Here’s the true, heroic history of America:

You know this is “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”, right? Now you must check out the true, heroic recounting of the horrors faced by one of Horowitz’s neo-con speakers at the deepest pit of hell Wellesley. The girls made mean faces at her. This is cause for great fear and concern on the right: it suggests that Hamas is offering eye-rolling classes to their terrorist curriculum, and the Horowitzians cannot survive that kind of mockery.

We really are living in Roy Zimmerman’s America. I don’t think I like it much, even if it is funny.

The chemists among the readers here have probably already all heard this, but there is a bit of a flap in the American Chemical Society over Open Access publishing. It seems some within the ACS have been protesting Open Access; unsurprisingly, it seems that many of them have connections to the scientific publishing industry. I was deeply amused by the fellow who scorned open access because is it is “socialized science,” as if government support of science were bad, and as if we weren’t all dependent on the largesse of state and federal government support. Oh, if only we could return to the days when all scientists were either wealthy men of leisure who could afford to be gentlemen scholars, or they were captains of industry using the fruits of their laboratories to immediately produce commerce-generating applications!

I’ve put the full text of letters I’ve received about this below the fold. Have fun plumbing the practical sociology of science!

[Read more…]

Perhaps Barack Obama really wants to make sure I won’t vote for him. At least, that’s how I’m interpreting his attempts to couple environmentalism and religion.

Meeting the threat of global climate change will take hard work and faith, Obama said.

“Not a blind faith, not a faith of mere words, not a faith that ignores science, but an active searching faith,” said Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ. “It’s a faith that does not look at the hardship and pain and suffering in the world and use it all as an excuse for inaction or cynicism, but one that accepts the fact that although we are not going to solve every problem here on earth, we can make a difference.”

I don’t even know what the hell he means. Meeting the threat of global climate change will take hard work, but faith? What does faith contribute to it? And then the rest is just noise. You don’t need a searching faith, since there’s nothing to search, and no criterion for deciding when you’ve found something — just make it all up. Tossing in irrelevant nonsense about using faith in an endeavor that requires real-world solutions is just an annoyance, and makes me suspect he’s going to waste a lot of effort if he gets into office. We do not need faith-based science.

Then there’s another issue: linking himself with evangelical Christianity means he’s automatically going to be allying himself with anti-gay bigotry. He has since rejected the position, but face it — he’s going to be hauling a lot of baggage along with him on this issue.

Here’s the only stance I’d like to see from any of the candidates: they can say they’re devout, that they believe in god and all that stuff, but that it’s a personal issue that they keep in the home and in their church, and off the campaign trail, and in particular, out of their political office. Can we please get at least one candidate stating that they are running for a secular political office and all that matters is their natural, material qualifications and plans? I can’t vote for a candidate who’s running on the platform that ghosts are on his side.

I’m a bit disappointed with Al Franken. Ben Stein has donated to the Franken campaign, and he has accepted the money — come on, Al, let’s see some principles. Stein is a dishonest fraud who is peddling Intelligent Design creationism in his upcoming movie, Expelled; he’s a former Nixon speechwriter, and he defends Nixon. I know they might be friends in their personal life, but this is politics — Franken should stand up for his liberal ideas and courteously refuse to take money from a stupid right-winger.

Besides supporting pseudoscience in the schools, here’s another reason to reject Stein. There’s a letter that’s been going around for some time, purportedly from Ben Stein. According to Snopes, only part of it is, so I’ll just tackle the part that we can assign to Stein’s feeble brain.

[Read more…]

I just got word that there will be a vigil outside Michele Bachmann‘s Woodbury office, tonight at 7, with students coming in by bus from SCSU. This is to protest her opposition to SCHIP and, I presume, her support for the war. You’ve still got time to join them!

Her office is at 6043 Hudson Rd, Suite 330,
Woodbury, MN 55125. Give her lots of grief.

Tara has a real horror story: a geneticist failed to follow procedure in mailing some samples, sharing some harmless commercial strains of some innocuous and common bacteria with an artist, the kind of thing that a bureaucrat would reasonably respond to with a hand-slap and insistence that the mistake not be repeated. Except that in this case the federal government has charged in under the pretext of anti-bioterrorism laws (thanks, Patriot Act) and…

Normally, this would be an issue handled between Ferrell (and his university) and ATCC; however, under the broad definitions of mail and wire fraud under the Patriot Act, the government stepped in and charged Kurtz and Ferrell with mail and wire fraud–felonies that, since they’re being charged under the Patriot Act, could carry a possible 20-year sentence.

The whole thing is a ham-handed mess, mismanaged by utterly clueless federal law enforcement agencies who basically freaked out over a vial of ordinary soil bacteria. Be careful not to sneeze anywhere near your income tax returns, or you could be guilty of biological warfare against the IRS.

Al Gore and the IPCC have won the 2007 Nobel Peace prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

Now run for president, Al — we need someone with the respect of the international community to repair all that our current chief nitwit has broken.