Politics
clock | September 3, 2007Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And many bloggers' eyes and typing fingers bring a lot of sunlight to whatever anyone is trying hide. This makes bloggers dangerous to many entrenched and powerful interests.
Not that bloggers are Martians, recent arrivals on this planet, to be treated as a 'special interest' group. Bloggers are people. And the Web gives people the ability to say what they think, to report what they see, to fact-check the PR outfits, to use their own individual expertise to parse others' arguments and, yes, to point fingers at the guilty.
And in many countries around…
clock | September 3, 2007Drug rep creates stir with details on tricks of his trade
Drug reps are carefully trained to target a physician with tactics suitable to his or her personality, according to a recently published article co-authored by a former Eli Lilly and Co. detailer, Shahram Ahari, MPH. He says detailers come armed with an array of techniques aimed at changing the physician's prescribing behavior. Here are the tactics Ahari used with physicians, depending on their disposition.
The paper came out in April, but I have not noticed much reaction to it on medblogs. Will this new interview stir the pot now?
j7uy5 | September 3, 2007Usually the LA Times does not print things this awful.
Usually these things don't bother me so much. The
problem is not just that the author is wrong, or that he develops his
argument poorly -- although both are true. What bothers me is
the pointlessly malicious tone of the piece.
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-bawer2sep02,0,833953.story?coll=la-home-commentary">The
peace racket
A growing movement is pushing a worldview that ignores
history's lessons about strength and appeasement.
By Bruce Bawer
September 2, 2007
'If you want peace, prepare for…
grrlscientist | September 2, 2007tags: politics, blog carnivals
The September 2, 2007 edition of The Carnival of Political Punditry is now available. They included a contribution from me, so be sure to go there and check it out.
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is, and what it means for modern thinking, people would move away from attacking evolution in order to bolster their religious agendas.
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of…
clock | September 1, 2007Chaoslillith alerts:
Environmentalists Challenge Political Interference With 55 Endangered Species in 28 States, Seek to Restore 8.7 Million Acres of Protected Habitat Across the Country:
The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a formal notice of intent to sue the Department of the Interior for political interference with 55 endangered species in 28 states. The notice initiates the largest substantive legal action in the 34-year history of the Endangered Species Act.
At stake in the suit is the illegal removal of one animal from the endangered species list, the refusal to place three…
pharyngula | September 1, 2007Mooney says that because polls show that Americans are so blinded by religion that they would choose the words of a bloody-handed Middle Eastern sky god over the evidence of science, Dawkins and all us uncompromising atheists are wrong in our tactics. We are henceforth to heed the words of Nisbet and stop confronting people on their religious biases.
Huh?
But that's exactly the problem that we're addressing — that people will foolishly prefer "white-beard-in-the-sky-guy" over reality. And the message he takes home from this is that we're wrong? This is nuts. I read that poll and it says we…
jlynch | August 31, 2007Naomi Oreskes’ reply to Schulte got me thinking about the journal Energy & Environment, which appears to be the climate science equivalent of Rivista di Biologia (more here on that particular turkey). The journal was founded in 1990 and it offers a home for climate contrarians. According to this 2005 article, the journal is found in only 25 libraries worldwide and is unlisted in the Journal Citation Reports. Actually, I’ll take that back, it makes Rivista look like Nature.
Just as Rivista has an "interesting" editor in Guiseppe Sermonti, Energy & Environment has an unorthodox editor…
pharyngula | August 31, 2007Texans should be concerned about Texas H.B. No. 3678, an act "relating to voluntary student expression of religious viewpoints in public schools." It's authored by Charlie Howard, an overly cheerful and zealous member of the far religious right, and Warren Chisum, who will be known forever as the bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa, and it plays the pious fairmindedness card perfectly, while hiding the fact that it emerged from the sleeve of a pair of notorious liars for Christ. It is an underhanded and sneaky bill that, under the guise of promoting religious tolerance, actually has the purpose…
clock | August 31, 2007Naomi Oreskes, the author of the 2004 paper in Science about the scientific consensus on global warming, recently had her work attacked by regressive denialists (including on Senator I-hate-science-Inhofe's blog). Her full response is now available on Stranger Fruit. Go and read it. Now.
jlynch | August 31, 2007Many readers will no doubt know the 2004 paper in Science by historian of science Naomi Oreskes, a paper which discussed the consensus position regarding anthropogenic climate change. Predictably, the paper received much vitriol from the climate contrarians and denialists. Now, a medical research (Klaus-Martin Schulte, who appears to be a consultant in endocrine surgery) has claimed that Oreskes’ paper is not only outdated but also wrong. This claim has been extensively crowed over not only by Inhofe’s EPW Press Blog but by other Right wing sites and, indeed, our own beloved Uncommon Descent…
oracknows | August 31, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on October 19, 2005. Enjoy!
Somehow I didn't find out about this story about a football coach who resigned because the school district ordered him not to lead his team in prayer at dinners before each game until several days after it had happened. Consequently, I had been debating about whether or not to write about it, its being old news…
clock | August 30, 2007I went to my old blog to see if and what I blogged about during and after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast two years ago. I was astonished at just how much I posted! My blogging style is, like, so different today.
Of course, I made a big linkfest of the best that was written on blogs at the time, a useful reminder of some of the details if you are looking for inspiration for your own posts:
Best Katrina Blogging (so far)
But, check this torrent of posting! I can't believe I did it! Some are one-liners with links, some are long quotes from others, some are provocative and sharp-tongued thoughts…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2007And while we're perusing the Hardball transcript, here's Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee commenting on the causes of cancer. Huckabee, recall, was one of three Republican candidates to raise his hand to affirm his rejection of evolution. Take it away Guv'ner:
I believe God created these wonderful bodies of ours. And they are a masterpiece, but they were designed to be used in a way that were fueled properly and then were exercised properly. And, when we don't fuel them properly or exercise them properly, it is like having a car in which you pour mud into the tank and…
jstemwedel | August 29, 2007Even though I've been frightfully busy this week, I've been following the news about the launch of PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). I first saw it discussed in this post by Peter Suber, after which numerous ScienceBloggers piled on. If you have some time (and a cup of coffee), read Bora's comprehensive run-down of the blogosphere's reaction.
If you're in a hurry, here are three reasons I think PRISM's plans to "save" scientists and the public from Open Access are a bad idea.
While the PRISM website claims that a consequence of more Open Access…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2007Last night's edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews provided more than its fair share of strange moments. There was an amusing exchange between Christopher Hitchens and Catholic League president Bill Donohue regarding the current Time magazine cover story about Mother Teresa's religious doubts. But since I only have about ten minutes until my next class, I'll save that for another post.
Instead I thought I'd bring you the following moment, from the round table discussion at the end of the show. The topic was Idaho Senator Larry Craig. I trust you've heard about it? Matthews' guest was…
denialism | August 28, 2007Ok, I can't resist. What do people think of Larry Craig's arrest for ostensibly soliciting sex in a men's room? He's denying he did anything wrong.
Tuesday, in his first public statement on the arrest, the Idaho Republican said he did nothing "inappropriate."
"Let me be clear: I am not gay and never have been," said Craig, who has aligned himself with conservative groups who oppose gay rights.
However, I don't think he has plausible deniability here. From the police account:
A police officer who arrested him June 11 said Craig peered through a crack in a restroom stall door for two…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2007
Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph:
It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory of evolution, which nonetheless has enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in academia and the mainstream media. Perhaps one explanation for the throngs at the Creation Museum is that there are so few politically correct alternatives for people who question the evolutionary…
grrlscientist | August 28, 2007tags: Marc van Roosmalen, primatology,monkeys, Brazil, research, biopiracy
Dutch scientist Marc van Roosmalen (pictured) was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for trying to auction off the names of several monkey species and for keeping monkeys at his house without proper authorization.
Image: Eraldo Peres (AP).
In a surprising move, the Brazilian government recently sentenced world renowned primatologist, Dr. Marc van Roosmalen, to nearly 16 years in prison. Van Roosmalen, who discovered seven species of monkeys and a new primate genus in the Amazon rainforest, was formally…
clock | August 28, 2007Grist takes a look at all candidates from both parties and evaluates their stands on environmental issues, global warming and energy:
How Green Is Your Candidate?