The Florida Baptist Witness got various candidates for office to answer a few questions. They’re bad questions, almost entirely focused on the issues of the religious right, but Katherine Harris clasped them to her bosom and ran with them. It’s actually kind of creepy.
This Connecticut mess is doing a great job of highlighting the structural incompetence of the Democratic party, isn’t it? Sisyphus Shrugged quotes Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on the current situation with both Ned Lamont, the official Democratic candidate, and Joe Lieberman, sanctified egotist candidate, running in the November elections there.
“Explain to me how two Democrats running is bad,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview.
Setting aside the whole issue of the fact that Lieberman is not running as a Democrat…wait. Let’s not set that aside. What kind of flaming nitwit can Emanuel be to gloss over the fact that the state primary made Lamont the candidate? Jebus.
OK, now setting that aside, I’m a naive biologist, not a political scientist at all, and even I can see how having two Democrats (or, one Democrat and one “Democrat”) is bad. Does he think that every Democratic voter in Connecticut gets two votes? How can this bigwig in the party be unaware of such a basic fact of our electoral system?
Man, I look at the disarray of the Republican party, the mess their policies have put us in, and the general venal corruption of the ruling clique, and I feel pretty good about the next election—I think we’ve got a chance of kicking the vermin out. And then one of the beltway bozos of my party opens his mouth, and I realize…they’re damn good at blowing it.
A neurobiologist at UCLA, Dario Ringach, has stopped doing research on primates. The reason?
Colleagues suggested that Ringach, who did not return e-mails seeking comment, was spooked by an attack on a colleague. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks’s elderly neighbor’s house, and did not detonate.
Whoa. Incompetence and thuggish violence—what a combination. I love animals and think they needed to be treated with care and respect (although, if our cat pees on the furniture one more time…), and I can sympathize with people who are concerned about animal research. I would suggest, though, that they spend less time firebombing people and more time working for their local humane society. It’s penny wise and pound foolish to harrass scientists when all you have to do is visit your local grocery store’s dumpster to find malnourished, diseased, and injured cats scavenging for something to eat. Or look into animal hoarding—it’s more common than you might think.
Whatever you do, though, don’t throw away your moral compass as some fanatics do.
Jerry Vlasak, a practicing physician, a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Press Office, and a former animal researcher, said that “obviously the roughly 30 non-human primates [Ringach] was killing every year would be ecstatic” with his decision to halt his work. Vlasak said that when he was an animal researcher, he published papers on his work, but didn’t feel that he contributed anything important to society. As to the Molotov cocktail, Vlasak said that “force is a poor second choice, but if that’s the only thing that will work … there’s certainly moral justification for that.”
Why, no. No there isn’t.
It’s really that simple.
There is no excuse for bombing people. There is especially no excuse for being so stupid that you try to bomb random people. What this is is terrorism, plain and simple, and Dario Ringach is a victim of domestic terrorism.
(via Virtually Shocking)
Perhaps this is redundant, since Jon Swift has already taken care of it, but how could I possibly resist an article titled “The Death of Science,” posted on a “Blogs for Bush” site? It’s got wingnuts, it’s got irony, it’s got dizzyingly inane interpretations of science. It’s like everything that’s wrong with the Bush approach to science, all in one short article.
What reasons could a blinkered Bush supporter with a petrified brain and no background in science possibly advance to support the claim that science is dead?
DefCon Blog has put up a video clip of an unused embryo’s fate.
Watch it get eliminated. It sounds horrific, but it’s a matter of pulling a tube out of a flask of liquid nitrogen and putting it in the trash. That’s what the Religious Right is getting all worked up about.
The situation on the right wing must be getting bad when you can’t even tell Jack Kemp and Phyllis Schlafly apart anymore.
Shelley asks what we think of the death penalty…that’s an easy one to answer. I am absolutely against it; I think it brutalizes the culture, puts untoward power in the hands of government, and since I have little trust in the reliability of the court system, allows irreversible and tragic errors. I don’t have to go on about it, though: just read Wilkins. I’ve decided to let him think for me this month.
One other thing I’d add, though: the death penalty isn’t even an effective deterrent. For it to work, you have to assume that death penalty offenses are committed in a rational state of mind, and further, that there are no rational grounds for assuming one will be able to get away with it. Neither condition is true.
In a surprising discovery, reading the Wall Street Journal opinion pages will make you 57% dumber, will kill 8,945,562,241 neurons, and will force you to invent ridiculous statistics. Don’t follow that link! The article will make you cry as you go through a Flowers for Algernon experience.
If you’ve been following the Australian lungfish saga, there’s a new development, and it’s an ugly one. As the Noosa Journal reports (they don’t seem to have a web accessible archive, so this issue may vanish soon; here’s a screenshot), the Queensland government is actively suppressing scientific information that highlights the environmental costs of building the damaging dams.
The Beattie Government has ordered the shredding of a vital report used to list the unique Queensland lungfish under Federal environmental laws, according to a world authority on the species, Macquarie University’s Professor Jean Joss. The shredding order follows suppression of the report shortly after it was published, she said.
If the order is carried out, a vital piece of evidence will have been destroyed to support a challenge to the Mary River Dam under Federal Environmental laws.
The suppressed study analyzed the effects of a small weir that was put on the Burnett River, showing that it had a drastic effect on lungfish breeding and recruitment, and predicted that the greater effect of a dam would “reduce recruitment to a Critically Endangered level, at which extinction is assured.”
You know the other side is completely in the wrong when they’re reduced to hiding reality. The Queensland government seems to have adopted the American Republican style of policy making.
Chris Mooney is trying to kill me.
It’s true. He sent me this book, The Republican War on Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (now available in a new paperback edition!), that he knew would send my blood pressure skyrocketing, give me apoplexy, and cause me to stroke out and die, gasping, clawing in futile spasms at the floor. Fortunately, I’ve been inoculating myself for the past few years by reading his weblog (now also in a new edition!), so I managed to survive, although there were a few chest-clutching moments and one or two life-flashing-past-my-eyes experiences, which will be handy if I ever write a memoir.
