Policy and Politics
tfk | June 15, 2009Why Aren't Scientists Allowed to Believe In God?
It's a shame that some people try to stop scientists from believing in God.
Is Darwinian Evolution Compatible with Religion?
Scientists who accept evolution are wrong to believe in God.
Sounds like they need to work on message discipline.
tfk | June 11, 2009
Afarensis and PZ note that the Discovery Institute is trying to hide Youtube videos criticizing their pet dachshund, Casey Luskin.
Luskin Someone at Disco. has apparently been hitting his their own product, a danger in the Disco. scene. He or she thinks that they have a copyright claim on video made by Fox News. He Disco. doesn't. Fox News does, so if anyone is going to take down this video, it will be Fox, not Disco.
CaseyWhichever Disco spinner did this also needs to understand that copyright law is not a tool for censorship. Copyright exists, according to the US Constitution, "To…
tfk | June 10, 2009Martin Cothran, the hateful bigot who touted the words of an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier on Holocaust Remembrance Day, is confused. He cannot fathom why I called him a moral monster.
The reason is simple. On June 4, less than a week after George Tiller was shot and killed in his church, Cothran advocated that "the murder of abortionists" be "safe and legal." This is disgusting.
Cothran offers no particular defense for the conscienceless (and tasteless, natch) attempt at justifying cold-blooded murder. Like Scott Roeder, who pulled the trigger on George Tiller, Cothran is "deadly…
tfk | June 9, 2009While perusing Ed Whelan's apology to publius and his further explanation of that apology (context), I learned that David Brooks thinks Sonia Sotomayor has bad timing:
Sonia Sotomayor had bad timing. If she’d entered college in the late-1950s or early-1960s, she would have been surrounded by an ethos that encouraged smart young ethnic kids to assimilate. If she’d entered Princeton and Yale in the 1980s, her ethnicity and gender would have been mildly interesting traits among the many she might possibly possess.
But she happened to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School in the 1970s.
From…
tfk | June 8, 2009
Apologies for the profanity in the cartoon above, but it is as nothing compared to the eldritch horror quoted below. I offer Penny Arcade's theory as a possible explanation of where this comes from.
Martin Cothran, who blogs for the Disco. Inst., who purports to teach logic (though he's has odd affections for elementary fallacies), and who works for Kentucky's Focus on the Family ally, wants to "keep the murder of abortionists safe and legal." Seeking clarification of that insane title, we learn that:
Reading Ann Coulter is, for me, something of a guilty pleasure, given her gift of…
tfk | June 3, 2009Hilzoy and Megan McArdle have had an exchange over abortion, which includes, as these discussions always do, a ton of talking-past-each-other. This tends to happen, because anti-choicers tend to ignore the pregnant woman, and put all their attention on the well-being of the embryo (and my friend John B., a member of George Tiller's church, has a great post showing how this framing of the issue has influenced our national discourse on abortion). Pro-choice advocates are focused on the pregnant woman's rights, and have diverse views on the moral status of an embryo. This results in one…
tfk | June 1, 2009Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Growing up black in a state where dark skin was a crime, he had the courage to stand up for his rights and the rights of his friends and family. He organized boycotts, sued for admission to a segregated law school, and became field secretary for the NAACP.
His house was attacked with Molotov cocktails, but he didn't back down. In Phil Ochs' immortal phrasing, "They tried to burn his home and they beat him to the ground/ But deep inside they both knew what it took to bring him down." And on June 12, 1963, returning home from a…
tfk | May 31, 2009Department of Homeland Security report on Rightwing Extremism, issued April 7, 2009:
Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.
Rep. Michele Bachmann, April…
tfk | May 31, 2009The Wichita Eagle reports that George Tiller was shot and killed:
George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.
Tiller is one of the few doctors in the country who offered third trimester abortions, and did so in a city that rekindled the anti-abortion movement in the '90s. His clinic was the subject of numerous attacks, including a shooting which wounded him in 1993.
Tiller also worked through his political action committee to ensure that women had access to lifesaving…
tfk | May 29, 2009The AP reports:
Cool and collected, Kavya Shivashankar wrote out every word on her palm and always ended with a smile. The 13-year-old Kansas girl saved the biggest smile for last, when she rattled off the letters to "Laodicean" to become the nation's spelling champion.
The budding neurosurgeon from Olathe, Kan., outlasted 11 finalists Thursday night to win the 82nd Scripps National Spelling Bee, taking home more than $40,000 in cash and prizes and, of course, the huge champion's trophy.
After spelling the winning word, which means lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics, Kavya…
tfk | May 28, 2009Texas Board of Education chairman Don McLeroy's nomination to continue in that capacity was just rejected by the Texas Senate.
For all the gory details, check out TFN's liveblog. The vote was 19-11 in favor, and requires 2/3 for approval. The Senate President briefly had trouble with the math, either thinking 19>20 or that 30 * 2/3 ≠ 20, but it all sorted out.
Check out my article on events in Texas for more background on McLeroy's antics.
tfk | May 27, 2009Ned Ryun, son of former Olympic miler and stumbleprone former Congressman Jim Ryun, is worried about Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court.
How worried? "I have a sneaking suspicion," he writes, "that she has a different view of the Constitution than our Founders did."
I kinda hope so, truth be told. Our Founders thought that the Constitution should allow slavery, should not grant equal rights to women, should not apply equally without regard to race, thought that the Senate should not be directly elected by the states' voters, and generally…
tfk | May 26, 2009The California Supreme Court upheld the legality of last year's ballot initiative writing discrimination into the Constitution. No one can marry a same sex couple now, but they didn't invalidate marriages performed in the window between a previous ruling permitting same sex marriages and the amendment's passage.
This is obviously a disappointment. Proposition 8 is a travesty, and should never have passed. Indeed, it surely won't stand. More and more states are legalizing marriage equality through the legislatures, and it's increasingly uncontroversial.
The fact is, California nearly…
tfk | May 22, 2009George W. Bush, addressing the graduating class of Artesia High School, says:
I no longer feel that great sense of responsibility that I had when I was in the Oval Office. And frankly, it’s a liberating feeling.
For us as well.
tfk | May 21, 2009Reluctant as I am to endorse anything on America's Shittiest Website™, this article should be required reading for any politically active atheist. It's written as advice for social conservatives/political evangelicals, but for reasons which have implications I won't get into, it applies equally well to the New Atheists or whatever their favored term is these days.
Maggie Gallagher, a loon associated with various fringe evangelical projects like limiting access to marriage and complaining loudly about how much sex everyone else is having, observes:
Social conservatives simply have not been…
tfk | May 20, 2009Governor Mark Sanford, for those keeping track of such things, is one of the few governors to refuse federal stimulus funds, specifically rejecting funding that would allow him to avoid laying off hundreds of teachers.
In a discussion with batshit insane conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, Sanford refused to endorse Beck's bizarre scenario about the possible consequences of the feds backing loans to California. Beck claimed:
So, if they bail out California, they bail out Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, what would stop them from saying, "You know what, let's just stop with the state taxes…
tfk | May 20, 2009My article for Seed about what the new Texas standards mean for science education nationwide is now online! Check it out.
Here's a taste:
Given these stakes, my colleagues and I worked hard to influence the Texas School Board over the months of hearings, providing them with a statement signed by 54 scientific and educational societies opposing “any effort to undermine the teaching of biological evolution and related topics.” We worked with local activists to organize constituents and political honchos who educated board members about the importance of evolution to science education.
But the…
tfk | May 20, 2009Scientists generally advocate for openness. Full disclosure of methods is vital to peer review and to reproducibility or even evaluation of experimental results. Scientists are also pushing hard for a new publishing system which doesn't hide research behind copyright walls. The community of science is largely an open book, encouraging collaboration, review, and public discussion of new findings. So it's understandable that Kevin Drum is confused about the secrecy surrounding "Ida", the name given to the newly-described fossil scientifically known as Darwinius masillae. The fossil…
tfk | May 20, 2009As an addendum to last week's post about the California budget propositions, let me say that I voted for 1B (raising school funds if 1A passes) and against the rest.
I am apparently not alone, as it appears all but 1F (legislator pay caps) failed. The chair of the Assembly Budget Committee told the AP, "I think the voters are sending a message that they believe the budget is the job of the governor and the Legislature. We probably need to go back and do our job." Um… yeah.
As a reminder to the politicians and opinionmakers, I want to return to a theme in that previous post. I wrote:…