Politics
pharyngula | September 6, 2006While browsing through the UW Alumni magazine (yes, I read it; no, please don't ask me for money, I'm poor), I ran across a nice quote I thought I'd share:
Imagine it like the software in a computer that is five years old…these [stem] cell lines are inherently inferior. We're forced to focus our efforts on lines that are inherently less innovative.
Dr Anthony Blau, commenting on Bush's veto of a bill that would open up new cell lines for research
stcynic | September 6, 2006I was watching TV last night and a campaign commercial came on for Debbie Stabenow, the Democratic incumbent US Senator from Michigan. Like most campaign commercials, it was just a medley of scenes of her shaking hands and talking to people with the appropriate look of concern on her face. And the voiceover features her talking about how great Michigan's workers are and how they can compete with anyone. It ends with her saying, "This isn't about Republicans and Democrats, it's about our Michigan way of life, and I'm fighting for it every day." You can actually see the commercial on the front…
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2006And the state of nature, nasty, poor, brutish, and short, or so said Thomas Hobbes. But it seems Hobbes was wrong. Humans have always lived in society. That doesn't mean they lived in cities or nations, of course, but they've always been social animals, just like our sister species the chimps and the gorilla. But what sort of society did they live in?
Thom Hartmann thinks we were democrats in a state of nature. In an op-ed arguing (rightly, I think) that the decline of the middle class is leading to oligarchy, a "feudal aristocracy" (backed up by a recent survey of American mean incomes,…
oracknows | September 5, 2006Sigh.
You know, the President of Iran, Ahmoud Ahmadinejad, is, sadly, not unlike the Energizer Bunny. He keeps going and going and going and going. This time around, he just can't resist putting his foot in it again. Hot on the heels of hosting a Holocaust Cartoon Exhibit as his response to the Danish cartoon incident designed to "test the tolerance" of the West for offensive "humor" directed at Jews and the Holocaust. Never mind that, unlike Denmark, this "Holocaust cartoon exhibit" is being held in a nation with in essence no freedom of speech, where the government controls the media and…
jlynch | September 5, 2006Then
"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."- G.W. Bush, 3/13/02
Subtext ... we're too busy figuring out excuses for invading Iraq
Now
"History teaches that underestimating the words of evil and ambitious men is a terrible mistake. Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?" - G.W. Bush, 9/5/06
Amazing the difference being close to mid-term elections makes. As John…
jlynch | September 5, 2006It is to our deep national shame--and ultimately it will be to the President's deep personal regret--that he has followed his Secretary of Defense down the path of trying to tie those loyal Americans who disagree with his policies--or even question their effectiveness or execution--to the Nazis of the past, and the al Qaeda of the present.
Today, in the same subtle terms in which Mr. Bush and his colleagues muddied the clear line separating Iraq and 9/11 -- without ever actually saying so--the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, "a media campaign to…
pharyngula | September 5, 2006One after the other, I got two requests to promote some worthy causes which need letter-writers to help out. Here they are:
Save wilderness:
Over the strong objections of Native people, wildlife biologists, sportsmen's groups, and the general public, the Bureau of Land Management remains intent on leasing one of the most remarkable wetlands complexes on the planet. The place is the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the largest single block of wild public land left in the United States.
Save minds:
On Monday, the Ohio Board of Education will hold…
pharyngula | September 5, 2006Since we biologists were just bizarrely accused of being like a bunch of animal rights activists, I am surprised that when I read that PETA opposes experiments on gay sheep, I find myself opposing PETA and thinking that the experiments sound cool and interesting and informative. I'm also a little disgusted with the way PETA finds it necessary to lie in their criticisms.
The Next Hurrah has a thorough take-down of PETA. Particularly amusing is the statistic that the research involves 18 sheep a year, while meat-packers butcher 4 million per year…so which one do the kooky extremists of the…
tsmith | September 5, 2006You may remember earlier in the summer that several ScienceBloggers mentioned a cartoon contest called Science Idol, looking for submissions of political cartoons with a science theme. Well, the finalists have been posted, and you can vote for your favorite.
tsmith | September 5, 2006Eleven of the worst places in the country to vote, and Ohio gets three spots. Ah, nostalgia for home...
j7uy5 | September 4, 2006You might have seen the article, The Terrorism Index, in Foreign Policy magazine a while ago. If you did, here is a reminder of the high points. If you did not, go read the whole thing.
clock | September 4, 2006They are certainly familiar to anyone who has ever had a Creationist troll, a global-warming denialist troll, AIDS-HIV connection denialist troll, AR troll, DDT-is-banned troll, etc....
(Hat-tip: Bitch PhD)
oracknows | September 4, 2006The latest RINO Sightings have been posted at Right Thoughts for your reading edification.
drorzel | September 4, 2006It's Labor Day today in the US, which means it's a day off from work for everybody who isn't in academia. Our fall classes start Wednesday, though, so I'm going to spend Labor Day, well, laboring. This is nothing new, but at least it's better than my first year, when classes started on Labor Day.
Anyway, I know that in the current Gilded Age, we're supposed to regard labor unions as just this side of Pure Evil for their interference with the joys of unfettered capitalism, but if you're lucky enough to have the day off, take a few minutes to reflect on the good things organized labor has given…
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2006The New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Ronald Dworkin entitled "3 Questions for America". The three questions are:
1. Should alternatives to evolution be taught in schools? Dworkin says yes, but only if they are actually scientific. Alternatives derived from and dictated by religious beliefs don't count. He recommends that we (that is, the USAians, but it applies in broader international contexts) need a Contemporary Politics course that discusses how these sorts of issues arise and for what political purposes.
2. The Pledge of Allegiance. Though this is not cast as a…
oracknows | September 3, 2006John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has posted an excellent brief summary of the history of the eugenics movement. In the process, he makes a strong argument that it was genetics far more than evolution that influenced eugenecists and that the entire eugenics movement was based on the concept that evolution was being thwarted by human society and thus needed "help" (a process that is far more like "intelligent design" than natural evolution). Moreover, he gives examples of scientists who pointed out that, for example, weeding out eugenics through selective sterilization was totally…
pharyngula | September 3, 2006John Wilkins is fighting the philosophical and historical fight against the Darwin's Deadly Legacy nonsense with an excellent summary of the course of the eugenics movement. I especially liked this quote from Dobzhansky:
The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating recessive genes that produce pathological effects when homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of nature fare in this respect no better than man does with all the artificiality of his surroundings, and yet life has…
oracknows | September 2, 2006While I was catching up on some of the stuff that's happened while I was away, I noticed PZ Myer's article about animal rights terrorists who intimidated a neurobiologist at UCLA named Dario Ringach to the point where he decided to stop doing research on primates. Then I saw that Jake and Bora also weighed in on the issue (although for the life of me I can't figure out how on earth Bora came to the conclusion that animal rights is a conservative philosophy at its core--his explanation is tortured, at best). Here's what happened, as reported in Inside Higher Ed:
Ringach's name and home phone…
stcynic | September 2, 2006Including the son of Ted Stevens. They're apparently looking at corruption charges involving an oil services company:
The offices of at least six Alaska legislators, including the son of Sen. Ted Stevens, were raided by federal agents searching for possible ties between the lawmakers and a large oil field services company, officials and aides said.
Tam Cook, the Legislature's top attorney, said the company named in the search warrant was VECO Corp., an Anchorage-based oil field services and construction company whose executives are major contributors to political campaigns.
That put a smile…
clock | September 1, 2006There has been a lot of commentary online about the Inside Higher Ed article about an UCLA primate researcher who quit his research due to being terrorised by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and the follow up article about the steps UCLA and other Universities are taking to ensure the safety of their faculty and staff:
The announcement by Abrams follows an upswing in activities in which UCLA professors who work with animals have been targets. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, a researcher who does…