The Australian government is trying to censor the internet. They have a blacklist of over 1300 sites — to be expanded to 10,000 — to which it is illegal to link, with violations costing you as much as $11,000 a day.
This doesn’t work, except as part of a package of tools for oppressing citizens. I did not have the impression that that was a road Australians wanted to travel upon.
So true.
We other Americans, the ones down south in the United States, have been wrestling with this problem for a long time. Sometimes, you just get flaming idiots in charge of important bureaucracies. Sometimes they even get handed the keys to the administration of important scientific institutions. And then they open their mouths and show off how stupid they are, and we poor peons get to sit back and watch the spectacle of money being shoveled into the hands of the incompetent for a while.
Canada has Gary Goodyear, the chiropractor who has been vaulted into the position of minister in charge of science and technology. He does not have a good reputation — his management style leaves much to be desired, and likes to accuse scientists of conspiring to lie to the public — and there are suspicions that he is a closet creationist, so he was recently asked outright if he believed in evolution.
“I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
I think the answer to that one was, “No, no I don’t, Bob.” The giveaway? He wasn’t asked if he was an atheist, he was asked if he accepted a basic scientific fact, and he immediately ran to hide behind the robes of whatever flavor of clueless cleric he favors. That’s creationist behavior, alright.
So, Canada, how long until you give this sorry sad sack the boot?
As part of his deplorable legacy, one of the last things George W. Bush rushed through in his last days of power was a set of changes in environmental policy that basically gutted protections for endangered organisms. Our new president has been given the power to undo those changes in a recent spending bill.
Obama may now, with the stroke of a pen, rescind the Bush Administration’s last-minute rules that:
forcibly removed global warming from the list of extinction threats to the polar bear (despite scientific opinion that global warming is the bear’s chief extinction threat)
allowed oil and gas drilling in polar bear habitats
eliminated the need to consult with wildlife and marine scientists when allowing mining, building, logging and other destructive projects that might increase extinction threats to endangered species.
Make it so, President Obama.
Today, President Obama signed a bill lifting the Bush restrictions on stem cell research. You really must go listen to his speech on the occasion — he seems to get what scientific research is all about. Man, it’s been a long eight years, and oh is it wonderfully good to hear an eloquent defense of scientific research from our president, for a change.
The ugly little goblins of the Bush years still plague us, though; compare the uplifting message of knowledge from Obama with this fundamentally fallacious opinion piece from the carnie barker of junk science, Steven Milloy. And by “fundamentally fallacious”, I mean that it’s problems are far deeper than his usual slithery tweaking of the facts to misrepresent the evidence and the science — I mean that right at the core of Milloy is an absolute lack of comprehension of the very nature of science, and it’s right there, exposed and naked and hideous.
His problem? He thinks his ignorance of the field is an accurate picture, and he thinks science ought to be more like a vending machine: put in your nickel, and the bubble gum you wanted pops out.
Uh-oh. She opened her mouth again.
BACHMANN: If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism. … But we all know that we could turn this around and we can turn this around fairly quickly. We’re still a free country.
And as the Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels — that’s what they’re very good at — they’re trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren’t able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated.
She calls what punctuated equilibrium? I don’t think she knows what it means, and I don’t believe she knows anything about either biology or economic history. It’s interesting to see the Republican version of bipartisanship so nakedly exposed, at least.
(By the way, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” No one ever honks.)
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin is the pol who pushed a major “alternative medicine” proposal through congress that led to the formation of the NCCAM, a hotbed of government-sponsored quackery. He now regrets the effort, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s hard to imagine a more damning statement that reveals an utter ignorance of how science should work than this one:
Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies.
“One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short,” Harkin said.
The senator went on to lament that, since its inception in 1998, the focus of NCCAM has been “disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things.”
Skeptics have complained all along that Harkin and his allies founded this office to promote alternative therapies at public expense, not to test them scientifically. Harkin’s statement at the hearing explicitly confirms that hypothesis.
He’s unhappy because the research didn’t give him the answer he wanted. Does he think science is a magic wishing well?
Maybe we need to establish a new political party, the Rationalists, to replace both the Democrats and Republicans. It would be a wonderful idea, but I fear it would never get more than 0.001% of the American vote.
The blogs have talked about Bobby Jindal’s credentials as an exorcist for some time, and now, finally, after Jindal’s comical performance on national TV the other night, the mainstream media is taking notice. His dalliance with exorcism gets a write-up in the NY Times, where one of the more depressing questions I’ve run across is asked.
“That’s incredible. But is it politically problematic?”
It’s discouraging that we even need to ask this. A potential presidential candidate believes that a woman grappling with cancer and depression might have been literally possessed by a demon, and that chanting magical incantations cast the demon out. This is absolutely insane stuff. But of course, in this country it’s the people who question such ludicrous claims who are regarded as ‘close-minded’ and ‘weird’.
Discouraging as the fact that that question can even be asked might be, even worse is the answer. “Probably not”.
Check the poll results at that link. 40% of Americans in the 21st century believe that the devil sometimes possesses people. We hoped for flying cars, and all we got was voodoo and speaking in tongues. I feel a little bit cheated.
At least we can hope that maybe newspapers and television will begin to eye these claims a bit more skeptically. But don’t count on it.
Speaking of incessant, grating whines…here’s another Minnesota pest, Michele Bachmann. She spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (by invitation…how deranged have the Republicans become, anyway?) and offered this jewel of logic:
I just wondered that if our founders thought taxation without representation was bad, what would they think of representation WITH taxation?
Don’t even try to comprehend the strange thoughts that flit through that tiny brain.
Is there some new requirement in the Republican party that potential candidates for the presidency must be against basic science? Bobby Jindal gave a rebuttal to one of Obama’s recent speeches, and what does he do? Criticizes the investment of “$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.” Heck, this isn’t even any of that abstract, difficult-to-understand stuff — it’s work that directly helps people.
“I was kind of taken aback by the way volcanic monitoring was portrayed in the speech,” Brad Singer, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin, said. “Every once in awhile there’s some odd science research going on that sounds so out there that it’s not useful and even I can laugh at some of those. But volcano monitoring is a serious business. I would say there are hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. who live in the sphere of hazard associated with many individual volcanoes.”
It’s work to help predict and prevent disasters. You would think the governor of Louisiana would understand why this is important, even if his state doesn’t have volcanoes, but one thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that Republican presidential candidates don’t have much of a connection with reality or empathy.
