Why should Catholicism be a prerequisite for speaking science?

I just received my copy of the latest Seed, and although I feel a bit reluctant to say it because it may be interpreted as sucking up to the corporate masters who provide my bandwidth, it really is a very good science magazine—I’d be subscribing even if they weren’t sending it to me for free. Take a browse through it sometime, there’s a lot of the content available online.

Anyway, of course the first thing I turn to in the magazine is Chris Mooney’s article on Learning to speak science. It’s good and has some productive suggestions, and I agree with Mooney on 90% of what he says in it, but…

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David Barton was a piker compared to Gonzales

I couldn’t believe it myself when Gonzales said Washington and Lincoln had authorized electronic surveillance, but now we have a corroborative account that shows that Washington did authorize grand electrical schemes. Remember, he had the assistance of Franklin, so it isn’t that implausible, is it?

Washington got his warrantless electic surveilance. And though the resulting confligration left 233 people dead, and the Barbary pirates avoided detection, a vital precedent was set. Nobody could tell the President to do diddly squat. He was the President, after all. This would come in handly four score and seven years later, when Lincoln was using electricity to shock the genitals of Southern prisoners—a new kind of electric surveilance, to be sure, but another great chapter in the history of freedom.

Now I understand how Bush can be President

He’s a miracle worker and a creative genius. How else can you explain his proposal to add or train 70,000 new math and science teachers while cutting the proposed education budget by 20%?

I’d like to be able to explain to my wife how we can buy a brand new MacBook Pro while saving money, but either I’m not as smart as George W. Bush or she is much, much cleverer and less credulous than Republicans.

Also note that our pro-science president wants to freeze the NIH budget. Isn’t it amazing how he does that?

Local lunacy

Where do you think this peculiar practice is going down?

OK, let me get this straight. A bunch of muttonheads are burying idols in their yards thinking it will magically get someone to buy their house, the Strib runs it as a straight story, yet the right wing somehow claims that the mainstream media is hostile to religion? Unbelievable.

Yeah, nice middle-class neighborhoods in suburban Minnesota.

Then there was the guy at the booth behind me at the coffeeshop bragging about how his “system” at the slots in his weekly trips to the casino was paying off, and he was investing all of his winnings in gold and silver. It was very distracting: I had to grit my teeth and restrain myself from turning around and giving the poor old fool a lecture in probability.

It hurts so good

So scribblingwoman finally reads some recent China Miéville, long after Crooked Timber covered it (nothing wrong with that…if you saw my stack of books waiting for me to finish them…). She brings up a few interesting points, though, and one in particular poked me right in my reading biases. In Perdido Street Station(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), one of the central characters, Lin, meets a particularly unpleasant fate, and this after we’d been reading about her for a long time, gotten to know and like her and find her engaging. Then, wham:

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Hey, so George and Al are indistinguishable!

Bush/Gore, Bore/Gush, they were both the same, remember? It didn’t matter whether you voted Democrat or Republican, you were just getting the same ol’ thing.

Look how true that is: Bush sounds just like Al Gore. Of course, there were a few minor differences, like that Gore was 14 years ahead of Bush, really meant it (rather than having his lackeys issue retractions the day after), and I suspect, had the competence to actually follow through.