of where science/religion accommodation comes from:
Insofar as I’m an accommodationist, then, it’s not because I don’t see the incongruity between relying on faith, and looking for evidence, as bases for knowing. Rather, it’s because I know that many very intelligent people are struggling all the time to make their peace with this incongruity in their own way–a peace that works for them. And so long as they’re not messing with what our kids learn–or, again, trying to…
tfk | June 24, 2009Sean Carroll, one of the sharpest guys out there, says that science and religion are not compatible. I happen to think he's using an idiosyncratic (but not necessarily wrong) definition to reach that conclusion:
are science and religion actually compatible? Clearly one’s stance on that issue will affect one’s feelings about accomodationism. So I’d like to put my own feelings down in one place.
Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean.
It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori…
tfk | June 23, 2009Students of the creation/evolution conflict know the Thomas More Law Center as the conservative legal group who encouraged the Dover school board to undertake their disastrous policies. TMLC lost badly, and left Dover on the hook for over a million dollars in legal fees. TMLC dropped plenty of their own money on the case, too, money donated by the founder of Dominos Pizza.
TMLC is at it again, stirring up baseless legal fights to promote their religious agenda. And when they lost, things got really ugly. The SF Chrnocile explains, "Religious right group likens S.F. supes to Nazis":
"It is…
tfk | June 22, 2009I haven't blogged about Iran at all, and I don't really feel bad about it. Obviously, it's the big news story, but I don't know what will happen, and the people I'm reading don't seem to have a clear idea either. I'm optimistic that honest election results will be posted, and that the genuine winner of their election will be seated.
But those are not the issues at play. The protests are being treated as a borderline revolution, with Mousavi as a potential George Washington. I'm less sure of that. Mousavi was a major backer of the Islamic Revolution, favors an Iranian nuclear weapons…
tfk | June 18, 2009Netroots Nation is rolling out their panels for the next meeting (August 13-16, Pittsburgh, PA). It's an interesting mix, with more than any one person can handle. If my experience last year is any guide, it'll be a struggle just to keep up, and there will be lots of times when I'll have two or more simultaneous panels I want to attend. I just hope my panel isn't scheduled opposite anything really fun.
That's right campers, I said my panel. The abstract isn't live yet, but we're just dotting a few t's and crossing some i's. The title is "Science Denial and Science Policy." A group of…
tfk | June 16, 2009A week or so ago, John West pimped a new Disco. Inst. website on faith and religion in the Washington Post's On Faith blog. His claims were as mendacious as you would expect from looking at the site, most bizarrely inventing a movement of "new theistic evolutionists," when the folks he names are simply repeating a position on the compatibility of faith and science which has been part of Christian theology since the time of Augustine of Hippo. You don't need to know more about West's piece.
NCSE Faith Project Director Peter Hess responded in On Faith today. His brief reaction to West: "He…