Josh Rosenau managed to get a few words with Barack Obama. He only had five minutes, but it’s interesting stuff—it’s too bad there wasn’t time for some questions about science or science policy!
Never mind me, I’m running around with classes and meetings today…here are a few quick links.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, what the hell is wrong with you?
I also refuse to pay any attention to the ghastly Huffington Post—it’s an example of the worst excesses of left-wing credulity, as represented by that fraud and quack, Deepak Chopra.
And it’s caught on tape. He was briefed the day before Katrina hit, heard Brown say this was “the big one”, that it was a bigger threat than Hurricane Andrew was, that there was great risk of loss of life, and that the topping of the levees was of great concern, and then would say with a straight face several days later that he didn’t think anyone anticipated the breech of the levees. He assured everyone that they were fully prepared to deal with the disaster.
Liar.
That’s our president: a useless, worthless lump who declaims platitudes in response to dire warnings, does nothing, and lies about it afterwards.
(via Neurotopia)
Powerline spouts the party line. It was overtopping, not breaching! It’s the usual fine-grained parsing to avoid the real issue: callous neglect and incompetence and CYA evasiveness by our duly elected Republican leadership. Soon they’ll be arguing that it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
Afghanistan doesn’t look pretty, and this cuts awful close to home for a teacher.
Teachers are the main targets. Some have been beheaded, others shot in front of their classes.
The years of fighting the Russians, the subsequent civil war and Taleban rule has produced a “lost generation” in education. International agencies and aid organisations speak of their difficulties in finding qualified people to run projects.
Now another lost generation is being created. The education system of modern Afghanistan is anathema to the Taleban and Islamist extremists because it is inclusive of girls, and offers secular subjects for study. They have declared that only madrassas (Muslim religious schools) meeting their approval will be allowed to operate.
Shooting kids on playgrounds? Butchering teachers for daring to instruct girls? When we fail to protect a whole generation like this, face it: you’ve lost the war.
Powerline. Round about these parts, that name is pretty much a synonym for stupid, and I see they’re doing a good job of maintaining their reputation. You’d think they’d learn that whenever they step into the domain of science, their level of ignorance is even more palpably apparent than usual.
Their latest embarrassment was prompted by an egregiously idiotic article from Michael Fumento, which catalogs an error-filled collection of so-called biases in science. The assrocket’s conclusion?
The moral of the story is that the leading scientific journals have been taken over by liberals who value politics over truth. So any time you see a news report on a “scientific” journal article that ostensibly has political implications, you should greet it with skepticism.
Wow. So any science article that discusses, say, evolution, climate, energy, reproduction, conservation, petroleum geology, glaciers, pesticides, extinction, wetlands, materials science, transportation, agriculture, neurobiology, HIV/AIDS (shall I go on?), demographics, deforestation, habitat loss, human genetics (I could keep this up all day), influenza, psychiatry, ethanol production, sexually transmitted disease, medicine in general, stem cells, weather, sex (OK, enough), all issues that have political implications, and which are therefore automatically suspect and tainted by <hiss>liberals? Jeez, John and Michael, why not just say, “Science is EVIL” and be done with it?When all the scientists are disagreeing with you, though, maybe instead you should wonder if you, people with no scientific competence at all, might just be wrong.
I’m pleased to say that we here at scienceblogs.com seem to be presenting a united front on this one, unsurprisingly. Chris Mooney also points out the absurdity of rejecting in its entirety the so-called “liberal” academy, and Tim Lambert rips into the bogus interpretations of the Fumento article. I’ll have to gnaw on a few scraps that are left over.
Here, for example, is an instance of Fumento illogic.
Consider a report
by three environmentalist authors back in 1988 in Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA), analyzing male-female birth ratios between
1970 and 1990. The authors found male births declining, and predictably
blamed man-made chemicals. Yet public data going
back to 1940 showed gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious
reason. Years that disproved their thesis were simply sliced out.
Look at that bit where he cites public data, with a link to a report by the CDC. He claims that the interpretation of the report is that “gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious reason”—I can only assume that he figures absolutely no one who reads his column will actually, like, look at his links. The report says nothing of the kind. Right at the top of the report is a graph that shows year-by-year variation, with trend lines on it to show that there is an overall decline in the number of males born. The report specifically discusses the reasons for it, explaining that it only looks at a few relationships and listing others. Here’s the CDC’s conclusion, plainly stated in the final paragraph.
Changes in the sex ratio at birth in the United States have been
attributed to many different factors. The factors examined in this report
include age of mother, birth order, and race and Hispanic origin of
mother. Other factors not examined here but cited by others in determining the sex of a child and, thus, the sex ratio at birth are weight
of mother, stress, age of father, family size, geographic and climatic
conditions, environmental toxins, and a preference for male offspring.
As such, the effect of these factors should be considered in under
standing the annual variation and overall decline in the sex ratio at birth.
How does he get away with this? He cites a report and claims that its conclusions are the exact opposite of what it actually says!
Assrocket just gullibly swallows it all whole. There is a whole parade of similarly mangled science results in Fumento’s article, and another is the recent Hwang Woo Suk scandal.
Fumento’s second example is embryonic stem cell research, where the most important “science” underlying public enthusiasm for cloning turned out to be fraudulent:
Even Science’s awful stem-cell embarrassment wasn’t purely a matter of fraud. I have written repeatedly on how both Science and Nature have turned themselves into cheerleaders for any supposed advance in ES cell science, while opening their pages to laughable attacks on what many see as both medically and ethically superior — namely adult stem cells.
Neither Powerline nor Fumento understand this result. It was an important and expected step in stem cell research, but it was only one result, and certainly wasn’t the foundation of public or scientific enthusiasm for this line of research. Nor does it in anyway invalidate the promise or past results of stem cell researchers, and the claim that everyone is sitting around wondering “How could I have been fooled?” is ridiculous.
This happens every time Powerline mentions anything about science. I think we ought to encourage a new reflex: every time Powerline mentions the word “science”, come check out scienceblogs.com, and you’ll find several of us howling with laughter.
Followers of that hateful lunatic, Fred Phelps, have been making the news for picketing military funerals in Minnesota. Apparently, because the US tolerates (sorta) homosexuality, they feel that they should hit up random funerals and cuss out the dead for dying for homosexuality. Now our state legislators are considering laws to block that kind of behavior, because it “flies in the face of Minnesota values.” The values they’re talking about aren’t tolerance, though, but simply an opposition to meddling with the military.
Eva makes a very good point: the Republican leadership in this state seems to share Fred Phelps’ values. She has photos of a rally at the capitol in support of Michele Bachmann’s anti-gay amendment, a rally that was approvingly attended by our Republican governor. Those signs aren’t being carried by crazed Kansans, but by people of our state with good ol’ “Minnesota values”.
I can’t see any significant difference between Bachmann and Pawlenty, and the nutjobs of the Westboro Baptist Church.
We shouldn’t be surprised when the Bush administration jiggers the scientific books:
In short, Oregon State University scientists reported in Science magazine that some logging practices may contribute to forest fires, rather than curbing them as conventional wisdom leads us to believe. The report ran contrary to current federal policy under the Bush administration, and the funding for the research group was suspended.
When reality conflicts with your ideology, it must be reality that’s in error.
Say, would the nice person who sent me the Roy Zimmerman CDs care to ‘fess up in the comments?
I need to turn you in for sedition. There might be a reward.
Here’s the difference between me and Michael Bérubé: he gets labeled a dangerous radical and profiled in David Horowitz’s new book, while all I get is a
mild squeak in our weekly campus newspaper and our local conservative rag.
While perusing the UMM main page, I happened upon the website http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula which belongs to UMM’s own Professor of Biology Dr. Meyers. Upon closer inspection I found content relating to my religious beliefs that offended me beyond belief. Not only was this speech sacrilegious and offensive, but it was readily available to anyone who happens across the UMM main page. The portion of content which I found most offensive was written under the label “humor,” and his blog is in fact up for an online award. Yet despite my outrage I must defend Dr. Meyers. He has the right to state his opinions and it is not my place to try to stop him. I may suggest the administration take the link off the campus website, but that has more to do with the fact that the website speaks for the University as a whole.
He is a bit of a junior Horowitz—I kind of like how he’s bending over backwards to insist I have a right to free speech while calling for the university to censor me—but you know, he put this up almost two weeks ago and the only reason I noticed at all is that my wife ran across it. It’s just sad. I mean, if what I wrote was really sacrilegious and outrageous and offensive beyond belief, couldn’t they get a condemnatory petition going, or a protest march, or even get one of Horowitz’s junior sub-alterns to come out and give a talk in which he complains about not being allowed to give a talk, while my kidneys threaten Western Civilization?
Man, I’d even be satisfied if they just spelled my name right.
