Category Archives: Politics

The American Way

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Anti-Terrorist Fantasy Dream Team on the Case

“I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force,” explained President Obama. “Jack Bauer and Wolverine are among the very best we have when in comes to combating fantasy foes.” Mr. Bauer said, “We’re quite certain that our prisons are secure. Osama bin Laden and his agents wouldn’t dare attempt a break-out, and would fail miserably if they tried. But I love this country. And should Lex Luthor, Magneto or the Loch Ness Monster attack, we’ll be there to stop them.”
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Republican Newt Gingrich also condemned the president’s actions. “President Obama seems to think that crapping one’s pants is a bad thing somehow,” said the former Speaker of the House, “but crapping one’s pants is what this country was founded on. The Reagan Revolution wouldn’t have happened without fear of evil Soviets and welfare queens. And say what you will about President Bush, he kept this country crapping its pants for seven long years after 9/11.”

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Is it Illegitimate Journalism?

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The Daily Show as Legitimate Journalism

Jon Stewart makes no pretense that he’s all about the entertainment, but I think the article is right — he does ask the tough questions when the time comes and shows good insight into issues.

The venerable Sunday morning news shows, oftentimes featuring some of the most reputable people in journalism, largely go through a formulaic process, repeated weekly with their guests. The crack team of researchers will provide a number of quotes made by said interviewee appearing to contradict each other that the guest will then evade and stonewall against by jumping through any number of grammatical, contextual, semantic, and logical hoops. While The Daily Show has a more varied roster of guests from week to week, the Sunday morning talk shows routinely have decision makers and opinion leaders on to explain themselves. Put it this way; who would you rather have interview David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney? I would feel much more confident that an interview with Stewart would reveal more of a subject than an interview with any of the Sunday morning hosts. If British talk show host David Frost can cement the legacy of a disgraced U.S. president, then certainly Jon Stewart would be able to shed light on some of our more pressing national issues.

I’m guessing that some of the people mentioned would rather only be interviewed by someone who was tossing slow pitches over the fat part of the plate

Oh Tee Yay!

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Rush Holt (physicist, congressman) on reviving the Office of Technology Assessment

Op-Ed: Reversing the Congressional Science Lobotomy

Among the 535 members of Congress, there are three physicists, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist. Most members of congress avoid science at all costs, and the handful of trained scientists cannot and do not try to inject the scientific thinking on the particulars of every issue.

What Congress needs is its own science advisors. We need not look far for a model: Until 1995, Congress could rely on the Office of Technology Assessment.

While members of Congress do not suffer from a lack of information, we lack time and resources to assess the validity, credibility, and usefulness of the large amount of scientific information and advice we receive as it affects actual policy decisions. The purpose of the OTA was to assist members of Congress in this task. It both provided an important long-term perspective and alerted Congress to scientific and technological components of policy that might not be obvious.

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Despite its importance, new leaders in Congress successfully defunded the OTA in 1995, which as one former member put it, was like Congress giving itself a lobotomy.

I think we (in the US, and true elsewhere, too) are all better off if our political policy is based on facts rather than ideology. IOW, on how nature actually behaves rather than how we want it to behave, or think it should behave. More goes into the policy equation, for certain, but factual information is a necessary place to start.

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Getting Your Scorecard

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Wrong Tomorrow

When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate.

They want significant, empirically testable predictions made by public figures, that have no more than a five-year horizon. Topics (thus far) are politics, technology, and finance.

Research has shown that experts make predictions at a rate worse than chance. This site exists in order to hold people and media outlets accountable for pretending to see into an unpredictable future.

And despite being often-wrong, they keep at it. And people still listen to them and cite them as authorities.

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It Only Seems Like an April Fool's Post

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But it ran in the Mar 31 issue. Report: cosmonaut grumbles about space bureaucracy

Squabbles on Earth over how cosmonauts and astronauts divide up the space station’s food, water, toilets and other facilities are hurting the crew’s morale and complicating work in space, a veteran Russian cosmonaut said, according to an interview published Monday.

Gennady Padalka told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper as saying space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, like toilets.

And Now, a Word from our Sponsor

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Presidential Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, March 9, 2009

The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. The selection of scientists and technology professionals for positions in the executive branch should be based on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.

Aw crap. You can do that? (Oh, yes we can)

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Mocking What You Don't Understand

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Eruptions of Know-Nothingism

A discussion of recent neuron-deficient attacks on science.

The tricky thing about most basic research, though, is that you don’t always know what you’ll get out of it when you release the funds. Such research often opens up new and surprising avenues that themselves then spin off important innovative technologies that no one could have predicted. (In Jindal’s case, he wasn’t even attacking basic research, but rather, research of obvious disaster safety import. Not even my caveats can help him.)

In an ideal world, then, specific scientific appropriations would hardly be above criticism—but you would also have to make a cogent argument for why they’re not the best use of our investments. You wouldn’t just mock that which you don’t understand

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The Fact of the Matter

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George Will Officially Loses His Mind

More piling on Poor George, for his act of confusing political punditry with science and the acceptability within each discipline of just making stuff up to make a point. But within the arguments, Tom brings up another example that hasn’t been horribly contaminated with politicium:

To get a handle on this last point, leap out of politically (not scientifically) charged areas like the study of anthropogenic climate change. Sixteen years after Einstein had worked out the special theory of relativity, which eliminated the concept the ether as the medium within which light waves travelled, word came of an experiment that seemed to have detected an ether “wind” — the effect produced by the motion of the earth through an ether. Einstein responded with perhaps his most quoted aphorism: Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht – Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not!

Einstein was, of course, correct, and the reported experiment was wrong. The moral of the story, in this context, is that while it is true that a single contrary result is enough to demolish established theory — that result had better damn well hold up.

And that’s something that needs to be understood about the process. Support for a theory is a body of evidence, and if a contrary data point comes up, it is investigated to see if there’s really new science there, or if it’s the result of a statistical fluke, an experiment that lacks some rigor, or even fraud. One of the foundations of science is repeatability — scientists try and replicate results, and if nobody can do so, the result is suspect. A hundred years later there are still those who contort themselves to tear down relativity, but all they can point to is a handful of experiments that show questionable results, as compared to a vastly larger pile of experiments that confirm the theory. The beautiful theory can be slain by an ugly fact, but one has to actually confirm that it is indeed a fact that one has uncovered.

Tripe from Tierney

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I ran across Tierney’s latest post in the NY Times, Politics in the Guise of Pure Science and, as it too often does, it left a bad taste.

Why, since President Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in Washington, do some things feel not quite right?

First there was Steven Chu, the physicist and new energy secretary, warning The Los Angeles Times that climate change could make water so scarce by century’s end that “there’s no more agriculture in California” and no way to keep the state’s cities going, either.

I couldn’t help but notice that Tierny doesn’t actually rebut the claim, or give any context at all for it. Just simple appeal to ridicule, with fragmentary quoting, which always raises the question of whether the remarks are being quoted out of context. Not to mention that I think Tierney is missing the point. There is science, and there is policy. Policy will encompass more than science, but it’s critical that policy be based on science, rather than basing policy on ideology and rewriting or suppressing contradictory science.

Via The Inverse Square Blog I see that my spidey-senses were spot-on. Siegel at Daily Kos provides more complete quotes and context to Chu’s comments, and makes it clear that Chu was describing a range of possibilities, with the loss of agriculture and severe reduction in water for the cities at the extreme end of the spectrum of outcomes.

Update: Carbon Nation takes a swipe, too.