Politics
pharyngula | November 26, 2008You seem to be going down a similar path — expertise is downplayed, any fool can do the job of government, irrationality is promoted to equal footing with reason. It's worrisome. Didn't your mother ever ask you whether you'd follow if your friends jumped off a cliff? Well, we're clinging desperately to the edge of that cliff, and you seem awfully anxious to join us.
Take the case of Gary Goodyear. He's a chiropractor and a certified acupuncturist. He's a quack, in other words. And you've gone and appointed him to be your science and technology minister! Don't you have any people up there who…
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
evolvingthoughts | November 25, 2008
GetUp! is an excellent organisation that has been attacking the draconian laws of the "war" on terror, antigay laws, and so on. They now have a petition against ISP filtering. Go for it...
Hat tip Samuel Douglas
gregladen | November 25, 2008With 80.6 percent of the vote recounted, the known difference between Coleman and Franken has for the first time grown greater than the audited and adjusted original count differenct of 215. The difference is now, by my rekoning, a whopping 238. This, by Norm Coleman's standards, is a virtual landslide!!!
But that number is fairly small in comparison to the 3594 votes that are currently contested by both camps, and the thousand or so potentially contested absentee ballots.
It is still the case that anything could happen.
illconsidered | November 25, 2008Okay, so this clip is a bit long (~10 minutes) and it is mostly Fox Noise, but it is really fascinating to watch this one guy, Peter Schiff, being dead on in his economic predictions and advice over and over and over again, and even more interesting to watch the the boobleheads laugh at him and wisely wag their fingers.
They even talk about what a bargain buy and how solid Meryl Lynch is, about one year ago!
But like New Orleans and Katrina, "no one" saw this mess coming....
oracknows | November 25, 2008Detroit's my hometown. I was born in the city, spent the first ten years of my life within the city limits, at least until my parents moved to the suburbs. Given that, I've been watching events unfold with regard to the impending bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler (and, less likely but still possible, Ford) with increasing dismay. The economic devastation that would be visited upon Detroit were even one, much less all three, of the Big Three to fall would be beyond imagining. On the one hand, my disgust at the mismanagement at the top that wants to see the heads of the Big Three executives on a…
clock | November 25, 2008Change.org/ideas (not the official Change.gov) is a place where people can post ideas for the Obama administration and readers can, Digg-like, vote the ideas up and down. This is how it works:
What is Ideas for Change in America?
Ideas for Change in America is a citizen-driven project that aims to identify and create momentum around the best ideas for how the Obama Administration and 111th Congress can turn the broad call for "change" across the country into specific policies.
The project is nonpartisan, and invites all political points of view. It is not connected to the Obama campaign or…
gregladen | November 25, 2008This is a MUST SEE video.
It starts with Arthur Laffer, the Regeanomic Yahoo looking like a moron. Then we move on to some other guys who look like utter fools ... Then, Ben Stein totally sticks his foot in it.
Ben Stein's Famous Last Words, one year ago: "Stocks will be a lot higher in one year than they are now." He especially recommended that you invent in financial companies leke Merrill Lynch.
hat tip: Joe
illconsidered | November 25, 2008So it took me a long time to finally watch the last segment, but I did find this documentary from PBS to be very engaging and very informative.
Maybe not so encouraging though...
FWIW, In It for the Gold agrees you should go watch it.
The synopsis is here:
Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, fires, floods and droughts. On the eve of a historic election, award-winning producer and correspondent Martin Smith investigates how the world's largest corporations and governments are responding to Earth's looming environmental disaster.
gregladen | November 25, 2008The numbers are now settling in for the Coleman-Franken Senate race recount for Minnesota. With 74.2% of the votes counted, it is now possible to make a reasonably good prediction of the outcome of the current recount, not counting challenged ballots or other changes. The following graph shows the change across time for each day of the recount in the number of votes for each of these two candidates.
What you see here is a random scatter of points. The regression line has become meaningless. What this tells us is that the number of votes from the recount process will be about 45 less for…
oracknows | November 24, 2008
There are times when I see a quote by someone who is clearly extremely intelligent, but the quote is so utterly dumb, so devoid of any evidence that a single functioning neuron was behind it, that I can only shake my head in disbelief. Thanks to Dr. Val, Dr. Wes, and Walter Olson, I've found one more such quote. It's by a trial lawyer named Gerry Spence, who was awarded the CAOC Lifetime Achievement Award and bestowed this gem of brain-sucking stupidity on the assembled throng of lawyers attending the awards ceremony:
"We have to redefine who we are: We are the most important people in…
denialism | November 24, 2008One of the great things about science is that it is open, international, and celebrates the free exchange of ideas. However, during the last 8 years we've seen some odd things at the National Institutes of Health - the premier governmental scientific institution in the world. The paranoia of the current administration has filtered down and contaminated day to day operations of what is essentially an academic health sciences campus.
For example, for some bizarre reason they decided to erect a 10 foot high iron fence around the entire campus:
And at the entrances every car is searched, every…
illconsidered | November 24, 2008This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
In his June 23, 2008 testimony before the United States Congress, James Hansen called for the punishment of climate change skeptics for "crimes against humanity". This is a mockery of free speech, the antithesis of scientific investigation and a clear indication that global warming "science" is just another religious persecution like the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo.
Answer:
The accusation is simply false. James Hansen never…
oracknows | November 24, 2008One of the handful of key themes that run through this blog day in, day out, week in, week, out, and year in, year out is that science and the application of the scientific method represent the most successful strategy that humans have yet come up with to improve human health. A consequence of this theme, of course, is the consideration of unscientific "therapies," specifically those known as "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, sometimes, "integrative medicine" (IM). As chronicled here (and many other places), the vast majority of CAM therapies are based on prescientific…
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2008There are too many of us on Earth, our numbers keep growing, and we need to do something about it. Now, let's never lose sight of the reason we want to do something about it.
I'm not an ecological romantic. I don't think the planet would be better off without humanity. In fact, I think a planet without intelligent life is completely pointless from the perspective of an intelligent observer. Our goal should never be to rid the planet of humans: we need to make sure that humans can continue to live happily and safely on Earth and avoid dying catastrophically. We should save the spotted owl for…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2008
At last the MSM seem to be picking it up. A Perth newsmagazine has reported it unfavourably (although are Xenophon and Fielding really waiting for the results, given they are major motivators of the idea?), and an online opinion site suggests that the ultimate source of this stupidity is Clive Hamilton and the Australia Institute, a reactionary "think tank", back in 2003. And a NSW Parliamentary Library report has challenged Conroy's claim, previously challenged by Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, that this is something already in place in various other countries. The report is available online…
clock | November 23, 2008As you all know, I was not an Obamamaniac. I never thought that he was a super-Progressive. But I am liking what I am seeing right now.
A lot of Progressive bloggers are screaming bloody murder how Obama has abandoned them by not appointing the Progressives to various cabinet posts. Hello? He's Obama, not Kucinich. But anyway, what Progressives can he appoint - give me names?
What I remember most from reading The True Believer many years ago was not that revolutions are bad, but the take-home message that a revolution has different 'types' of people and that most people are not…
gregladen | November 23, 2008FiveThirtyEight is a pretty good web site dealing with polls and other election realted number crunching. They predicted the outcome of the race for president almost as accurately as I did, so I figure they're pretty good. And now, FiveThirtyEight has a reasonably good analysis suggesting that Franken is going to win the recount.
Here's the argument in a nutshell. Franken is going to win because of all the reasons we've been saying all along (see this and this). But in some precincts, the Republicans are challenging a LOT of votes that are likely to be called as Franken votes, so they are…
jlynch | November 23, 2008According to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute "Americans fail a basic test on their history and institutions" with an average score of 49% (college educators apparently score 55%, and office-holders 44%).
I scored 88% (29 out of 33)... I put that down to not being a product of the American school system :)
Some of the questions are a little right-leaning but have at it nonetheless.