May I direct your attention this way? If you really want to make a case that GW Bush has been hurting American science, look where it really counts: follow the money. The Scientific Activist has the numbers, and it’s rather dramatic how research funding has dwindled over the years.
There was some kind of anniversary yesterday, to which I did not and will not refer—I think the tragedy of that day has been overwhelmed and lost by the ongoing catastrophe of the criminal response by our government, and while a single day is trivial to memorialize, five years of disgrace is surprisingly easy for many to gloss over. About the only appropriate response I’ve seen is Neddie Jingo’s, which points out the discordancy of the pattern we’re making.
Move on. Look at what we’re doing now, at the waste and foolishness and cacaphony and corruption and outright evil we’re perpetrating in the name of our affronted national honor—honor that’s little more than a tattered ragmop anymore, that we slosh around in the blood and pain of innocents, that we use to smear over the words of the law.
Our memorial isn’t tall and shining. It’s a dark, slimy pit into which we’ve thrown our sense and self-respect.
This is much happier news. Our county Democratic-Farmer-Labor party is having a fundraiser on 5 October, and we have a big-name guest to draw in donors…
Minnesotans are going to be a little less above average in October, when a gaggle of evil morons hit the state: James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer are having a rally in St Paul to “motivate pro-family conservative Christians.” It may also help motivate us pro-family liberal atheists.
Andy wonders which Minnesota politicians will show up for these hucksters for fascism: would Michele Bachmann be a safe bet? Mike Hatch better not; I’ve seen a few of his ads, and his gun-totin’ bird-killin’ pseudo-populism is almostas annoying as Mark Kennedy’s badly acted family dramas that play up his ‘credentials’ as a CPA—if Hatch sucks up to Dobson, he’ll lose my vote. I will rip his sign out of my yard.
The Secular Coalition for America has put together a Secular Scorecard for our representatives in both houses of congress, evaluating them for how they voted on issues of importance (separation of church and state, science, funding religious organizations, that sort of thing) in the past year. It’s interesting in a sad way in how it’s split along party lines: the lesson is that the godless should never, ever vote Republican, but that Democrats are only mostly safe. There are a few screwballs like Salazar and Nelson of Nebraska that throw off the general rule that you can divide them neatly by party, but generally you see disparities like this, for Minnesota.
| MINNESOTA | Party | RC130 | RC131 | RC132 | RC133 | RC1 | RC2 | RC158 | RC159 | RC163 | RC206 | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Coleman, N |
R | – | – | – | – | – | – | – | – | – | – | 0 |
|
Dayton, M |
D | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | 100 |
Even if Democrats aren’t godless themselves, they’re mostly on our side on the issues that count.
Sadly, I suspect that rather than being proud of their voting record, this is one endorsement they’ll struggle to hide.
…but next time you get on a plane, you are allowed to bring along “personal lubricants”. Yes, what it sounds like.
National security will not be allowed to deter new recruits to the Mile-High Club.
While 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
One after the other, I got two requests to promote some worthy causes which need letter-writers to help out. Here they are:
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.
On Monday, the Ohio Board of Education will hold its first fall meeting. Creationists on the board are hoping to introduce a Controversial Issues Template, which would not only allow for the teaching of intelligent design in science classrooms, but demand that teachers question global warming and highlight the religious right’s opposition to stem cell research.
Don’t just sit there! Do something!
Since 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 animal rights movement go after? There is an entirely appropriate quote from Mark Twain that applies here: “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” Research that studies cute little lambs and can be tied to homosexual shibboleths of both the right and the left sounds like the perfect scapegoat to lead more people to contribute to their cause; damning lamb chops and mutton just doesn’t push the right buttons.
John 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 not come to an end on this planet. The eschatological cries proclaiming the failure of natural selection to operate in human populations have more to do with political beliefs than with scientific findings.
If you don’t know who Theodosius Dobzhansky was, he was one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and was far, far more influential on evolutionary thinking than either Haeckel or Hitler. Scientific leaders were calling this stuff nonsense before Hitler tried to invoke his Final Solution.
