Science swirling down the drain

Lots of stuff about the intersection of science and politics in the US today—here are three things to read over breakfast.

  • Bruce Sterling suggests that American science is experiencing creeping Lysenkoism, and reports that “the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues.” He predicts a rather grim end for our science and science policy.

    Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs. This process has already begun in bioethics, meteorology, agriculture, nuclear science, and medicine, but doubts will spread to “American science” generally.

    It’s not a happy piece. Read it anyway.

  • Chris Mooney is surprised at the longevity of the critiques of Republican “science”: he says that “a similar pattern–ignore experts, favor ideologues–has been followed by the administration on any number of other science issues, ranging from global warming to the morning after pill,” and seems most impressed by the fact that these problems are being pointed out, over and over again. Where Sterling sees looming disaster, though, Mooney sees some hope: not everyone is blind to what the Bushites are doing, and science policy is becoming an important issue.

    But now I realize something more: These questions are proof positive that those who are worried about the politics of science nurture their concern within a much broader context. These Americans are thinking: As science goes, so goes the nation. On some level, the science community has always known that. What’s new is that now, we have a heck of a lot of company.

    Now we just have to get all that company motivated to campaign and vote.

  • Darksyde discusses an bill to protect scientific whistleblowers, people who come forward to politicized, ideological tampering with the science coming out of our premier federal research institutions, like NOAA. As he says, “Once again, the GOP preferred to ignore reality and opt for wishful thinking”: it was killed by the Republicans. The author of the bill, Rep. Brad Miller, (D-North Carolina), was online responding to comments, if you’d like to hear straight from the source.

    I think Mooney is right, that the public can see the damage being done to our reputation and the erosion of America’s science and engineering skill set, but there’s the obstacle—as long as the Republicans are in power, we’re not going to be able to slow the destruction.

Remember George Deutsch?

The young partisan hack appointed to NASA, who took it upon himself to filter the science a little bit to suit right-wing biases? It seems he was a demonstrably bad boy.

I wonder what ever happened that unqualified creep? I know he resigned from NASA, I’m just wondering if he has now fallen upward to a Republican think-tank or something, the usual wingnut reward for incompetence.

YK Counterprogramming

We wouldn’t want to leave everyone with the feeling that YearlyKos was heaven made manifest on earth, so I’ll just mention that Socratic Gadfly is blogging up a whirlwind of anti-Kos sentiment. I think it’s a bit overdone, but there is a germ of truth to some of his complaints.

I’d worry a little bit about an excess of Kos idolatry, but it was less in evidence than you might think from the name of the conference, and what you might read in dKos diaries. Firedoglake, MyDD, Glenn Greenwald, Atrios, and AmericaBlog were all big players here, and the attendees were highly egalitarian, more so than a list of panel members would indicate (this was a real problem, I think; way too many panels had the same people showing up on them, and a little more outreach to respected but low traffic blogs would be a good idea.) Gadfly thinks there is too much groupthink and narrow channeling of accepted views at dKos, but as long as a wide range of other bloggers are accepted at the convention, that shouldn’t be a big concern to the online activist community. I think it’s also good to have bona fide liberal skeptics like the Gadfly barking at their heels to keep them honest.

YearlyKos wrapup

I’ve been off at the big meeting, and it’s been a long and tiring weekend in Las Vegas. It’s been strange, too: we’re surrounded by slot machines and show girls, and our crowd hardly notices them; I took a moment to step outside, and I had to tell my wife, “the sunshine…it hurts…” and we went back in. We were intense, nerdly aliens in a neon world.

It was a good weekend, though. I’ll dump a few of my impressions below the fold.

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Hello from YearlyKos!

I’m here in sunny Las Vegas, hanging out in the lobby with the free wireless and watching all the funny blogger nerds with the orange badges walking by. Heh. Oh, hang on…I’m wearing an orange badge and blogging in a corner. Yeah, I’m such a nerd.

I don’t know how much time I’ll have for actually posting things here this weekend, but I’ve queued up a series of reruns to appear automagically at various times, so the site won’t be totally drying up. Half the liberal blogosphere seems to be here, so I’ve got to do something to keep a void from appearing.

No connection to reality at all

Isn’t this so symptomatic of Republican stupidity?

…the FDA released an internal memo showing that one high-ranking FDA official was sincerely worried about adolescents forming “sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.” Seriously.

The evidence, which may not be relevant to the Bush administration, shows no link between access to Plan B and risky sexual behavior, worse yet “sex-based cults.” How Bush-appointed “scientists” come up with such nonsense is a mystery.

If the administration said, “We’re morally opposed to emergency contraception,” we could at least have a reasonable debate. If the administration said, “We could go for this, but the Dobson crowd would kill us,” we would at least be facing political realities.

Instead, the Bush gang insists on a bizarre approach, in which they claim to base decisions like these on science, but ignore their own experts, hide embarrassing facts, and then lie about it. In the case of Plan B, the result is more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions.

For reasons that are unclear, the GOP’s religious right base seems to think this is a great idea.

I have an idea. Instead of blindly restricting the use of a safe and useful contraceptive, how about if we increase the level of sex education so that these mythical kids planning imaginary “sex parties” would realize that Plan B actually has a fairly high failure rate and doesn’t block sexually transmitted diseases at all? Then they’d know that this whole idea was very, very bad.

Oh, wait…the religious right opposes that, too.

Second option: how about if we require FDA bureaucrats to get instruction in how sex and reproduction works? They could hire me to give the birds and the bees talk to a roomful of stuffed shirt Washington drones.