Congratulations, Australia!

You’ve managed to remove your li’l Bush clone.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq.

Labor Party head Kevin Rudd’s pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush’s staunchest allies.

All the articles I read on the Australian elections used the lovely phrase “humiliating defeat.” I like it. Now we just need to humiliate our wanking Republican politicians here at home.

The logic that makes him confident history will remember him as the man who brought peace to Iraq

Since George W. Bush no longer owns a baseball team, he can take credit for whoever wins the World Series this year. After all, somebody will win despite his absence.

George W. Bush is a friend of the oil industry who has shown little interest in cultivating research into alternative energy or conservation—therefore, when (or if) someone develops a strategy for providing energy as the oil supply declines, George’s heroic boosterism for oil will be remembered as the stimulus for the future.

The Bush administration dallied when Katrina struck, but New Orleans is still there, and George W. Bush now deserves full credit for the brave efforts of Louisiana’s citizens to rebuild.

This Orwellian “logic”, that individuals who neglect or oppose an endeavor are to later be rewarded with accolades for their hindrance, comes to mind on reading this ridiculously effulgent piece praising Bush for the recent stem cell breakthrough.

I believe that many of these exciting “alternative” methods would not have been achieved but for President Bush’s stalwart stand promoting ethical stem-cell research. Indeed, had the president followed the crowd instead of leading it, most research efforts would have been devoted to trying to perfect ESCR and human-cloning research — which, despite copious funding, have not worked out yet as scientists originally hoped.

So thank you for your courageous leadership, Mr. President. Because of your willingness to absorb the brickbats of the Science Establishment, the Media Elite, and weak-kneed Republican and Democratic politicians alike — we now have the very real potential of developing thriving and robust stem-cell medicine and scientific research sectors that will bridge, rather than exacerbate, our moral differences over the importance and meaning of human life.

This is insane. The work that led to understanding the way to switch somatic cells into pluripotency required work on embryonic stem cells—the research Bush opposed. That scientists found ways to work around the Bush restrictions does not rebound to the credit of the man who threw up obstacles. This is also not a medical breakthrough at all: it opens the doors for basic research into how cells develop and differentiate (which may, of course, lead to medical advances), but to claim this develops “stem-cell medicine” is exactly wrong.

Reading that over-the-top praise for the man who hindered this progress reminded me so much of Powerline that I suspected John Hindrocket of authoring it…but no, it was my other bête noir, the Discovery Institute and Wesley J. Smith. I should have known. That’s one right wing think tank that has really mastered the art of double-speak.

Stem cell breakthrough

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

A recent discovery in stem cell research is no minor event: researchers have figured out how to reprogram adult cells into a state that is nearly indistinguishable from that of embryonic, pluripotent stem cells. This is huge news that promises to accelerate the pace of research in the field.

The problem has always been that cells exist in distinct states. A skin cell, for instance, has one set of genes essential for its specific function activated, and other sets of genes turned off; an egg cell has different patterns of gene activation and inactivation. Just taking the DNA from a skin cell and inserting it into the egg cell isn’t necessarily going to create a functional egg cell, because genes essential for egg cells may be switched off in the skin cell DNA, and we don’t know how to specifically switch them on. The process of somatic cell nuclear transfer has been hit or miss for that reason, with very high failure rates—scientists are basically trying to make the right configuration of genes switch on by giving the nucleus a good hard kick, and hoping that something in the cells will reconfigure the pattern of gene activation into something appropriate.

What the discovery by Takahashi et al. accomplishes is to reveal how to specifically switch on the right pattern of genes for a pluripotent stem cell. They have discovered the reset button for mammalian cells: a simple trigger that puts the cells in the right state to become anything else.

[Read more…]

Our local newspaper embarrassment

My fellow Minnesotans know what I mean when I groan over our local conservative columnist at the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten. Her latest column is a tirade against the horrible culture of victimhood in our universities, citing a recent incident in which a student newspaper editor decided to decorate the office with a handmade noose to motivate his black co-workers. Kersten thinks this is just awful. Not the insensitivity of the editor, of course — being ignorant of history is par for the course for Republicans, as is race-baiting. No, she’s appalled that he was fired.

The column is a hoot. She even obliviously quotes the guy making a “but my best friend is black!” excuse.

This is spam, from an unexpected source

I just got this fairly typical piece of election email.

A MESSAGE FROM JOHN EDWARDS ’08

Dear PZ,

John Edwards needs your help during the next Iowa statewide canvass,
Saturday, November 17 and Sunday, November 18.

It goes on, but never mind. The annoying thing is the source: it’s from Ted, at the domain for my university and my lab. It has a spoofed source address! This is the kind of obnoxious crap I get from the peddlers of gadgets and drugs for my penis … it’s not the behavior I expect from someone who wants me to vote for him.

Just a word of warning to any candidates out there: it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you start spamming I will put your name in my mail filters and I will ignore you…in the voting booth, as well.

And no, I won’t be canvassing for John Edwards.

Can we please form a Rationalist Party now?

I was shocked to open Current Biology and find the leading news article was titled “Call to atheists,” and it was actually a pleasantly neutral article that simply reported on Dawkins’ efforts to organize atheists and promote a positive view of secularism — I guess I’m simply so used to so many media references that get immediately defensive of religion and treat atheism as something scary. It’s very nice.

Right after reading it, however, I got a note from Melissa. If you want to see something that should choke a cockroach, watch the parade of Democrats getting in line to stand up and defend the Bible. It’s nauseating. I want to see my party standing up to defend the constitution and personal liberties, not antique superstitions…but there they are, prioritizing vocal support for a wretched old book of lies while allowing the erosion of democratic principles to continue, and in fact by their praise of state-endorsed Christianity, promoting the demolition of the separation of church and state.

What does that have to do with Dawkins? He makes this comment in the interview:

He has been encouraged in the early days for the race for president by the apparent distancing of Republican candidates from the Christian right. But he found “very depressing” the profession of faith from the Democratic candidates. “I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.”

I think Dawkins is wrong, unfortunately. Watch that video; I don’t think they’re pretending, I think they actually are pious twits.

I hate to admit it, but even I would vote for a Republican if he were openly atheist. I am thoroughly fed up with the sad-sack sanctimony from our representatives, and I don’t care whether it’s feigned or sincere — it’s corrosive garbage.

Williams, N (2007) Call to atheists. Current Biology 17(21):R899-R900.

A presidential debate on science…it’ll never happen

Matthew Chapman’s suggestion that the presidential candidates have a debate on science is naive, idealistic, and a step in the right direction. It will never happen, because the issues of science we could talk about are not up for debate, and I don’t think any of the candidates in any party are competent to discuss them, and they know it. They won’t step into a venue where their grade-school level understanding of science will face serious challenge, or where their embarrassing misunderstandings will be publicly aired.

Now what would be feasible, I think, would be a debate on science policy. What are they going to do about getting objective science information to congress? What do they propose to do to improve science, engineering and technology education in the schools, and specifically, what are they going to do to address major failures of the school to instruct their graduates in basic concepts like evolution? What are they going to do about an alternative energy policy, and global climate change? A lot of these questions would get down to the candidate’s understanding, but I’m more concerned that my candidate has a plan to improve the public understanding of science, rather than that they know it themselves.

At the very least, Chapman suggests that the debate be led by a panel of qualified experts. This is the best idea of all. We would improve the discourse and the depth of content of these presidential sessions immeasurably by the simple step of firing the incompetent jerks who are always tapped to run these circuses: give Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer, and Random News Head #63 the axe (metaphorically would be good enough, but literally has some virtues, too). Why aren’t the candidates standing up before panels of economists, foreign policy experts, scientists, etc., and getting good questions asked of them by competent people? It would be far more informative, and it would give us a better picture of how a prospective president would handle his own shortcomings.