If you’ve been wondering about this administration’s priorities (you probably haven’t, but go with the flow), take a look at this chart comparing spending on the war with spending on alternative energy research. That thing isn’t going to scale tidily to fit on a powerpoint slide, I’m afraid.

Hang on here. The war in Iraq is costing about $200 million per day, or a billion in less than a week. Yet George W Bush has just vetoed a bill that would give NIH an additional $1 billion per year, raising the budget from $29 billion to $30 billion.

And what does he do? He accuses Congress of being on a “spending spree.”

Here’s hoping the guy chokes on the irony.

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.

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.

We have to rely on comedians to tell us the obvious.

And that’s because over the last seven years, because of the incompetence that goes by the name George Bush, we’ve become the most insecure, paranoid superpower ever. We don’t think we can get anything right anymore. We can’t take care of our own citizens after a hurricane, or plan for our wars, or maintain our infrastructure, and our celebrity rehab facilities obviously aren’t working at all.

My least favorite political/economic group is the Libertarians, so it is a wonderfully pleasant experience to watch as China Miéville takes a sharp and dismissive rhetorical blade to a Libertarian pipe-dream. He’s specifically criticizing something called the Freedom Ship, a gigantic free-floating escapist fantasy for Libertarians, in which they cruise the seas with their own closed colony of warriors for greed.

Libertarianism is by no means a unified movement. As many of its advocates proudly stress, it comprises a taxonomy of bickering branches–minarchists, objectivists, paleo- and neolibertarians, agorists, et various al.–just like a real social theory. Claiming a lineage with post-Enlightenment classical liberalism, as well as in some cases with the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand, all of its variants are characterized, to differing degrees, by fervent, even cultish, faith in what is quaintly termed the “free” market, and extreme antipathy to that vaguely conceived bogeyman, “the state,” with its regulatory and fiscal powers.

Above all, they recast their most banal avarice–the disinclination to pay tax–as a principled blow for political freedom. Not content with existing offshore tax shelters, multimillionaires and property developers have aspired to build their own. For each such rare project that sees (usually brief) life, there are many unfettered by actual existence, such as Laissez-Faire City, a proposed offshore tax haven inspired by a particularly crass and gung-ho libertarianism, that generated press interest in the mid-’90s only to collapse in infighting and bad blood; or New Utopia, an intended sea-based libertarian micro-nation in the Caribbean that degenerated with breathtaking predictability into nonexistence and scandal.

The summary is particularly sweet.

It is a small schadenfreude to know that these dreams will never come true. There are dangerous enemies, and then there are jokes of history. The libertarian seasteaders are a joke. The pitiful, incoherent and cowardly utopia they pine for is a spoilt child’s autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism played as maritime farce: Pinochet of Penzance.

Well said — I think the institutionalized selfishness, petty small-mindedness, and bourgeois values run amuck of the libertarians represent the worst of America — and that finding common cause, supporting both social and economic equality, and striving for a real community of liberty (not that penny-pinching masquerading as freedom that libertarians espouse) represent the best.

(via Amardeep Singh)