Politics and Science
cmooney | September 5, 2006Well, it's official: On Wednesday I head out to the left coast for the start of the book tour. The first talk, on Thursday in La Jolla, will be one to remember (for me at least, and hopefully also for the audience). It will take place at the annual conference of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals (ARHP), a group that has been on the front lines fighting to defend the integrity of science, especially when it comes to issues like Plan B emergency contraception. But moreover, this talk, entitled "Science Friction: When Science and Politics Collide," is actually going to be…
cmooney | August 31, 2006...for causing so very many people so very much depression and angst. Reading this reaction to my book recently on a blog, I thought to myself, wow, it sounds like countless other reactions I've gotten from folks:
Reading these two books back to back [mine and Esther Kaplan's] is a tough thing to do, since Mooney's point of view (that yes, the Democrats/liberals/intellectuals have on occasion abused science, but that the GOP has made a full-time vocation of it) is both unabashedly direct and brutally nailed down. On finishing Kaplan, you think "things are awful, but we can get through this."…
cmooney | August 29, 2006Mother Jones has just put up an amazing timeline of the march to war with Iraq. It runs from August, 1990, up through 2003. It's incredible. You need to check it out here.
Now, of course, I don't usually blog about the war. But I'm increasingly convinced that the march to war and the "war on science" have a lot in common. Here's a teaser from the preface to the new paperback:
In other words, widespread concerns about the mistreatment of science cannot be understood except in the context of related worries about the overselling of the Iraq war based on dubious intelligence, or about our…
cmooney | August 29, 2006Well, yesterday was the official pub date for the paperback RWOS: I haven't been to a major bookstore yet to see if they're there, but they ought to be. Meanwhile, my thanks to all the blogs who noted the pub date and commented, including the following in no particular order:
MoJo Blog: "Mooney's headed out on tour and may be coming to your town; he's a prescient writer, not to be missed."
WordMunger: "Congratulations, Chris!"
The Scientific Activist: "Did somebody say "scientific activism"? I think so, I think so."
Transterrestrial Musings: "As I told Chris, while I disagree with a lot of…
cmooney | August 28, 2006Over at the Huffington Post, I've got a longish entry on the conclusions I draw from the Katrina tragedy one year later. Check it out.
cmooney | August 27, 2006Well, it's official: Some of the paperbacks have started shipping from Amazon.com. If you preordered the book that way, you should get it soon. The official pub date is tomorrow, Monday, so this will be my last "countdown" post prior to the book release. Of course, I will have much to say after the release date as well.
With this last countdown post, though, I'd like to revisit a subject that just came up on this blog, and which relates to the book themes. On Friday I pointed out that former astronaut and GOP Senator Harrison H. Schmitt, recently named head of NASA's National Advisory Council…
cmooney | August 26, 2006Recently, several folks have sent me this link to Blogs for Bush, where one Mark Noonan has pronounced the "Death of Science." "We have reached the end of the Age of Science," Noonan writes. "What will come after, I don't know, but I don't think that we'll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong."
I have to say, the post is really a bit shocking, if also quite revealing. You can see here for another takedown, but let me just offer a few reflections.
First, the post itself is extremely silly. It says things like this: "Science…
cmooney | August 25, 2006One of the rewarding things about publishing The Republican War on Science has been to sit back and watch as the book's title phrase has caught on. Now and then one finds bloggers using the words "Republican war on science" without any attribution--which is fine with me. Meanwhile, "war on science" panels are now popping up at conferences. The phrase hasn't exactly achieved the exalted status of other book titles-turned-expressions like "tipping point," of course. But it has taken on a modest life of its own.
Politicians are using it too. For example, at the Yearly Kos science panel in Las…
cmooney | August 24, 2006This entry will be short and sweet. Over at the book website, we've put up a new excerpt--a revised Chapter 11, the chapter on the subject of "Intelligent Design." And in addition to making the entire chapter available, we've also put up, at its end, the new update section that follows exclusively in the paperback edition. Seven full chapters of The Republican War on Science have been revised in this way for the paperback; this sneak preview is meant to give a taste of what that kind of updating entails. So, enjoy. Incidentally, for those of you who haven't read the book, having reread it…
cmooney | August 24, 2006In the poli-sci literature--politics and science, not political science--an important new book has come out; and no, I'm not talking about my own book in paperback. It's a more scholarly take on the problem, entitled Rescuing Science from Politics: Regulation and the Distortion of Scientific Research, a collection of essays edited by Wendy Wagner and Rena Steinzor, both legal scholars who helped me out a bunch as I worked on The Republican War on Science and who are doing some of the most important thinking about this stuff. The book has a prologue by Don Kennedy, who writes that "though it…
cmooney | August 23, 2006My latest Seed column is up, and it dovetails so nicely with some of the themes I've been trying to enunciate in relation to the paperback release that I'd like to call it to your attention. Entitled "Thank You for Polluting," it's a piece about my battles with Congressman Jim Gibbons of Nevada, and it narrates how my critiques of a contrarian report on mercury pollution put out by Gibbons have actually ended up being picked up by the local media now that Gibbons is running for governor in his state--thereby forcing Gibbons to respond, generating greater controversy, and so forth. Look at how…
cmooney | August 20, 2006I just downloaded and read a small part of Judge Gladys Kessler's gargantuan 1742 page opinion in the Justice Department's tobacco industry racketeering case (PDF). The table of contents alone is 29 pages long! I must say, this looks like the best and most official documentation we will ever get of just how extensively the tobacco companies conspired to deceive the public about the health risks of their products. As far as courts unmasking attacks on science, it's right up there with Judge Jones' opinion in the Dover evolution trial.
Few if any of us will have time to read Kessler's whole…
cmooney | August 19, 2006In anticipation of the paperback release, the book website is being substantially upgraded. It announces many new tour dates, most recently including this one in Ohio. It now shows the actual paperback cover image (displayed in high resolution below after the jump). Furthermore, there's a new book description; and most importantly for our current purposes, a new introduction from the author (moi).
More features to the site will appear in the coming days. But right now, with nine days til pub, I'd like to highlight some central themes enunciated in the new website intro (the same themes are…
cmooney | August 18, 2006Well, there are ten days until the official publication date of the paperback Republican War on Science (August 28). And I have decided, based on the suggestion of an e-correspondent, to do a countdown here on the blog, adding a relevant new angle, analysis, or update every day. So here's the first:
I am doing a book tour over the course of September, and having just booked the travel, I can now calculate that it will require flying some 11,000 miles. Back in July when I flew over to London, folks really kicked my butt about the size of my carbon footprint, and rightly so. And so I decided…
cmooney | August 3, 2006
I just got my author's advance copy of the paperback The Republican War on Science. Man, this is so exciting. It looks great, and I think the new preface, updates, and revisions make for great additions--the preface especially really lays out the big picture in a much better way than I think the book did in its original hardcover version. I think it's essential to the full package.
Anyway, once again, you can preorder the paperback here. It should be officially "out" within a few weeks. I'll have a lot more to say about it as the date nears....
cmooney | July 30, 2006Check it out here. In my view, the piece is kinda all over the place. It argues that left and right are both bad when it comes to the treatment of science, but really the only case study adduced on the leftwing side of things is the attack on E.O. Wilson and sociobiology from way back when. I too agree that the left is not immune from criticism when it comes to its treatment of science; I merely ask that we keep a sense of perspective when weighing the sins from the different sides on this subject.
I appreciate that the author of the National Journal piece, Paul Starobin, cited my work.…
cmooney | July 25, 2006What a great quote from Morgan Spurlock in the latest issue of Time magazine. In a sense, with these words Spurlock articulates a key aspect of what I've found Seed magazine to be all about. I encourage you to check out the whole interview with Spurlock, and then watch season two of 30 Days, starting this week....
cmooney | July 24, 2006...three copies of the hardcover edition, anyway. I'm not sure when new hardcovers will be in stock. But in any case, this is as good a time as any to make another mention that the new paperback version, due out in roughly a month, is available now for preorder. It's an updated version of the hardcover, with a lengthy new introduction, edits, and so on.
So if you are planning to get a paperback, let me remind you again that now's the time to put in a preorder. Last time around, we managed to get the hardcover edition on a top 25 list at Amazon.com for preorders. I sure would like to see that…
cmooney | June 16, 2006Well folks: The debate on NPR's "Science Friday" is today, starting around 3:15 ET. There will be a fair number of listener calls, I believe; remember, you can call in at 1-800-989-8255. To find a way to listen live, click here.
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to prepare, and want to thank you all very much for your help on the subjects of evolution and climate change. To further my prep, I also went to see Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth last night; I thought it was very powerful. True, there were a couple spots where Gore's presentation could have misled viewers into incorrectly thinking that…
cmooney | June 12, 2006I'm pleased to see that the Las Vegas Sun covered the remarks made by myself and General Clark at the Yearly Kos science panel last Friday. I made sure to give my comments a local hook, and the paper picked up on that. Get ready for a long excerpt:
Mooney specifically criticized President Bush and made passing reference to Nevada congressman Jim Gibbons, a Republican candidate for governor. Mooney noted that Gibbons wrote and released a report last year, with Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., titled "Mercury in Perspective: Fact and Fiction About the Debate Over Mercury."
Billed as an exhaustive…