News and Politics

Right-wing appointment for schools

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Via Flablog: Could this be another Jerry Rieger? Jeb names ultraconservative think tanker with Congressional ambitions as Florida’s chancellor of K-12 education. (And self-described creationist) See the Fla. Politics post comparing coverage. Related: The Austringer wonders if Florida will be the next flash point for people trying to teach Intelligent Design/Creationism in public schools.

Also, Wired talks about ‘Swift Boating science:

Some time ago, I conducted an interview with Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican and staunch member of the religious right. At the time, Stearns was proposing a law to jail any scientist who attempted to make a human embryo through cloning. He opposed cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, he said, because clones would not have “tentacles” like you and me and we’d wind up with “categories of people who didn’t have these tentacles, so there might be superior and inferior people. If you met them and knew they were cloned, how would you deal with them?”

OK, so maybe you can’t blame Stearns for concocting an Ed Wood plot point. He’s no scientist, and besides, he provides comic relief. But how funny is it that President George W. Bush recently endorsed the teaching of “intelligent design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution?

Not very, especially because Bush’s comments about deus ex machina versus book learnin’ are not just a goofy one-off. They are, as science writer Chris Mooney so brilliantly shows, part of The Republican War on Science. (Here let me declare that Mooney and I share a publisher, Basic Books, and let me also declare that my book for Basic sold so few copies I can honestly say I am not being influenced by money.)

It’s not news that the reign of Bush fils has been marked by an antagonism toward science and scientists unlike any since 1954, when Robert Oppenheimer had his security clearance revoked and Linus Pauling had his passport pulled. The many times this administration and its supporters have fudged or even lied about scientists and scientific research are well-known. Global warming, stem cells, cloning, sex, land use, pollution and missile defense come to mind.

The current antagonism towards science is one of the most pressing problems facing our country. We’re falling behind the rest of the world in the scientific community and if this continues we’ll no longer be able to compete. We need to regain our lead and stop our slide into the dark ages. The rest of the world is becoming more enlightened and we’re doing the opposite.

Marketing "Intelligent Design"

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Via Daily Kos – Bob Davidson, a scientist who is also a devout Christian, was at first attracted to Seattle’s Discovery Institute but soon saw through their psuedo-science:

“I’m kind of embarrassed that I ever got involved with this”

“It’s laughable: There have been millions of experiments over more than a century that support evolution,” he says. “There’s always questions being asked about parts of the theory, as there are with any theory, but there’s no real scientific controversy about it.”

Davidson began to believe the institute is an “elaborate, clever marketing program” to tear down evolution for religious reasons. He read its writings on intelligent design — the notion that some of life is so complex it must have been designed — and found them lacking in scientific merit.

An “elaborate, clever marketing program” that may not fool scientists, but just might start to influence the American public enough so that these poll numbers will lean toward belief in “intelligent design”, and science will fall by the wayside.

Silver lining

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TPMCafe points out a good thing about Bush getting re-elected (exactly as I predicted in this entry on Nov. 6): The situation in Iraq will continue to deteriorate. He’ll struggle to clean up his own messes and he wouldn’t be able to blame it on Clinton or the Democrats. By 2008 the country will be looking for a change.

Occupation Hypocrisy

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Via Minipundit: Crooks and Liars has a good listing of Republican statements on Kosovo. Let’s take a glimpse, shall we?

“You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo.”
-Tony Snow, Fox News 3/24/99

“Well, I just think it’s a bad idea. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years”
-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”
-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

“President Clinton is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”
-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity

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A great item at The Onion (via Boing Boing):

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University…
Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.

“Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the ‘electromagnetic force,’ the ‘weak nuclear force,’ the ‘strong nuclear force,’ and so-called ‘force of gravity,'” Burdett said. “And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus.”

Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America

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Via MetaFilter:

It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques–techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.

Margaret Chase Smith wrote these words in her 1950 Declaration of Conscience speech against McCarthyism in the Senate. It applies just as well to today’s political climate.

Dear Reuters, there is no debate

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Life and Deatherage: There is no “debate over an alternative to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.” There is the theory of evolution, proven by scientifically gathered evidence for nearly 150 years, and there are religious fundamentalists whose fragile worldview requires them to attack any fact that conflicts with any story in the Bible, no matter how clearly mythological the Biblical story is.

The US is falling behind

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According to this item at TPMCafe, only 35% of the people in the US believe in evolution. In comparison, 77% in Great Britain believe in evolution. How did we fall from the most advanced country in the world to this uneducated, superstitious society that turned against science? The rest of the world is making advances socially & scientifically while this country sinks further into the dark ages.