Damn the NCCAM

Since I was just griping about the false claim that the political left is as anti-scientific as the right, I will mention one exception where I think the argument has some merit: alternative medicine. I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which had a 2005 budget of 123 million dollars—123 million dollars that was sucked away from legitimate science and placed in the hands of quacks. The latest issue of Science has two articles, pro and con, on NCCAM, and you might be able to guess where my sympathies lay.

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Ignore anything I might have ever said about Dershowitz

How could I have ever said a charitable word about Alan Dershowitz? In penance, I urge you all to read Juan Cole’s dissection of Dershowitz’s grading of civilianity, or if you’d prefer something lighter, try Kung Fu Monkey’s demolition by amusing anecdote.

If anyone were in the mood to revisit my earlier post, you could easily undermine my appreciation of Dershowitz’s argument there by pointing out that it is Alan Dershowitz talking about morality, and I would have to sheepishly admit that he has no credibility on the matter.

Middle East code words

Digby’s argument, that the Bush administration language about the war in the Middle East is loaded with code words to pander to the looney fundamentalist base, isn’t entirely convincing. Just the fact that Rice used a word, “birth-pang,” that Rapture nuts have loaded with all kinds of millennialist meaning doesn’t mean she consciously chose it to make the fundies all giddy.

I admit, though, that the only reason I reject the hypothesis is that this administration has been so incompetent that I suspect they babble this kind of stuff all the time without putting any effort into thinking about it. These guys aren’t geniuses; overestimation of their abilities is something we should leave to their sycophants.

We’re all getting older

Honestly, I don’t feel a day over 12. I remember leaning on an old fence near the rhubarb on a fine fall day in 1969, looking out over the mucky little stream that ran near our house and listening to the frogs creak, and thinking that this was a very fine life I’ve got, and I think I’ll hang on to it for as long as I could, and maybe in a little bit I’ll get on my bike and pedal into town to see if there any new model airplanes at the five and dime, and browse the comic book rack at Stewart’s Drug, and then maybe say hello to Grandma and fuel up on cookies and kool-aid. That was me then, and this is me now, and there’s a conscious sense of continuity between us—and while Grandma is long gone and I haven’t been drawn to model airplanes or comic books in a good long time, they’re still all there in my mind’s eye. I can still hear the hum of the fan at the drug store and smell that plasticky reek of toluene and feel the nubbly cushions on my grandparents’ sofa. I still remember that old bike of mine, an ancient single-speed racing bike that made my thighs strain and ache every time I started out, but then felt so good once I got up to speed that I never wanted to stop…in part because then I’d have to lean hard on those pedals to get it moving again.

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Almost there

Georgetown College in Kentucky has ended its affiliation with the Southern Baptists after the Baptists tried to dictate that a new hire be a biblical literalist. The Baptists wanted nonsense like this:

“You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they actually existed,” Dr. York said.

They also refused to allow the college to hire more than 25% non-Baptist faculty, and what may have really been the deal-breaker is that the university’s enrollment is less than half Baptist…so insisting on strict adherence to the principles of a minority denomination was probably costing them students. I suspect money is more important than doctrine.

I was surprised and impressed by this comment:

David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,” Professor Key said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re searching for truths.”

He’s almost there. Now we just have to work towards the day the word “religion” is substituted for the too narrow “fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form”.

(via Socratic Gadfly)

Only in the Pacific Northwest…

Seattle is experiencing a surge of homicides (which are probably not statistically significant in number.) Seattle is also experiencing a surge of squid. Some irresponsible journalists are suggesting these two observations might or might not be linked.

These scurrilous allegations should be addressed by a trustworthy source, like The Typing Octopus. I mean, seriously, the murders are on dry land, with guns. I’d suspect the Sasquatch before I would some disgruntled cephalopod…and even there, the fact that the victims weren’t slammed with hurled tree trunks should let Bigfoot off the hook.