Politics and Science
sheril | July 30, 2008Politics aside, I'm suspicious of McCain's latest ad. It's a false free association taking us from Britney to Paris to Obama and then somehow to offshore drilling... (the latter is a very bad idea by the way). I can't help but wonder how in only 32 seconds we're supposed to figure out the connection between 'more foreign oil' and Spears. What I am sure of is that any potential leader of this country ought to give the American public enough credit to see through this kind of overt manipulation in advertising.
sheril | July 29, 2008
The vice chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee has been indicted 'on charges he lied about receiving gifts worth more than $250,000 from an Alaska-based energy company on whose behalf he intervened in Washington.'
More at CNN...
sheril | July 29, 2008by Philip H.
[Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this blog piece are the opinions of the author alone. They do not represent the opinions, policies, procedures, or sentiments of any government agency for which he currently works or has worked in the past. If you disagree, please contact the author, not your Congressmen.]
Now, here's some interesting news about American voters. It turns out that they are not, generally, policy wonks. Nor are they truly ignorant about important issues. Rather, they vote based on a small handful of issues, often selecting party affiliation based on…
sheril | July 17, 2008The latest from JibJab reminds me of the night we covered Dylan in NYC at the 2007 Sb blogger meetup... Chris, I think it's time for an encore.
cmooney | June 18, 2008My latest Science Progress column is up: It presents some ideas for improving the relationship between science and Congress other than the most obvious one--restoring the Office of Technology Assessment. The piece starts out like this:
First the good news: The number of physicists in Congress just increased dramatically. And now the bad: That increase was from 2 to 3. Still, if you plot the data, you can see the trend: As physicist Rush Holt (D-NJ) recently joked to The New York Times, "By mid-century, I think, we'll have a functioning majority."
In all seriousness, though, to hear Holt and…
cmooney | June 11, 2008My latest Science Progress column is up: It's about two recent developments which basically prove that those of us who have been flagging abuses of climate science in the administration were right all along.
The developments are these: 1) NASA's own Inspector General now backs up charges that the agency's public affairs office tried to censor James Hansen; 2) The administration itself has finally coughed up an assessment of climate change impacts on the United States, one that clearly validates the position that it is happening, human caused, and going to hurt us. (Hey, it's only four years…
sheril | June 9, 2008On the political spectrum, regular readers know I'm pretty nonpartisan. Call me old fashioned, but the America I want to be a part of looks something like the vision of Marlo Thomas from 1974. I'll vote for a candidate supporting freedom, a green country, and a shining (healthy) sea. And most of all, I'd like a leader who fosters cooperation and encourages our children to grow up to fulfill their potential.
The Democratic party has chosen Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential election and I'd like to welcome him to North Carolina this morning as he kicks off a two-week tour around the…
sheril | June 9, 2008Neil deGrasse Tyson is among the best science communicators of our time. I expect he wouldn't remember, but years ago when I was an undergrad fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, he encouraged me to pursue astrobiology. Eight years later, I cannot visit the Rose Center without wondering what I'd be up to today had I gone in that direction...
Needless to say, when Neil pens a NYTimes Op-Ed, I take notice. Now regardless of whether you agree with the methodology, he poses some thought-provoking questions:
If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral…
sheril | May 29, 2008From the Washington Post:
NEW YORK, May 28 -- Some of the nation's leading scientists, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's top science adviser, today sharply criticized the diminished role of science in the United States and the shortage of federal funding for research, even as science becomes increasingly important to combating problems such as climate change and the global food shortage.
Sounds familiar...ScienceDebate2008 anyone?
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg opened the city's science summit yesterday, calling science "just as exciting, just as cool, just as cutting-edge"…
cmooney | May 27, 2008Perhaps some of you already have heard of this book by David Michaels, entitled Doubt is Our Product--which is basically the most comprehensive documentation yet of the war on science being conducted by private industry. But nevertheless, I want to emphasize again that you need to check it out if you haven't already. See my review here, Science Progress's interview with Michaels here, and, if you're in D.C., a Center for American Progress event where he's speaking tomorrow that you should attend.
Basically, as the author of The Republican War on Science, even I found outrageous stories in…
cmooney | May 14, 2008Okay, so....I got sick of this new wave of conservative science punditry, which dismisses the "war on science" argument without even bothering to show it's wrong, and then goes on to claim that we liberals are "new eugenicists" and that our embrace of science is going to lead us off a political cliff. The result is my latest Science Progress column, readable here. It starts out like this:
I hate to confess it, but lately I've been feeling a bit wistful for the arguments of conservative science pundit Tom Bethell, author of the 2005 polemic The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science. Granted…
sheril | May 12, 2008Democrats, Republicans agree on need, disagree on issues; health care tops list
WASHINGTON--May 12, 2008-- A new poll shows that 85% of U.S. adults agree that the presidential candidates should participate in a debate on how science can be used to tackle America's major challenges. The poll found no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this question. A majority (84%) also agree that scientific innovations are improving our standard of living.
Among the most serious long-term issues facing the country, 76% rate health care the most serious, followed by alternative energy sources (…
cmooney | May 7, 2008I can't tell you how many people this morning have emailed me this Michael Gerson op-ed from the Washington Post, which debunks the "Republican war on science" thesis. They all want me to debunk the debunker in this instance. But why?
Gerson doesn't accurately represent my argument in the first place. He's off down the eugenics trail, talking about values, blah blah blah. We "war on science" folks all know these distinctions--that the facts of science don't prescribe moral positions, that science doesn't dictate policy, etc--but they're dealt with long before we actually make our "war on…
cmooney | April 30, 2008In my latest Science Progress column, I describe the utter meltdown at the Environmental Protection Agency, which involves not only mistreatment of agency scientists but the blatant failure to follow the law. Things probably haven't been this bad at the agency since the days of Ann Gorsuch Burford, if anyone remembers her. And that's saying something.
You can read the piece here.
sheril | April 18, 2008The Wall Street Journal has an article by David Baltimore and Ahmen Zewail about the Science Debate that didn't happen today at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia:
All three candidates declined. Apparently the top contenders for our nation's highest elective office have better things to do than explain to the public their views on securing America's future.
The piece lays out what we--America--must do to re-energize our commitment to being the world's leader in science and technology:
We need a president who moves science back into the White House. Today we do not have a presidential…
cmooney | April 16, 2008You've already read our policy forum in Science--but in my latest column for Science Progress, I go farther in drawing lessons from the ScienceDebate2008 experience thus far. They are:
1. Ignore the Naysayers
2. Whatever Happens in 2008, We Can Build on the Experience in 2012
3. There is No Excuse for Science To Run and Hide Again From Politics
4. Think Outside the Box, and Never Give Up
Read here for details....
P.S.: The massive and influential World Wildlife Federation has just endorsed ScienceDebate2008...
cmooney | April 10, 2008So this is the first bit of news that we've been promising....
In the latest issue of Science, we--the ScienceDebate2008 crew--have a policy forum article that lays out how this all got started, its implications, and where it's going. Doing the article was Sheril's idea, and she did a great deal of the work, as a consequence of which she is now a twentysomething first author in Science...not bad, huh?
I am not sure yet whether we can link to the article in a non-password protected way. There will also soon be some press releases; we'll throw those links up shortly. But in the meantime, let me…
cmooney | April 5, 2008I've been writing more for D.C. based political magazines lately--going back to the roots, I guess--and I now have a piece in the latest issue of The New Republic about why scientists need to stop taking abuse and fight back. As described in this piece, "framing science"--or, as I put it, "investing... in mass-media initiatives to communicate"--is just one part of what must be done. There's a great deal more if we want science to be both tough but also smart:
So how can scientists strap on the gloves? They can start by investing, through their major organizations, in mass-media initiatives to…
sheril | April 4, 2008Chris and I, along with the rest of the ScienceDebate2008 steering committee, continue to work hard behind the scenes to push for candidates to talk about where they stand on issues related to science and technology. Here's the latest, from Alan Boyle with MSNBC:
If the candidates pass up the Pennsylvania opening, Science Debate 2008 will shift its focus to Oregon. Portland State University is being lined up as the proposed venue. Otto said the media partners in the effort would be "Nova," the venerable public-TV science program; and "Now," a more recent public-affairs series on PBS. A…