Politics
drorzel | July 15, 2009I am a fan of the New York Giants.
I believe that they can win every game they play. I hope that they will win every game that they play. I get emotionally involved in their games to such a degree that my heart pounds and I get short of breath when they face a critical play in the fourth quarter. I yell at the tv, though I know that they can't hear me. When something goes wrong, I will punch things and curse. When they win, I will stay up late to watch highlights of a game I just watched.
I will re-arrange my schedule so as to be able to watch their games as they happen. If I can't manage…
drorzel | July 15, 2009I've sometimes seen it said that in order to have a productive discussion, people on both sides need to be willing to change their minds. I think that's probably slightly overdetermined-- you can find examples of cases in which neither side was going to change, but they managed to sustain a mutually beneficial dialogue all the same. The physics example that comes to mind is Bohr and Einstein, who spent decades arguing with each other over the philosophical basis of quantum theory, but were nonetheless good friends. They pushed each other, forcing each of them to refine their arguments and…
palmd | July 14, 2009I've got a lot of patients who are worried about health care reform. Most of it is expressed in right-wing radio talking points. They quite literally believe that they will no longer be able to choose their doctor, or that other doom and gloom events are imminent.
Have they no experience with government? Health care reform isn't going to happen quickly. When it does, it will likely have an American character. While socialized medicine works very well in some other countries, Americans just aren't into it, even if it were to work. Whatever I may think about it, it's a non-starter.…
drorzel | July 14, 2009I'm running way behind this morning for a variety of reasons, so I'm going to swipe another easy question and throw it back to the audience. this one's from Eric Lund, who asked:
If you could attend a dinner with any major political figure in the world, who would it be, and why?
The answer that makes this an easy question is "Barack Obama," who is currently the most major of world political figures, and comes off as almost too good to be true on tv. So I'd like to have dinner with him (after playing hoops for a while to work up an appetite), just to see if he's really that good.
But that's…
catdynamics | July 14, 2009Frabjous day.
Marchons, marchons!
A major financial institution announces, at last, it has become profitable again
This is rather good since Goldman Sachs allegedly had their proprietary high frequency trading code stolen.
This was very serious, since, according to the prosecutor, the code could enable unscrupulous people to unfairly manipulate the markets.
So we better make sure only Goldman Sachs has a copy of the code, since they wouldn't use their privileged positions as a Supplementary Liquidity Provider to do anything unfair in the markets.
This will also hopefully preclude any more…
pharyngula | July 14, 2009It's happening again. The Republicans are tilting at one of their favorite windmills, the mad scientists' dream of creating an unholy union between beast and human to produce a slave race of soulless monsters. They have introduced legislation to ban human-animal hybrids. And it's even bipartisan! They've got 19 Rethuglicans, like Sam Brownback, the ignoramus from Kansas:
What was once only science fiction is now becoming a reality, and we need to ensure that experimentation and subsequent ramifications do not outpace ethical discussion and societal decisions. History does not look kindly on…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2009In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I'd have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say -- so much that I'm breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I'm going to start here with a post about the public's end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I'll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I'll take up the much discussed issue of the book's treatment of…
emjohnson | July 13, 2009Greenpeace banner deployed on Mt. Rushmore. Image: S.J. Carrera / Greenpeace
There have been few more passionate and prescient figures in the history of science than the Russian naturalist and political radical Peter Kropotkin. Upon the confirmation of his geological research that demonstrated an ancient ice sheet had once extended across the Russian landscape, this evolutionary theorist and gentle anarchist reported in 1894 that "we must accustom ourselves to the idea that climate, like everything else on the earth, is a changeable element." In his many books and articles he regularly…
pharyngula | July 13, 2009Robert Wright has an article that you can stop reading as soon as you've seen the title: Why the "New Atheists" are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy.
Uh, we aren't.
Well, that one was easy.
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2009Writing at the Huffington Post, Robert Wright has a very bad post up about the New Atheists and foreign policy. Let's have a look"
It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?
No essay that starts like that is likely to have anything interesting or insightful to say. Atheists are overwhelmingly left-wing on…
pharyngula | July 13, 2009And it's a strange thing. It's a law that slaps anyone who offends "a substantial number of the adherents of a religion" with a €25,000 fine — which is equal to most of my yearly salary, and also means I'm one of the few people that one could make a good case for having committed blasphemy. I guess I won't be vacationing in Ireland any time soon.
Fortunately, some people are speaking out against the law, especially Atheist Ireland. Join in if you can, work to repeal this medieval nonsense.
grrlscientist | July 13, 2009tags: new rules, social commentary, humor, funny, Bill Maher, streaming video
In this video we learn, among other things, how to properly greet the first African-American POTUS and the identity of the REAL Islamic bomb [6:17]
sa smith | July 12, 2009Sally Kerns list of terrorists is getting long. Gays, evilutionists, and now, apparently, the ACLU:
In recent months, we have witnessed the reign of terror that the ACLU has exacted on Americans--aggressively working to strip away our religious freedom.
From the Pledge of Allegiance to the Ten Commandments, to prayer, the ACLU is the nation's foremost censor of religious freedom. They have effectively manipulated our very founding principles to repress religious liberty.
But it doesn't end there.
ACLU policies and goals are destroying America's fabric by pushing a radical agenda that…
revere | July 12, 2009Sunday and The Reveres have discharged their pastoral obligation to do a Freethinker Sermonette but there is other news on the religion front so we'll do a religious twofer. We've already discussed the nomination of Francis Collins to be NIH Director a couple of times (here, here and here; one post was linked in a Wall Street Journal online column by Steven Waldman, much to our surprise). Collins has religious beliefs that are quite different than most scientists because he has them at all. Just how different that is was revealed by a recent Pew Poll on public views of science, one section of…
grrlscientist | July 12, 2009tags: politics, religion, fundamentalism, physical violence, Bill Maher, streaming video
"'This is what I believe.' 'Yeah, you believe it, and I'm going to say why it's dumb.'" ~ Bill Maher [2:17]
jstemwedel | July 11, 2009
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
2009
In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy -- they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public's…
pharyngula | July 11, 2009I've been wrestling with how to respond to the imminent appointment of Francis Collins to the NIH, and it's tough. The problem is that he has excellent qualifications for the position of chief paper-pusher and technician-wrangler, but that his position on religion is just plain weird. He's a lovable dufus with great organizational skills whose grasp of the principles of science is superficial. But you can't just reject the guy because he's religious — we're in big trouble when we start using a religious litmus test for high political positions.
Oh, wait…we already do that. You know if someone…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2009tags: politics, American constitution, national security, terrorism, Bill Maher, streaming video
Should America curtail our constitutional rights under the guise of preventing terrorist attacks? NO NO NO. I just wanted to remind you of an important discussion that occurred nearly one year ago when American was trapped in the clutches of a lunatic moron who aspired to be "dictator" -- I wonder when Obama will finally stop all this invasive secret governmental spying on Americans? [3:41]
catdynamics | July 10, 2009"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..."
Well, Penn State has a budget.
Or, actually it has two budgets, with the possibility of creating a linearly interpolated hybrid budget between the two budgets.
It depends, you see, on whether the Governor Rendell's budget proposal passes, or that of…
emjohnson | July 10, 2009
The "Revelation" as described by St. John, though likely inspired through the
use of hallucinogens (see The Mystery of Manna).
The title for this post comes from a terrific book by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, but I think it's appropriate for a discussion on faith, feeling and reason. Francis Collins' nomination as Director of the National Institutes of Health has effectively gotten people talking about religion, science and what, if anything, each should have to do with the other. I recently brought up Sam Harris' critique of the editor's at Nature for their praise of Collins' book…