Poor Superman

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So, the Bush administration is going to try and be pro-science. Here we go.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”

Deutsch is 24 years old, having just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism a few years ago. As a reward for being a loyal Republican party apparatchik, he has been generously appointed to be a Political Officer enforcing doctrine over a bunch of high-falutin’ rocket scientists. Shades of Lysenko!

It must have been a heady feeling to have the power to dictate ideology to a lot of scientists with Ph.D.s.

I wonder if it now feels terrible to have one’s stupidity and ignorance a matter of public record (“theory” does not mean what he thinks it means), and to have so thoroughly overreached one’s intellectual capacity that it will be emblematic of the Republican corruption of science policy for years to come? Or perhaps (and perhaps more likely) Mr Deutsch is basking in the high regard of his know-nothing peers in this administration, who probably think smacking a scientist with a Bible is a clever retort.

If there were justice, Deutsch’s political career would be dead now, and he’d have to make a living selling aluminum siding in Topeka. I fear he’s just improved his standing in the Republican party.

. The rot runs deep.

There’s more at Bad Astronomy and Stranger Fruit.

Add Cosmic Variance to the list. I think you’re going to see a growing righteous fury among scientists on this.

Pox-ridden houses

I haven’t commented on those Muslim cartoons so far. I’m conflicted.

Why, you might ask? It’s a clear-cut case of religious insanity, exactly the sort of thing I ought to relish wagging an arrogantly atheistical finger at. And of course I will, in just a moment…but the difficult part is that there are actually at least two issues here, and religion is only one of them.

There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!

I’ve seen the cartoons, and they are crude and uninteresting—they are more about perpetuating stereotypes of Muslims as bomb-throwing terrorists than seriously illuminating a problem. They lack artistic or social or even comedic merit, and are only presented as an insult to inflame a poor minority. I don’t have any sympathy for a newspaper carrying out an exercise in pointless provocation.

So on the one hand I see a social problem being mocked, but on the other—and here comes the smug godless finger-wagging—I see a foolish superstition used as a prod to mock people, and a people so muddled by the phony blandishments of religion that they scream “Blasphemy!” and falsely pin the problem on a ridiculous insult to a non-existent god, rather than on the affront to their dignity as human beings and citizens. Religion in this case has accomplished two things, neither one productive: it’s distracted people away from the real problems, which have nothing at all to do with the camera-shy nature of their imaginary deity, and it’s also amplified the hatred.

It also doesn’t help that their riots are confirming the caricatures rather than opposing them. Once again, religiosity turns people into mindless frenzied zombies, and once again it interferes with progress.

Somehow, people are assuming from this that I’m “sympathetic to Islam”. How, I don’t know; I thought I’d always been quite clear in my contempt for all religion, and I thought the last two paragraphs above were plain enough. I am sympathetic to the problem of being a minority immigrant; that’s one issue that is being ignored too much. As I said, the real problem is being exacerbated by bad religion that amplifies the hate.

I really don’t think a Muslim would find me to be a friend to their religion.

Aliens among us

I simply do not understand some people’s attitudes towards sex. I’m a fairly conservative guy in that department, I thought, happily involved in a long term and conventional relationship, but these stories I’m hearing about the new breed of American puritanism are simply incomprehensible to me. This Kansas law to criminalize consensual amorous activities between teenagers sounds so freakily Talibanish to me.

While Kansas is one of 12 states in which sex under a certain age—16, 17, or 18—is always presumed illegal, regardless of consent or the age difference between the partners, Kline’s written interpretation of Kansas’ reporting law makes it the only state requiring that doctors, nurses, counselors, and all other care providers report—as abuse—any sexual interaction between teens under 16. Failure to report is a misdemeanor. Under Kline’s view, professionals must report even when the sex is consensual, committed with partners their age, and where there is no suspicion of injury. The plaintiffs who filed suit—a group of doctors, nurses, and counselors—contend that under Kline’s policy, even evidence of teen necking must be reported.

Then there’s this weird new commenter on this site: start here and read down, looking for comments by “B”. He has the most convoluted rationale for opposing any kind of contraception that I’ve ever heard. Apparently, you’re only supposed to have sex if there is some chance, no matter how remote, of the woman getting pregnant. You can reduce the odds by ‘natural’ methods, but there always has to be this lingering possibility…it’s sex as Russian roulette. It’s not worth doing unless there’s a round in one chamber.

I AM saying that people should always have sex that provides for the possibility of new life. Using artificial contraception removes that possibility. Therefore the act becomes solely for pleasure. Using someone to merely satisfy your own means is wrong. It’s so wrong, in fact, that people don’t even need to be told that it’s wrong.

That’s completely backwards. People having a good time together is perfectly normal and natural, and you have to be indoctrinated into believing it is wrong.

Here, for instance, is a perfect example of an irrationally warped attitude.

…harming yourself and your loved one by using artificial contraception to avoid said pregnancy is not healthy.

I think Mr B really needs to move to Kansas, unless he’s already there.

I guess Bush really didn’t mean anything

Bush didn’t really mean we were going to try and reduce our dependency on Middle East oil.

Bush didn’t really mean we were going to invest more in alternative energy research.

In this thread, I’ve got Bush apologists trying to tell me he didn’t really mean that he was going to prohibit a wide range of reproductive biotechnologies.

Now look at this analysis. Bush apparently proposed to increase the numbers of math and science teachers by 70,000 over four years. But what he actually seems to have meant was retraining 70,000 existing teachers, but without saying anything about ever paying for it.

Did he say anything in that speech that was actually true? I’m beginning to suspect that if he started by saying, “My fellow Americans…,” that it might be fruitful to check into the INS records and see if he actually is a citizen.

I am certain now that the media stuck the label “serial exaggerator” on the wrong man in the 2000 election.

President panders to anti-manimal lobby! Dr Moreau flees country in rage!

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I didn’t listen to the State of the Union Address last night, preferring to maintain my equanimity by attending a talk on quantum physics, but I knew I could trust my readers to email me with choice weird science bits. I’m getting a lot of “WTF?” email about this statement from Bush:

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

It’s pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus vote…and we know which one has the majority here.

But guess what? Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it’s really happening. Of course, it isn’t with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it’s the topic of ongoing debate. Let’s consider one recent example of such an experiment.

Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It’s also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

He’s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he’s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn’t “We aren’t going to let the mad scientists make monsters!”, it’s “We aren’t going to let the doctors help those ‘retards.'”

Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are.

O’Doherty A, Ruf S, Mulligan C, Hildreth V, Errington ML, Cooke S, Sesay A, Modino S, Vanes L, Hernandez D, Linehan JM, Sharpe PT, Brandner S, Bliss TV, Henderson DJ, Nizetic D, Tybulewicz VL, Fisher EM. (2005) An aneuploid mouse strain carrying human chromosome 21 with Down syndrome phenotypes. Science 309(5743):2033-7.

More Koufax nominations!

I’ve got a couple of posts that have been nominated for The 2005 Koufax Awards: Best Post, so I’ve quickly brought them on board here at the new site. Voting isn’t yet open, but here they are:

  • Idiot America. This one is something of a howl of anguish, and it’s really more a lot of quotes from Charles Pierce’s article of the same name in Esquire. If this gets the nomination, credit should go more to Pierce than to me—and that’s OK.
  • Planet of the Hats. This article is probably the best representation for how I actually feel about religion. It’s all metaphor, but if you don’t get it, I won’t be surprised…it means you’re really, really, ummm, devout.
  • The proper reverence due those who have gone before. I have to say, if one of these three gets the nomination, this is the one I’d personally favor. But hey, you’re all supposed to vote for your favorite, and there are about 220 other great choices there, too. Anyway, if you want to understand why I despise creationists of all stripes, this article might help you understand why.

Idiot America

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I love this article.

Ctenotrish sent along a copy of Greetings from Idiot America, by Charles P. Pierce (sorry, but it’s behind a firewall, and you have to pay $2.95 to see it) from the latest Esquire. I don’t think I’ve ever read this magazine before—it’s one of those things with half-naked young ladies draped over the cover, which, strangely enough, isn’t something that usually entices me to pick up a copy—but this one article has all the vigor and passion that most of our media have wrung out of their press, replacing it with tepid timidity and vacuous boosterism for whatever the polls say is most popular today. It begins with a description of a tour of Ken Ham’s new creation science museum in Kentucky, with its dinosaurs wearing saddles and its bland Adam, which we learn is naked but sculpted without a penis, and the train of well-fed Middle American boobs lining up with great earnestness to parade through the patently bogus exhibits.

What is Idiot America?

[Read more…]

Debbie Does Derangement

Oh. My. Nonexistent. God. Debbie Schlussel.

How does anyone take these “conservative commentators” seriously? She read a NYT article that shows a genetic link between Asians and Native Americans, and guess what that means? It was OK for Europeans to displace them from the Americas, because they were invaders, too!

So whom did THEY steal the land from? Somebody else, obviously. Yet, no “Dances With Wolves” and “Into the West” from Hollywood about that.

Well, not obviously: no humans lived here prior to their migrations. And yes, there certainly were territorial struggles between different native groups, but so what? That doesn’t change the fact of who was in possession of the land.

Poor Debbie. People point out the inanity of her position, and it prompts her to ever greater levels of hysteria. Take a look at the ALL CAPS rants she’s put into her comments, or the recent addendum to her post, which just digs the hole a lot deeper.

Yet, there is no proof they were the first here. And even if they were, this is yet more proof that they originated in ASIA. Hello? . . . This is yet more evidence that we did NOT steal THEIR land. It means it was not THEIRS to begin with.

I’ve got this house I own (at least, I’m paying the mortgage on it). I can imagine Debbie Schlussel showing up here, waving a birth certificate for my great, great grandfather from the little town of Westad, Sweden, claiming that this is proof I originated in SCANDINAVIA, and my house is not MINE to begin with. (And hey, “Schlussel”…that sounds GERMAN. What kind of American properties might you suspect she believes she owns?)

Look at the long list of employers who have apparently thought Debbie Schlussel was a competent, authoritative commentator. What a sad state of affairs that anyone takes her seriously. She’s a blithering nutcase.

(via The Sixth International)