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Should Science Be King In Politics?
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
OTOH, if every decision is going to be based on gathering facts, peer reviewing them, gathering more data, and reproducing outcomes, government would never get anything done.
Surely this subject will instil nothing but the most civil, logical, and objective debates. After all most debates about climate change somehow morph into a left versus right debate, and it's that transition that's really hard. But now we can have the debate in parallel to each other. Throw in the libertarians, and I'm positive that we will all get through this one with not a swear in sight.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Start a "The Scientific Party" and let the democratic process do it's work. If there's a demand for such thing, it will be.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
We don;t want a monarchy. Maybe science should be president.
is that you? I guess owning a multi-billion dollar, international chemicals manufacturer will sort of prompt you to "believe" in science....
The world is run on emotion as much as logic. Anyone that thinks logic can be king either has never been married, or is rapidly headed towards a divorce...
According to former Republican in name only representative Bob Inglis
Text in italics added. Mr. Inglis refutes his own thesis by indulging in fantasy regarding the nature of "conservatism."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The two solutions that are in line with both past experience and economic theory are:
(A) cap-and-trade, where the government sells a limited number of pollution permits, allows the buyers of those permits to trade them, and then sends inspectors (funded by the proceeds of the original sale) to ensure that nobody goes over the number of permits they have. This was successfully used to reduce SO2 emissions back in the 1980's and 1990's.
(B) A CO2 tax, where the more you pollute the more you're taxed. This gives companies a financial incentive to reduce their emissions, and means that those that do reduce their CO2 emissions aren't at a competitive disadvantage from those that don't. Again, inspectors are needed (funded by the tax) to ensure that nobody cheats.
Both of these basically rely on putting a price on pollution, and then making sure nobody cheats on paying that price. It's enforced by the government because nobody else can - nobody owns the country's air, and nobody reasonably could.
I am officially gone from
Do you really want the process of the scientific method corrupted by politics? Let's keep politics away from our science, thank you very much.
thats a bigger belief and wishful thinking than anything else.
Read radical news here
If only more conservatives felt the same way. But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
While I can see many will knee-jerk themselves into an emphatic "YES" to scientific superiority in government, there should still be a place for philosophy and morality in politics as well. And in some cases, philosophy should trump science.
When you might ask? How about in terms of macroeconomics? It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again. Yet it goes against our values to not take care of our most vulnerable who are unable to care for themselves.
It also makes little scientific sense to protect individual rights to the extent that we do. My friends over in Europe and Asia often point out that the banning of hate speech has a demonstrable effect on reducing bigotry. Yet our non-scientific culture values free speech.
So, science should play a big role in determining the fundamental facts of a political discussion, but after that it is all about values and philosophy.
from the full article: " 'If there is a problem, surely there’s some brainiac who will invent a solution.' Call it the faithful’s faith in the faithless."
so true.
Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
We base policies on science, not sentiment, we insist on people being accountable for their actions, and we maintain that markets, not mandates, are the path to prosperity.
If you based your policies on science, then why isn't it a completely open process? Anonymize the names (if any) and release the numbers (especially who pays what in taxes from which areas) behind your policy making. Of course you don't and on top of that, paltry though it may be, we have to wait until Obama to get that ball started rolling.
Oh, yeah, accountable of their actions? Yeah, you rich bastards love to hold each other accountable for your actions -- especially your financiers.
You would expect conservatives to stand with 95 percent of the scientific community and to grow the 13 percent into a working majority.
Oh, wait a minute, I see what's going on here. You're not really a conservative. You're like Zell Miller who is a Democrat only by label and paperwork.
Your proposal, though noble, is a fool's errand. I believe this has been tackled before and the real problem is that you can always find more and more ties to pollution or non-renewable resources being used to make your product and get it to the consumer and then even after that you have the whole usage of it followed by proper disposal and returning the resources. That cheap Dell computer your secretary is playing Bejeweled on? Yeah, that's a nightmare.
What if we attached all of the costs -- especially the hidden costs -- to all fuels?
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board. For now you're basically scratching the surface of a very deep and complicated rabbit hole that is hard to trace backward for many reasons. Some of them supply line problems, some of them scientific problems, some of them statistical problems and some even privacy problems for the users.
Companies already try to regulate themselves by paying a so called 'carbon tax' by being 'carbon neutral' or by planting just an assload of trees so they can say X trees for Y products sold. But you know, that's all really neither exact nor assuredly truly undoing all that is done in their dealings. And while they might tell the public one thing, I don't think they believe it.
Could someone please enumerate every true cost of getting one gallon of gasoline into my car tank? What about what happens as I use it? What about what happens after I've used it?
And the best part is that at some point, as you noted, loss of life is going to be on that list of true costs. Whether you're buying an Apple iPhone that some worker committed suicide while making at the Foxconn plant or BP's little explosion killing 11 oil well workers, you're going to have to say at some point that 1 human life = X million dollars in cost. And that makes people really uncomfortable. It gets even more uncomfortable when whoever deciding that cost considers nationality in influencing that ratio.
My work here is dung.
"Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts."
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
If he's trying with this article to pitch reason and science to his fellow conservatives, by suggesting to them that it's consistent with their core values, best of luck to him. But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch. Today's conservatives' unwavering faith in The Market doesn't come from their observation of its empirical validity, but from a gut-feeling belief in the Unseen Hand of the market as the demiurge of God.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You clearly don't live in the United States. A professed belief in God is an absolute requirement to be elected president, and damn near essential for any other federal or high-level state elective office.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
One of my past mentors had a favorite saying, "The Facts are not important." If a patient perceives that you screwed up, the facts are irrelevant, because their opinion is unlikely to be changed by the facts. Perceptions are reality.
The problems are many though.
Conservatism is usually an expression of:
1. Tradition-keeping
2. Protection of the already powerful
3. Fiercely challenging new ideas
However conservatism changes with its constituents, and across different nations, this core of conservatism tends to be in direct opposition to the changes brought about by science.
What support of science in conservative circles usually means is: Science has made us strong, we should support what science has done to make us strong, but oppose anything else it may do.
So yes, we may see some support for an HPV vaccine with more conservatives if this view becomes more common, and I hope it does - but the interests of the already powerful is still what matters, not wherever the scientific method leads.
Ryan Fenton
Acceptable levels of arsenic, Yucca mountain, the "Clear Skys" act ....
global warming is just the most prominent example of how Republicans routinely twist or flat out ignore science.
Their focus is lining pockets not adhering to facts.
"former ... representative Bob Inglis"
I've heard a lot of politicians talking sense, but they are always *former* office holders.
No human with skin in the game can tell the truth (the whole truth). It is against nature.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Scientists produce data. But this data already has some uncertainty (which is often not reported, btw).
This data is then interpreted, manipulated and possibly even extrapolated, which might introduce additional errors.
Then extra assumptions are made to arrive at an answer to a question from a politician.
Can you still call that a fact? I think politicians should merely aim to understand this process.
U.S. politics is dominated by the idea that your candidate has to look good and have a quick wit. It's a bogus premise that factors in minimally in how to run a government. I don't want my politicians to be scientific experts but rather to have a general knowledge strong enough to know which experts are valuable and which ones are trying to hoodwink them. I also think that there's something to be said about flip-flopping. Why is this bad? Shouldn't someone be thoughtful in their beliefs and open to the idea of change within themselves? Yet it's ugly and comparable to someone switching allegiance to a sports team. It's one thing to have strong convictions and to stick to your principles, but it's another when those principles are reviled. This is why politics are so divided. It's shunned to change your views. What's the point of having a political debate if no one is allowed to change their mind? And this is paramount to having a strong science presence in politics. Science changes all the time.
The problem is everyone in politics KNOWS what the causal laws are that govern human ecologies. Indeed, everyone in the social sciences KNOWS what the causal laws are that govern human ecologies.
They don't.
What they have are correlations and, as every sophomore knows "Correlation doesn't imply causation."
The hard sciences get around this with experimental controls but it seems that the political class equates the political equivalent -- the Laboratory of the States -- as some how being a violation of the 13th amendment (or at least on the slippery slope to same). They prefer to slug it out with rhetoric and propaganda to see who can get their hypothesis in human ecology imposed on all States at once in the guise of "liberal democracy" which, in operational terms, is merely tyranny of the majority restrained only by a vague laundry list of selectively enforced "human rights".
Such "liberal democracy" is de facto theocracy whose canons are dictated by the equivalent of religious wars.
It is much more important to any real notion of human rights that people be able to vote with their feet, than vote in the ballot box. Assortative migration of mutually consenting adults sharing strongly held working hypotheses in human ecology is what the world needs -- not more centralized government ruled by a "scientific" elite. If a minute fraction of the dollars spent on wars was spent, instead, on such assortative migrations, not only would people be able to enjoy genuine consent of the governed, but the science of human ecology would be, for the first time, genuine science as the groups into which they assort would function as control groups, discovering the causal laws politicians and professors guess at and then preach at the populace and the pupils.
Of course -- the only time "science" is trotted out by the central government guys is when there are no options for control groups: global atmospheric concerns.
Yes, it is true that of the various soft-scientific views, atmospheric ecology is the strongest justification for centralized governmental controls. That's why we are NOT given the option of global assortative migrations but ARE given the option of global central authority controlling anyone who affects the atmosphere.
So, yes, Bob, you're right. You and your globalist theocrats do have a reasonable justification for imposing your belief system about global warming on the rest of the world. But you would be a LOT more credible among the "populists" if you put a fraction of the effort you put into global governance of atmospheric ecology into "regime change" that promoted a genuine Laboratory of the States so that when it comes to other political issues, you guys can just STFU and let people live their strongly held beliefs in human ecology among mutually consenting others.
Oh, but that would "open the door to 'State's Rights' Nazis!!!" The truth be damned. Consent of the governed be damned. Scientific ethics be damned.
Seastead this.
Bob Inglis was my (republican) congressman until the tea-partiers ran him out on a rail during the primaries. He was accused of not being sufficiently conservative. On fiscal and economic policy he was consistently conservative, but not so much on social issues. In other words, he is pretty much a Liberterian, and has not shifted his positions since leaving office. I do not know him personally, but he appears to be a thoughtful, principled man.
He was originally elected in the Clinton era, promised to limit himself to two terms, and kept that promise. He was succeeded by Jim DeMint, and was persuaded to return to congress when DeMint was elected as a senator.
Republicans are often accused of being dismissive of science and beholden to religion. I agree with this view. However, from my point of view as a non-religious person, the Democrats are the same, but in different ways. They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science. Environmentalism should be labeled a religion and treated as such. Also, Democrats propound economic theories of "fairness" which demonstrably lead to worse outcomes for the people they claim to represent. Remember, Republicans are no better.
For myself, I believe global warming is happening, but I am unconcerned about the consequences. So I am more worried about the response to global warming, than I am about the warming itself.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Too bad the secular humanists of the 19th century believed in spiritism and crystal balls.
(Not about TFA but about the title) I for one find the vision of a society ruled solely by scientific results to be a horrible dystopia. While the scientific method is the most reliable method to make the sphere of our ignorance smaller it is not beyond criticism. And especially the application of scientific results to our everyday problems and society is prone to error and abuse.
I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.
The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).
It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.
Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
I read, "I'll limit government agencies to only be able to see corporate shell games and call it consumer protection".
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I mean really, we're only 14 Trillion in debt, clearly we need to make it harder and more expensive to do business in the United States. Any other solution is just ludicrous. We'll just buy things made in another country and resell it here. I mean, thier poluted air will never make it ALL THE WAY over here... No chance. Let the other side of the globe burn to cinders under global warming. Technically, we already have carbon credits... They are called fines.
Interesting how many Republicans become sane once they're out of office
Interesting how Democrats DON'T
See Jimmy Carter.
Unfortunately, every generation has to put Democrats in charge of the government just to find out for themselves how bad of an idea it really is.
Lyndon Johnson? Got us involved in Vietnam (it was the Republican Nixon that got us out...)
Jimmy "Malaise" Carter? Gave up in the face of an act of war by Iran. Terrified by a killer rabbit. Even Carter's own mother said she wished she'd stayed a virgin.
Obama: Makes George W. Bush look good. Obama's unemployment rate is twice the "horrible" Bush years. Obama's deficits are 10 times the "unsustainable" Bush ones. Unilateral war? Obama in Libya is the archetype for THAT. Bush never lied about closing Gitmo or extending his tax cuts - Obama LIED about both. Bush also never summarily executed American citizens...
Ruining a franchise under any prominent and profitable company will spell success for any ambitious business entrepreneur.
genius...
Sorry the big controversies that "science should solve" are political.
For example global warming, the boosters claim the debate is over.
In science the debate is NEVER over.
The earth was flat, until we found out it was round.
The atom was the smallest indivisible object, until we broke it.
What about scientifically managing the economy? Not only are there different views of what the desired outcome should be, we don't actually understand how it works.
There are a number of areas where science doesn't give us the good clean perfect answer that some would hope for.
The reason to support "science" on climate change, is because the science supports your course of action.
I bet many of those same people would be opposed to supporting "science" on the economy and trade, because the scientific agreement is opposite their desired course of action.
"Or just critical thinking in general." that plus several courses in logic. It would enable the average person sift through the BS easier.
Well, there's some sane Republicans in office, such as Mitch Daniels, but his term as an elected official is soon to be over.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
In order to make any moral decision at all, you need to know the consequences of those decisions. People who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so. (The latter being obviously problematic, because most people don't know about their ignorance or delude themselves about their knowledge - and there is a selection bias in politics that favors those who are overconfident about their knowledge and judgment.)
Imaging a simple moral dilemma. Choice A: Ten people will die. Choice B: 5 people will die.
The decision is simple - you take B.
The problem? Well, you're wrong. Choice B was based on a popular myth that three of the people involved would not be in any danger - but actually they would die. B would cause the death of 8 people. Choice A on the other hand has only been represented by the media as being extremely dangerous, but a sober scientific assessment would have led you to the conclusion, that only 2 people will die.
Yes, there can be science - even successful science - without moral judgment. Which is a problem and it is highly visible. But there can be no true moral judgment without science. Moral judgment is entirely derivative of our knowledge of the world, of the cause and effect relationships involved.
Unfortunately, pomp and circumstance can easily hide a lack of knowledge about the consequences of decisions made by those claiming (or claimed) to be moral authorities. That includes, unfortunately, the whole debate of climate science that usually sees a lot of discussions among people who hold a claim to moral authority but don't know the least bit about the science. Instead, they rely on biased reporting of the science to make and justify their "moral" decisions.
I guess they want to use science in everything except... yup, you guessed it, religion. How convenient!
Seriously, people still think the president runs the show, and does it for the majority of us common folk? Go look into Yale's skull and bones, Bilderberg, ect.
I agree that we should tax the externalities of fossil energy use directly, rather than use cap and trade to the same ends. Cap and trade was originally a Republican idea, since it involves a market mechanism (the "trade" part), rather than being a pure government program (as a tax is). But a carbon tax is favored by James Hansen (the NASA climate scientist much hated by Fox), and it's the most direct route to the result.
But the representative's claim that not raising the minimum wage is favored by science or the facts is nonsense. It's wishful thinking that keeping wages down results in more jobs. We're in an America now where wages have been broadly suppressed for 30 years - over which median income has been nearly flat while per-capita GDP has doubled, with almost the entire gains going to the super-rich. So where are the jobs? On the scientific side, comparisons of similar regions with different minimum wages, and before-and-after comparisons of places where minimum wages have been raised, find absolutely no support for the claim that there will be higher unemployment where minimum wages are higher. None. The evidence, while not conclusive, leans the other way. It certainly isn't "science" then to be against raising minimum wages. It's just what the people who would rather stiff their workers on wages indulge in as wishful thinking. They want it to be true. And if your logic is simple minded, it will seem as if it should be. It's not.
For one thing, when more people are paid more, the can spend more, which supports greater employment all around. That logic is perhaps too complex for the Republican mind, because it's a second-order effect - it depends on the whole local economic ecosystem's health, rather than the immediate profit to the firm that just hired a worker at a low minimum wage. But complex systems are like that - you get effects out of them that aren't predicted from studying their parts in isolation. The Republican argument against a higher minimum wage follows exclusively from studying a part in isolation.
So do the Republican arguments against moving to forms of energy production without such dire "externalities." So yes, price in the cost of the externalities with taxes (even though there's no exact math capable of application in setting those taxes), lower the income tax, and capitalism will find a way. Republicans generally doubt that capitalism is smart enough to find a way unless the current economic landscape is kept in stasis. They call this "lessening uncertainty." The modern "capitalist" Republican is as addicted to stasis as the leaders of the old Soviet Empire. Heaven forfend America should ever again have to embrace progress and change. How could we compete in such a landscape, where oil and coal companies don't rule us forever?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Representative Inglis became former representative Inglis when he lost in the GOP primary in 2010 to run for re-election. That is what political parties tend to do to people who think on their own...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
we'd throw out most of classical economics and the notion of the free market due to being completely fallacious and based on a naive and incomplete model of physics.
"Interesting how many Republicans become sane once they're out of office"...
and how many Democrats don't.
They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science.
Agree with the majority of what you wrote, although that one line is horribly wrong.
Hang out with a geologist, like my former roommate, and even if you don't talk geology all the time, simply having to think about the topic will educate you.
The entire science / history of geology seems to be nothing more than carefully supported / researched / analyzed scientific study of environmental catastrophe. I'm sure there is some weird corner of geology focusing solely on the flight patterns of unicorns flying over rainbows, but 99.9% of geology is catastrophe related. The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum. Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that. Doesn't mean it won't be bad for the fools who didn't plan for it, but it does mean its (unfortunately) pocket change compared to expected geologic evolution.
Environmental catastrophe always has, and always will, occur. The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better". Nope, its still gonna suck, its just if we torture ourselves and destroy civilization before hand, we can make it worse and increase the total suffering of humanity, if we try really hard to implement hard core environmentalist agenda.
Part of it is what used to pass for environmentalism has become common sense. Don't dump industrial waste into your drinking water is common sense, not "modern environmentalism". All thats left of environmentalism is the watermelon types, green on outside, red on inside.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The title says it all.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
When was the last time a politician really solved a problem? I find that they just put band-aids on issues. It's time that we have scientists solve the issues of the world.
Oh, I don't think "science" is all that necessary for politics. It's a good indicator of someone's education and critical thinking skills and general intelligence. But political leadership is more about motivating people to do something -- anything -- in a coordinated fashion, that results in something more than they could do individually.
Besides, science doesn't provide any moral imperative to do good or bad. It just tells you that, based on past observations and maybe some theoretical extrapolation, Y is likely to happen if you do X.
Environmentalism is sort of a moral imperative to give back as much as you take. There are some that want to convince you that they need to take more. It's in society's interest to keep those people in their box. The science only figures into how you give or take.
What politics does need is transparency and accountability. But politics is all about accumulating power, and those things kinda run counter to that.
Ethics, fairness, and basic morality should be "king" in politics. Science should obviously inform appropriate decisions. But politics deals too much with matters that can't be quantified into scientific questions for it to be "king."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Scientists also produce error bars with their data. As a politician, you should look at the data including the error margin.
For example, if a scientists says that 'A' is happening with a 95% confidence, the politician can then calculate the costs as 0.95 * cost(A) + 0.05 * cost(not A). All kinds of strategies to deal with 'A' can be calculated in a similar way. In the end, net costs for all policies can be listed, and the cheapest one can be implemented.
Huh? That was a Bayesian interpretation to a 95% confidence, which is nowhere close to what is meant with "95% confidence".
First of all, I love science. It is a great tool for understanding our universe based on the resources we have to fuel our research. The scientific method gives us a foundation on which to build our knowledge, but it only generates undeniable facts under strictly controlled environments. All else can be considered evidence but can't honestly be considered truth.
The annoying thing about evidence is that it falls victim to a degree of subjectivity. No one is completely objective (unless one tossed out any and all non-empirical data), so interpretation and extrapolation of the evidence will always be influenced by philosophical and ideological values. I'm not necessarily talking about religion. Even the most rigid-minded scientist has a philosophical view of how the universe should function. After all, how do you objectively define what deserves attention and what does not? Even if it concerns the survival of the human race, who's to say that our survival is worth pursuing? That's where science ends and humanity begins.
Breeding shall now be restricted to once every seven years. For some of us this will mean less mating. For some of us it will be much much more.
This, the Republican't party is constantly sucking up to the religious right. These people base policies on what will get the religious vote and that is NOT even remotely related to science. This is the same group that will tell you that the USA was founded 'as a christian nation' despite clear 'separation of church and state' as spelled out in the constitution. This is the group that ignored all the facts and clung to 'discredited intelligence' to gin up the populace for a war in Iraq (Got WMD?). The article states "we insist on people being accountable for their actions", well, if that's the case, let's ship your precious George Bush overseas to face the war crimes trials that are awaiting him. Cheney too. The republican party has continually denied that global warming (climate change) was occurring, denied that mankind had ANY power to impact the climate and repeatedly assured their membership that 'God is on our side so everthing will be OK." All of this is bunk and anything but science. In short, they LIE.
Not that I care for repubs, but this article offers no solution to the problem. In reality, the dems are no better.
IMO: the stupidest thing to do is to just shake your fist of whichever party you don't belong to. It accomplishes nothing, and distracts from the real issue.
Thats what I heard on astronomy.fm (talk internet radio). So we have a week core and most likely of the 29%, of us that understand Science, we will not all agree. IMHO, we need more education.
It's more interesting how many Democrats don't.
The correct title should be: Should facts or fiction be king?
The most alarming thing about the article is the thinking that science is "consensus" based. Even if 95% of scientists agree with a theory that doesn't make it a reality. At times it is the handful of dissenters that turn out to be correct. (I'm not saying they are in this case, just pointing out the flawed thinking that there is a "consensus" and that numbers of "scientists" agreeing doesn't mean we write it into scientific law)
The most unsettling thing about the "climate change" debate is how skeptics are treated and attacked. Alarmists also need to be held accountable for wild and inaccurate predictions. If the science cannot make accurate predictions you have some more work to do before government-enforced behavior engineering is acceptable.
While environmental catastrophe may have been widespread in geologic history, things are different now. When the sea level rose dramatically a million years ago, it didn't destroy trillions of dollars/euros/yuan worth of real estate.
We're not talking about "politics", we're talking about governing.
It's not just the political system that's broken, it's us. Precious few citizens of any country except maybe Finland and a handful of others actually understand how their society works.
Look at the currently popular notion in the US that to run government, we need someone with experience running a private corporation. As if running a business had anything in common with running a government except they are both organizations. If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president and we've seen that's not usually the case. In fact, I'd say that "business experience" or "experience" in general (other than experience dealing with people) is highly overrated. Right now, there's going to be only one person running for president in 2012 that actually has on-the-job experience as president of the US. Does that make him automatically the best person for the job? Does the fact that a leading candidate on the other side ran a business that successfully cannibalized other businesses make him the best person for the job?
I think the notion (mentioned by someone else in these comments) that understanding "science" in the most basic sense of the word, as a system of understanding that things have explanations and effects have causes would be extremely important in government. Certainly more important than the current notion, that the guy who has the most money gets to rule. I would have thought we were disabused of that notion a few centuries ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Politician knows which side his bread is buttered. News at 9.
The entire science / history of geology seems to be nothing more than carefully supported / researched / analyzed scientific study of environmental catastrophe. I'm sure there is some weird corner of geology focusing solely on the flight patterns of unicorns flying over rainbows, but 99.9% of geology is catastrophe related.
I strongly disagree. It's like history.
"History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the kings' bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly."
-- J. H. Fabre
It's more interesting how many Democrats don't.
It's called a "pre-existing condition".
Science itself would be very partial and trustworthy. Unfortunately scientists are human, have agendas and are prone to unscientific thinking in order to get facts to fit what they think things should look like. To get to science, you have to go through a human, who taints the results.
> we have a hard time even making people identify themselves at the polls
Actually voter fraud is quite rare. There's been something like a couple dozen cases in the last decade or two, and most of those were just mistakes (eg: people voting in the wrong precinct). Election fraud, on the other hand, is a real reason for concern. With recent revelations on the weakness of electronic voting machines, that seems a far greater hazard.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Background on me: I'm a centrist. Some of my views would have the left saying I'm a right wing radical. Some of my views would have the right saying I'm a left wing radical. Overall though, I sit in the centre... definately not a moderate though... :)
I'm a big fan of science and read a lot of science magazines. I've noticed a lot of angst between the right and science (in the US at le. Science magazines and scientists frequently bash the right-wing (which I feel is inappropriate to the process). At the same time- I've noticed a huge distrust of science and the scientist from the right-wing.
Science shouldn't be a political thing. It bothers me that science and the right tend to be at war. I believe we need to do what we can to promote science and technology- but I don't want the left running everything. I'm sure the war starts from the right wanting to cut public spending on science (as all things)- but surely there are plenty of right-wing politicians out there that understand the difference between investment and wastefull spending.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The scientist Ben Franklin (No, it wasn't Albert Einstein) said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
We had 8 years of a science-and-fact-loving conservative government, after which we had a doubled national debt, two wars, an economic crisis second only to the Great Depression, the demonizing of evolution, and oh yeah, a new attitude in the country that climate change was questionable and that it was probably the scientists that were to blame. Please excuse me if I remain skeptical that a single former representative is going to change much.
There is a reason why Mr. Inglis is a "former" Representative - his commie ideas about actually believing the scientists were clearly not well received by his former constituency.
As much as I love science, it simply cannot be king, for several reasons. I used to think Science may one day replace several branches of philosophy, but I now realize this can never be the case.
Firstly there is the ethical consideration. Science describes reality as it is, it can inform decisions, but it cant tell us how the world Ought to be (normative ethics). Science can describe human ethical decision making, and suggest improvements, but it can't 'objectively' value them.
Secondly there is the epistemological limitation. The scientific method can predict and inform us of many things, but many of the most relevent systems with regard to politics (Social, Economic, Biological, Ecological, Intellectual sytems for example) are highly complex. I would not go so far as to argue that science cannot say anything about them, but when there is no room to repeat experiments on this scale, its likely scientists will have no concesus on many such issues. Additionally, the complexity of such systems makes prediction pretty much impossible, except maybe for very short time scales. There is something to be said about epistemic arrugance when we repeatedly attempt to predict numbers as 'simple' as GDP and cannot do so.
Both empirical measurement and theoretical decision making are extreemly difficult in this field, although they are improving. A big issue is model robustness (which is hard to achieve in complex systems). In empirical measurement, the statistics are not always so obvious (power law distributions are extreemly sensitive to sampling error).
Thirdly are practical issues which need to be worked out. What is considered an accepted scientific result? Assuming it is an accepted result, what do we do about it? Who decides? What about transparency? Do people even want this to happen?
In the end of the day WE are king, and science is our servent and advisor. When we start to think its the other way around, we have not only lost our freedom but also real critical thinking, which streches far beyond science and can doubt science itself.
While environmental catastrophe may have been widespread in geologic history, things are different now. When the sea level rose dramatically a million years ago, it didn't destroy trillions of dollars/euros/yuan worth of real estate.
1) The preposterous assumption we can stop that forever in to the future by forcing ourselves to become "noble savages"
2) The preposterous assumption that the best way to prevent trillions of dollars of destruction is to implement economic policies that will only cost tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars.
3) The preposterous assumption that people should not be responsible for their actions in the face of strong scientific evidence. Frankly, we need people who cannot process information to suffer a bit of Darwinian selection. We should encourage dumb people to live on top of an earthquake fault, or below sea level on the coast. Not punish everyone else because of the stupidity of a small group.
The way to evaluate environmentalist proposals is by time, not money. OK, we'll destroy modern civilization, or crush current civilization under the heel of a 1984 style boot for all eternity. The way to evaluate that is not in dollars, but in years... So that would cost us trillions, so what. The real effect is the next ice age will arrive about a hundred years sooner. Is that worth all the human suffering?
The solution to coastal flooding is not to go paleoconservative and try to prevent all geological change, which is utterly inevitably doomed to failure. Its to flow with the earth and not do something moronic, like, say, building a major city below (current or future) sea level.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Your post reminded me of a quote from Sagan's book "Demon Haunted World (Subtitled: Science as a candle in the dark)";
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United State is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Science does not care about politics.
No.
Bwahahahhahahhaa!
Funniest thing I've read for ages.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Inglis was defeated in the Republican primary in June 2010.
Sounds like more than just "in name only" he was their official representative.
Sounds like the Party decided he is a Republican In Name Only. All of that history falls into the "that was then, this is now" category. Now he's complaining that he represents the Real Republican Party, and all of those voters don't count.
Color me unimpressed.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Oh well, maybe when China owns us, everything will be on the right track ;-D
http://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chinese-political-leaders-have-engineering-degrees-whereas-their-American-counterparts-have-law-degrees
On fiscal and economic policy he was consistently conservative, but not so much on social issues. In other words, he is pretty much a Liberterian,
"Libertarian". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Libertarians are not conservatives.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
You can't have scientists running policy on global warming. If the world is warming, they'll propose anything scientifically possible to do something about it.
But how about someone who will tell you the economic impact of those actions? How about someone who will tell you the social impact of those actions? How about protecting freedom while implementing the actions?
Scientists can't answer that.
Look at the currently popular notion in the US that to run government, we need someone with experience running a private corporation. As if running a business had anything in common with running a government except they are both organizations. If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president and we've seen that's not usually the case. In fact, I'd say that "business experience" or "experience" in general (other than experience dealing with people) is highly overrated. Right now, there's going to be only one person running for president in 2012 that actually has on-the-job experience as president of the US. Does that make him automatically the best person for the job? Does the fact that a leading candidate on the other side ran a business that successfully cannibalized other businesses make him the best person for the job?
This line of thinking got us a President with zero experience of any useful kind. He had no experience running any kind of large organization be it public, private or military. Part of a year going through the motions of being a Congressman does not count. We are seeing the result of that.
Both major parties (not one, both) need to set aside their posturing and pontificating for the benefit of their fringe constituencies. This country has serious problems. We need a frank discussion of the solutions followed by non-partisan action. Let's put an end to any activity that only benefits a small portion of the citizenship. Halt useless Congressional activity that only serves political parties and their patronage. The time for such nonsense is long over. Let's get to work.
From someone that makes a plea to use facts as a basis for policy, stating that turbines
will be developed that burn only the hydrogen from coal is a bit strange.
Otherwise, I think the guy is right. A similar discussion took place in germany about nuclear
power plants. Normally speaking, a company is legally required to insure itself against damage
it can possible do to others. For nuclear power plantsin germany, the legally required amount is
set at something like a few ten million euros, which is completely laughable when considering
the actual damages in case of a Fukushima scale disasters (billions). However, no insurance
company wants to insure a company for billions of euros, so if a company is held accountable.
it will just go bankrupt. Its assest (the powerplant) will be worthless and the state will have to
pay for the damages. This means nuclear energy is actually implicitly heavily subsidized.
The two solutions that are in line with both past experience and economic theory are:
(A) cap-and-trade, where the government sells a limited number of pollution permits, allows the buyers of those permits to trade them, and then sends inspectors (funded by the proceeds of the original sale) to ensure that nobody goes over the number of permits they have. This was successfully used to reduce SO2 emissions back in the 1980's and 1990's.
(B) A CO2 tax, where the more you pollute the more you're taxed. This gives companies a financial incentive to reduce their emissions, and means that those that do reduce their CO2 emissions aren't at a competitive disadvantage from those that don't. Again, inspectors are needed (funded by the tax) to ensure that nobody cheats.
Both of these basically rely on putting a price on pollution, and then making sure nobody cheats on paying that price. It's enforced by the government because nobody else can - nobody owns the country's air, and nobody reasonably could.
The difference of course being that there are ways of reducing and eliminating SO2 emissions without sacrificing productivity. It is effectively impossible to generate power for electricity, machinery and transportation without generating a substantial amount of CO2 (the only plausible way I can imagine would be the ubiquitous application of nuclear power). Thus, limits on CO2 are a de-facto limit on production.
Really? Are you sure about that? Because we have ever higher rates of students failing basic math and science tests upon entrance into universities that have been the same for over 100 years. You apparently have been hiding under a rock whilst your education system has been crumbling.
That's because we have a higher percentage of young people going to college. It actually indicates an increase in the median education level, not a decline.
College isn't about education anymore - it's vocational training now. If your degree is in: business, engineering, medicine, law or any other major that prepares you for a career, then you're not educated.
The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum.
Obviously you don't live anywhere near a coast. The sea level rising a couple feet at the coastal city nearest to me, means probably 5,000 or more people whose homes have a foot of water in them. It also means a major re-planning and rebuild of a lot of the dock structures for the shipping port, and re-planning/rebuild of many of the structures at the local marina and launch docks for recreational boating. It also means a major change in coastal erosion patterns, wildlife, and navigability for the surrounding area due to the creation of highly shallow flat areas that are nevertheless waterlogged / "under water."
Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that.
Volcanic eruptions suck. Earthquakes suck. Tsunami suck. On the other hand, we can't prevent those - best we can do is improve our early warning systems. We CAN mitigate the damage we do to the environment, however.
The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better".
Oh for the love of... sigh. With this one paragraph you proved how completely fucking insane you are, because nobody I know who is an "environmentalist" has ever proposed such a thing. The closest to come has actually been the racist shitheads of the local Republican Party, who propose enforced limits (either economic penalty-based or forced-sterilization-if-on-government-assistance) on lower income people having babies (while at the same time denying this is anything like China's "one child policy", where only the ultra-rich are allowed to have an extra kid or two) with the express purpose of limiting the growing population of hispanics and blacks.
Someone's thought this through before
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
One of the biggest problems I've seen with science as it is used in public policy is that otherwise unrelated correlations are mined for in order to support a politically convenient theory, in order to provide a scientific basis for that public policy. Science (both social science and medical science) is full of these unrelated correlations which can then provide a "scientific" fig-leaf that allows you to bash your opponents as being unscientific idiots. (Nevermind the fact that you distorted the process.)
And if you don't find the correlation, bias the numbers.
Porn causes rape, anyone?
If you don't believe there are all sorts of random, weird and ultimately unrelated correlations out there, may I recommend Correlated?
Obama: Makes George W. Bush look good. Obama's unemployment rate is twice the "horrible" Bush years. Obama's deficits are 10 times the "unsustainable" Bush ones.
I'm a Republican who voted for McCain (and oh the shame, Palin), and I've voted GOP almost all my life, but I even call bs on this. The likes of you got to stop with this bullshit (same goes to left-wing lunatics for whom conservatives can never do good, you know who you are!.)
Current unemployment rates and the general economic malaise are a function of pre-existing conditions that have been brewing for decades now, not solely a function of the Obama's administration. This isn't rocket science.
Unilateral war? Obama in Libya is the archetype for THAT.
So? At best it was a master diplomatic stroke in that the US engagement is extremely limited, and done only on a support role for NATO (being led primarily by France and the UK), and for the first time ever, with the backing of every single Arab state, the result being the dethroning of a world-wide despised tyrant. It was certainly better than the Bush/Rumsfeld's fairy tale of a flowery reception in Baghdad, and with (so far) cleaner outcomes.
Bush never lied about closing Gitmo or extending his tax cuts - Obama LIED about both.
But he lied about WMDs, and Obama hasn't. So what's your point? That politicians lied when they have to and only for those subjects that they found strategic to lie about? Welcome to life dude.
Bush also never summarily executed American citizens...
Are you referring to Anwar al-Awlaki? You better be kidding. Bush didn't because he didn't have the chance. And to be honest, I don't see what's the problem of launching a predator against an Al Qaeda operative, American or not, that is actively plotting terror attacks against the US (and pretty much any other country should they deem it collateral damage). What did you want? An FBI agent knocking down his tent with an arrest warrant????????????????????
If we simultaneously eliminated all subsidies, we'd unleash real competition among all fuels. Markets would powerfully deliver solutions.
Have gnu, will travel.
That said, most politicians do NOT have experience running companies, just working for them. They demonstrate this lack of experience every single day that government runs without a balanced budget.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president and we've seen that's not usually the case.
Surprisingly, the data does not support that. Check Wikipedia's aggregate historical rankings of Presidents of the United States. Third place comes General Washington, with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in fifth, Major General Andrew Jackson and General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower tied for eighth, and finally Lieutenant Kennedy. That's five out of the top ten.
Now look at the bottom ten: Harrison was only a Lieutenant in the army (he was a major-general of the state militia, not sure how that counts), and Tyler, Bush Jr., Buchanan and Fillmore had only low-ranking military service. The only high-ranking ones were General Grant, Major General Taylor and Brigadier General Pierce. So only 30% of the bottom ten had significant military service.
So, looking at this data, I would definitely find a correlation between "good military leader" and "good president".
America needs a tax on ALL GOODS, imported and local produced. It should be on CO2 emissions from where the final and largest sub-component come from. It should be a % of a total tax. If your item comes from a low or none CO2 emission nation/state, then you have no real tax. If it comes from a high, then you get most of the tax.
One of the right ways to do this, is to make it be CO2 PER SQ KM of land. Not per capita. Per capita does not take into account a number of issues (economic output, ag, etc). Neither does sq km, but it comes closer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Use of science must be balanced with recognitions of its limits
1. Recognize the inherent limits of science - science can tell us a lot about what is but not much about what should be, what is right and wrong - also science is limited to observations of the physical world as it is.
2. Recognize the limits of the state-of-the-art. Psychology is still in its infancy and should not be too heavily relied on. Other sciences have plenty of room for doubt as well. For example, while long term climate change seems pretty likely, there is still a lot of doubt about what the long-term effects will be.
3. Recognize that scientists are people and many - particularly the most vocal - are likely to have their own agenda and/or selfish motivations.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
... into the ground.
Conservativeness is based on keeping tradition unless the replacement can be proven to be surperior, to maintain indivual accountability, to support honest hard work. Unfortunately, true Conservatives don't really exist.
When is the last time you heard a conservative trying to achieve Perfect Competition, which is the foundation of Market Based Economics, (markets don't work for the mutual benefit without it). Again, he doesn't, but at least he seems to be trying to embue so called conservatives with a sense of scientific obligation, and I will applaud him for that. Of course, the solution is a lot more obvious, take the massive oil subsidies and put them into renewable energy and storage. But again, he's TRYING to bring scientific values to modern conservativism.
...I remember from an ethics class, that some fella had the notion that politics was the supreme science in that it dictated what other sciences could and could not study. And did I see someone state that evolution was a fact/law? When its universally presented as a theory (ya know because we have no proof of a species turning into another over long periods of time)? While unpopular here, religious beliefs don't automatically mean anti-science. Spouting that line of nonsense debilitates your argument.
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
The notion that the next commander-in-chief should have experience running a private corporation is slightly better than the notion, quite popular a few years ago, that your next commander-in-chief should be someone you would like to "share a beer" with.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
Master's in computer science, did ballistics for the Navy, not the standard law or business degree that our politcians normally have.
This is why I'm not conservative any more. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I am still pretty conservative, but no longer in the Republican party, or any other party. In the past, conservative leaders were intelligent people like William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, George Will, Walter Williams, etc. Nowadays the conservative leaders are ignorant and boorish. I cannot associate with them, and have trouble associating with my friends who like them.
Having said that, ignorance is not limited to those on the right. There are a lot of leftists who are pretty stupid as well. These are the people who think we should not put babies in diapers, suggest we ban the use of plastic utensils, and assume thousands of wind turbines will not require expensive maintenance.
Proverbs 21:19
The solution to the causation conundrum in the social sciences is available to policy makers but the reality is they don't want to know the truth and they don't want government to be truly consensual.
Seastead this.
Or at least not in any political faction that describes itself either as liberal or conservative.
Placing science first in politics is the tacit acceptance of utilitarianism or technocracy as the guiding principle or ideology. Liberalism is supposed to be about placing liberty first. And conservatives claim to be trying to bring back "traditional American values," which certainly includes liberty.
Very often you see this tacit acceptance of utilitarianism (the government should regulate anything that's harmful) and technocracy (what the experts say "is king") in political debates over policy decisions. For example, take two people debating over climate change, with one person citing data that supports climate change and the other citing data that discredits it. Often the whole point of the debate is actually whether or not some new policy should exist, but both people immediately attack the policy decision from the science angle: If global warming is real, obviously the government should pass these regulations! If global warming isn't real, obviously they shouldn't! Both people have already, tacitly, accepted that the government ought to pass the policy merely if the scientific data is correct, without addressing a deeper question that should be asked first: In a so-called "free society," which purports to respect things like personal freedom, property rights, &c., should the government even be legislating this particular topic in the first place, regardless of whether or not such regulations might stop or prevent some harm? Even if the policy might prevent some sort of physical harm, does the policy infringe upon human freedom?
As for the article, the whole thing is a straw man: Conservatives who "deny" climate change are in fact putting facts first; they are making the science "king" -- they're just presenting their own facts and data that discredit rather than support climate change, and basing their policy decisions on that. Both parties nowadays, while claiming to support "liberty" (albeit in slightly different ways) are in fact both utilitarian and technocratic. Only minority factions such as constitutionalists or libertarians seem to be willing to address the climate change debate from the deeper ethical and moral angle.
Liberty in your lifetime
There are many issues involved, making the whole claim totally, well, wrong.
The first problem is that science can't fix **goals**. Einstein explained it well in http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism but it's a much more general point admitted by most serious rationalists : science (or more exactly rationality, from which science is a subset) is the most powerful tool to understand the world, and to change it to match your goals. But science can't fix goals. It can enable you to maximize your utility function, but it can't fix your utility function. And people will disagree on goals. That's the main reason for which elections and democracy are the best (or at least, "less worse") system, for it allows people to fix the goals together. Imperfectly, but since there is no objective set of goals, no ultimate utility function, only asking to everyone what they want can solve disputes between goals.
The second problem is that science requires the ability to perform repeatable measurements. Large-scale social sciences (like macroeconomics) are therefore not really sciences. You can't perform repeatable experiments and measurements in macroeconomics, with changing one factor and letting the others stay the same. While you can measure the speed of light, or the amount of energy liberated by fusion between two given isotopes of hydrogen, you can't measure how much a tax cut or welfare policy will affect the economy as a whole. You can't make an experiment for that and have 5 other labs around the planet to repeat it in the same conditions. Same when you test a drug on humans, you'll test it on hundred or thousands of cases, comparing it with a placebo. You can't have the same level of confidence in large-scale social science (such as macroeconomics) than you can in physics or biology. You can use rationalism over the evidence we have favoring one or the other systems, but that will still be much more disputed than a claim of "science", and you'll find economists defending and opposing every proposed policy, in a way you'll never see in physics.
The third problem is that science is definitely not conservative. Associating science with conservatism is completely misunderstanding what science is about. Science is completely revolutionizing itself. Relativity and QM are the most known revolutions, but science is directly bound to the idea of **progress**, science is a process of always getting closer to the truth - making your map of reality always closer to what reality really is. Science is definitely not something static, with final answers that will never be changed. That's one of the most fundamental differences between science and religion. Conservatism is resistance to changes. Science is embracing change, realizing you were wrong and fixing it.
That said, yes, we would gain to use more rationalist (or scientific, if you prefer) approach to many topics in politics. And more trust from politicians towards scientists.
And that, I'm pretty sure, would not favor "conservative" policies. It would favor gay rights and abortion. It would oppose death penalty or gun ownership. And it would oppose the current economical orthodoxy, which just, well, fails, from Argentina to Greece to USA. Just for USA, it was much faring better off in the 60s and 70s when it add very high income taxes on the richest, and regulations like Glass-Steagall act, than nowadays after the Reagan/Bush cuts and Clinton liberalism. That part is very well open to debate, but the 3 first reasons for which those claims are just, well, *false*, are much less debatable.
"According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts."
Wow. What a wacky way to self-destruct your political career. I guess his unorthodox opinion explains the "former" modification.
Ask me about my sig!
the hidden costs -- to all fuels?" Sounds like Socialism to me.
It's that science is always changing. What we think we know or understand today isn't what it was yesterday and it won't be the same tomorrow. Consider, neutrinos and the size of the proton. If we continue to base scientific principals on ideas that turn out to be false, then we could end up throwing a lot of money, effort and even our own safety away because something SEEMED to be correct.
"According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. "
The GOP has been at the forefront of making those issues into issues of denial and wishful thinking. Please.
Your implication is the his lack of experience led to the adoption of policies that you don't agree with. That's hardly a condemnation of his ability to be president. Overall, his approval ratings are far better the GWB's at the end of his second term - a guy who at that point had plenty of executive experience.
Obama also had no military experience and little foreign policy experience, yet even most conservatives think that he is doing well on the "war on terror."
I agree with your last point, but experience is overrated in a presidential candidate. They bring a team with them and their ability to succeed in a primary and federal election is a reasonable proof of basic competence. Now, if a candidate has experience running a large organization and seriously screwed it up, that's another issue.
If we're suggesting areas of study to rule our nation, here's my vote for the council or congress:
(1) Epistemology - The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.
(2) History - To prevent making the same mistakes over and over.
(3) Ethics - The study of the many ways in which individuals decide to act (and treat one-another) based on their priorities, knowledge, and assumptions.
(4) Fact-based Sciences - All the basics of Biology, Physics, Chemistry, etc.
(5) Research-based Math - Mainly economics
(6) Social Psychology - To understand how and why groups of people act the way they do.
How about a "scientific" soundbite? If the science is difficult for the "masses" just deliver a pithy one-liner that actually describes the science -- something along the line of "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- and then let the media explain it to the masses. That is their job, after all.
If they ask you to explain it, just say, "I'm sorry, did you not take biology in high school? Well, go ahead and google it, and if you still have questions, feel free to call me tomorrow, I just don't want to take up valuable time right now, when so many others have questions to ask. Thank you."
Somehow I have to wonder if scientists themselves don't contribute to this dumbing down because they get too caught up in the limelight. Here's a geek who probably isn't used to media attention, especially not when being interviewed by a busty female reporter who's suddenly fascinated by his hard-earned knowledge. Then of course, there's the ego-trip of demonstrating how much smarter you are than "normal" people... so there's plausible cause for scientists to "dumb down" their findings, which would naturally have the undesirable effect of reinforcing the notion that "science is hard" among the masses.
Higher expectations tend to beget better results.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Deaths per terawatt-hour. That is, if we need to generate X amount of electricity, here's how many people will die to get it generated based on method:
Coal - 161
Oil - 36
Natural Gas - 4
Biofuel/Biomass - 12
Peat - 12
Wind - 0.15
Hydro - 1.4
Nuclear - 0.04
Nuclear has the biggest "dumb public" problem of any electricity generation method. They're afraid of the invisible killer that'll make them glow in the dark regardless of how many people have actually died from it.
Except our markets are not free.
I reuse re-purpose recycle but even thought I put out my trash can only once a month I still have to pay as much as everyone else.
You make it so it is subtracted from our bills and your land fills will not fill up so fast.
Simple solution but never going to happen.
In a free market 1-99 would never exist.
"According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts."
Wait, what? Since when?! Not in my lifetime.
Politics is not a science. Science should not be "king" in politics any more than politics should dominate science. They are two different things. Just because you are (or claim to be) a scientist doesn't give you any particular right to tell me what to do, period. Nor does it make you right. Scientists make mistakes because they don't always follow the right method of inquiry, not because of who they are. We live in a democracy, not a technocracy.
Perhaps he should read the comments to his article? It's full of climate deniers... Makes me kind of sad really....
And if more people understood there wouldn't be a problem.
Again, for the love of sanity: we NEED people to live in various areas. Each area has various risks - earthquake, volcano, tsunami, hurricane, tornado, hot as fuck winters, cold as fuck summers, and on and on. We manage our risks as best we can. But for each area there is a BENEFIT to people living there as well.
Coastal cities are necessary. We need ports. We need fishermen. We need all sorts of things that only coastal cities can provide, just like we need all sorts of things that regularly-flooded farmland can provide and things that can only be found on volcanic islands.
Your "fuck everyone that ever lived anywhere there was risk" idea is just fucking stupid and you know it.
Those rankings are political wranglings. No one is going to argue that Washington was a bad president, but I will certainly argue that Jackson burnt this nation so hard we spun into the Civil War from his mismanagement. I'm certain an intelligent conservative could have excellent arguments against Roosevelt being on that list too. Eisenhower was a humble man at the right time. He never would have been a bad president, but he wasn't one of our finest. The bad presidents governed during bad times in our nation's history.
It pains me to read the comments on a story like this. You all claim to be so smart, so superior, yet you make countless errors including:
* falling into the left-right, liberal-conservative nonsense. all politicians and bureaucrats, and indeed all human beings, are motivated by self interest.
* assuming that state actions have no consequences other than the intended ones
* completely ignoring morality, ethics, philosophy, economics, and countless other things to consider before decided to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of unwilling people
There is no "scientific" solution to politics. The only thing that distinguishes the state from all other human organizations other than organized crime is its ability and desire to threaten, extort, and coerce its way to achieving objectives. Science can play no useful role here.
I used the aggregate rankings. I figure if you take the obviously-Democrat-biased ones and the obviously-Republican-biased ones and average them, you'll get something relatively accurate (if a bit harsh on the Whigs).
Eisenhower was a good manager. Remember, we didn't win WW2 because we had better equipment or better generals or better soldiers, we won because we had better production. Eisenhower was good at managing supply lines and organizing the various battlefield generals. Which is both exactly what we needed for WW2, and pretty much exactly what the President should be doing - getting together a bunch of good people, giving them a goal and enough funding, and letting them do their job.
I also think you mixed up your Roosevelts - Theodore is relatively highly-rated by conservatives, even though he was a liberal for his time. It's Franklin that the conservatives hate.
Actually voter fraud is quite rare.
lol That is such a joke. I personally know more than a couple foreigners who voted in US elections as students, during a particularly heated election in Hawaii. If voter fraud appears rare, it's because no one is looking for it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
For someone who purports to respect the "facts", this article is somewhat short on them.
To WHAT "several recent studies" showing a 95% consensus does he refer? I am only aware of one such "study", and that was the infamous non-peer-reviewed paper by Naomi Oreskes, which was thoroughly and soundly discredited almost immediately after it was published.
This line of thinking got us a President with zero experience of any useful kind.
And if you'll recall, the only alternative was someone whose only experience appeared to be wrecking planes and politicking. There is no one from either party who is seriously offering viable alternatives, and if they were, they'd be laughed off the ballot. This is the problem with having an uninformed, uneducated populace -- something both parties have worked very hard to cultivate.
You have the fiscal conservatives who want a restrained fiscal policy for government.
Then there are the governmental conservatives, who want to reduce the power of federal government over the states, and the power of all government over the people. They're more for individual freedom, but the government does have to spend a lot of money to infringe on those freedoms, so they're related to the first.
In both cases they want to go back to original concepts of our country -- a small government that doesn't use much of the country's riches to run and doesn't interfere much with the lives of the people.
Then you have religious conservatives, who aren't necessarily either of the above. Many of them are creationists.
This doesn't fly well with the Enlightenment environment this country was created in, with the love for science and learning, and the willingness to question theistic traditions. So in a sense, they're not very conservative, just fundamentalist.
They also weren't identified solely with the Republican party. The concentration of Christian conservatives into the Republican party didn't start until around the 1960s with Barry Goldwater. Ignorant racist Southern Democrats were also a huge chunk of religious conservative influx. They began defecting when the Democratic Party finally started supporting civil rights for blacks, and that became a flood when Nixon actively courted them to the Republicans to get elected.
> Your "fuck everyone that ever lived anywhere there was risk" idea is just fucking stupid and you know it.
How the holy fuck could you read "We can still have ports and resorts along the beaches, just price relocating/rebuilding them into the cost of doing business instead of lining up for the FEMA check." and get me wanting nobody living along the coastline?
Just what percentage of the people living in New Orleans are involved in in the port, gas terminal or fishing? Be generous and count the shopkeepers, schoolteachers, policemen, plumbers, etc and such required to supply the needs of the dockworkers and fishermen and their families. New Orleans should be at most 20% of its current population. Then add in the French Quarter since it beings in so much tourism and besides, it is about the only land around there that is actually above sea level. Why do you think the French established a city where they did? The ninth ward, totally below sea level, should never have been rebuilt since it is just a huge people warehouse and could equally be anywhere in CONUS.
Same for flood plains. Yea, we get most of our food from them, farmers should be living there. But vast housing developments? Office blocks? Factories? Tell me again why we are growing cities there instead of pricing things such that most new growth happens a few miles inland where it doesn't flood every couple of years?
Democrat delenda est
From Wiktionary (2):
(chiefly US) A believer in a political doctrine that emphasizes individual liberty and a lack of governmental regulation and oversight both in matters of the economy ('free market') and in personal behavior where no one's rights are being violated or threatened. Also 'classical liberal', akin to 'anarcho-capitalist'.
Historically, the Democratic Party is owned by the content creation industry, the liberals pushing its agenda. That was a very bad example.
For example, the MAFIAA practically owns liberal Democrat Howard Berman (D-Disney), who is one of the the lead politicians pushing ACTA through.
Look at the currently popular notion in the US that to run government, we need someone with experience running a private corporation.
Huh? You mean the US, where the current president has had zero experience running anything but a campaign? Where the democrat president before him ran nothing but a governor's office? I don't think this notion is quite as popular as you pretend.
On the other hand, why shouldn't it be a qualification? Running something other than a political machine seems like a desirable thing. Having run a successful business, and demonstrating a basic understanding of economics and how money works and how to meet a payroll seems to me to be a good thing.
If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president
Logical fallacy. The military is not a business. Rarely does a CEO have to order people out into the field to die. Rarely can a CEO put someone into prison for failing to obey an order. Your odd view of the military is one of the common failings of liberals who think that the military is nothing more than a public service organization that should be transporting food and medicine to needy people. Or maybe out filling sandbags to help with floods.
Does the fact that a leading candidate on the other side ran a business that successfully cannibalized other businesses make him the best person for the job?
Of course one qualification is not enough to fully judge a candidate. And I doubt you will find that this one qualification is all that is being presented.
Certainly more important than the current notion, that the guy who has the most money gets to rule.
You mean like Warren Buffet who is busy twisting public policy to meet his personal goals? Or George Soros, who is using his money to push his goals? Those "most money" people?
I assumed you were talking about the US, but now it is clear you aren't. The one with the "most money" doesn't get to rule. It takes an election. Even those with a lot of money to send lots of lawyers into a state to try to prevent legal ballots from being counted don't always win.
On the contrary, Republicans (in particular) have been looking for it for a long time. But even so, they have not been able to come up with much evidence of it.
As for your "foreign" voting friends, are you certain of their status at the time of voting? Did they tell you they were cheating? If so, did you try to talk them out of it? Did you report it to the authorities? When I was in school, back in the 80's, I would hang out with foreign students all the time, and I never met anyone who claimed to have voted in a US election.
Show me some evidence (not just hearsay) that there is a significant number of voter registrations which can't be matched with local records of birth, school, etc., then perhaps I'll take "voter fraud" more seriously.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
If voter fraud appears rare, it's because no one is looking for it.
Or reporting it, eh?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Right, because the Texas governor that came before him did such a bang up job. Bush had experience with governing a large state and running several large businesses into complete ruin. That didn't make him qualified to run the country.
In fact, if Bush and his Neo-Con's hadn't fucked the economy so hard with their glad handing of the banking systems then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess and the political posturing really would be as meaningless as it had previously been. Right now we're on a precipice placed their by the raping of our economy, not by politicians, but by the banking sector and the posturing really is seriously harming our country.
Both major parties (not one, both) need to set aside their posturing and pontificating for the benefit of their fringe constituencies. This country has serious problems. We need a frank discussion of the solutions followed by non-partisan action. Let's put an end to any activity that only benefits a small portion of the citizenship. Halt useless Congressional activity that only serves political parties and their patronage. The time for such nonsense is long over. Let's get to work.
The problem is that there is not one solution. There are a variety of solutions that have a variety of impacts on different people. We could close the deficit eliminating social security, medicare and medicaid. We could do it by cutting the military budget by three quarters and raising taxes on the top 1%. We could just say fuck it, continue massive deficit spending and pass a debt of twice GDP to our grandchildren.
The problem is that there is no objectively right answer. So what we have is the different beneficiaries fighting over scarce resources. You can't just say "do it now" because the question remains -- do what? There is no amount of discussion or "work" that will get the AARP to agree to eliminate social security, or the defense contractors or their employees to agree to a plan that would cut their contracts by three quarters, etc. So you have a bunch of political posturing as different factions do horse trading to try to assure that their donors' desires make it into the budget.
It isn't about Doing the Right Thing, it's about who gets to have the government take money out of the treasury to write them a check. The only way you could put a stop to it is if you took the money out of Washington -- if you handed all the social programs to the states and left the federal government in charge of a military which consumed the European-average percentage of GDP. Then the lobbyists would have to go to the states, which would make each lobbyist 50 times less effective.
As for your "foreign" voting friends, are you certain of their status at the time of voting? Did they tell you they were cheating? If so, did you try to talk them out of it? Did you report it to the authorities?
Yes, I was certain of their status (there is no doubt on that point), no I did not try to talk them out of it, or report them. It was during the Hawaiian gay marriage elections in the late 90s. Most of the time, foreign students weren't any more interested in politics than the rest of us, but that was a high profile election.
I don't know how widespread that sort of thing is, it would be great if someone did a study on it, but it's definitely more common than 'a couple dozen cases in the last two decades.'
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hm... I meant to put a link in there, but forgot...
http://politics.salon.com/2008/04/28/scotus_2/
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I suppose it really depends on how you measure a "good" president. There are some people that think Bush Jr. was the best thing to happen to this country, but they marked their survey ballot in crayon with a big "X"
I got here through a series of tubes
Were there more than a couple votes difference between the winning and losing candidates? And please give more of the story. Were they able to register without being citizens, or did they simply pretend to be someone else?
You mean like Warren Buffet who is busy twisting public policy to meet his personal goals? Or George Soros, who is using his money to push his goals? Those "most money" people?
If you are going to put both Warren Buffet and George Soros's name into this category (not saying you are wrong in doing so), perhaps you would be so kind to include the Koch Brothers, who own Koch Industries and are actively funding "conservative value" campaign, while undermining our country's security by doing business with Iran in proxy.
I got no problem with you trying to paint Warren Buffet as having personal agenda, however unclear it is (we know Soros political standing pretty well) to others. However please be fair and include prominent figures from "both" side of the spectrum when you do so. Then the argument is more persuasive and truly balanced.
Well, a couple dozen cases are all that have surfaced in that time. And given the Republicans' particular focus on this issue, you'd think they could have dug up more than that.
Out of curiosity, where where your foreign friends from, and how did they vote in the gay rights thing?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Mr. "I have four kids" Al Gore is a BIG proponent of population control. Of course, he only means population control for the darker skin types, not for rich folks like himself.
Couch it in whatever racist terms you'd like, but Republicans are only proposing to stop the vicious feedback cycle that Democratic welfare has created. Poor woman has kid, we pay her more, she has more kids in order to get more. When having kids is the easiest path to making money, that is the path people will take. This also contributes to breakup of the family, as a mother can make more if she doesn't have a husband, practically ensuring she and her kids remain in poverty.
This all perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Democrats want to continue it, Republicans want to stop it.
In those areas when a teenage girl gets pregnant the first thought is often "Wooohooo, I'm gonna get a government check now!" That perverse incentive needs to be eliminated.
It's not that the anti-science political machine doesn't believe in science - the problem is that they believe that winning is more important, and supporting their big corporate donors' agendas is a big part of winning.
The opposition to evolution is primarily to get religious conservatives to identify themselves as political conservatives (as opposed to feeding the hungry, healing the sick, freeing the prisoners, building peace instead of war, etc. and similar liberal values.) But it's also to get people to believe what their leaders tell them instead of thinking about the consequences of what they're doing, and to keep them anti-science - believe the authorities, not the experts!.
The opposition to climate change science is much more fundamental, because it's a corporate-sponsor thing. If the public believes that pollution and carbon emission are leading to devastating climate changes, then they'll pressure politicians to make laws like cap&trade that are bad for oil and coal companies, or laws about farm practices that affect big agribusinesses, or laws restricting clear-cutting forests, or laws about managing government-owned natural resources. Well, "Drill, Baby, Drill!", and if it means lying to another generation of schoolkids about how biology works to keep them anti-science, no problem.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Both major parties (not one, both) need to set aside their posturing and pontificating for the benefit of their fringe constituencies. This country has serious problems. We need a frank discussion of the solutions followed by non-partisan action. Let's put an end to any activity that only benefits a small portion of the citizenship. Halt useless Congressional activity that only serves political parties and their patronage. The time for such nonsense is long over. Let's get to work.
Good luck with that...
Carter inherited a large family farm, and when he got settled after leaving the Navy he went straight into politics.
Cain spent 25 years in various aspects of real business, climbing his way to the top, before going into politics (and then it was only advising initially, with no serious run until 2004).
But one of my biggest reasons for wanting to see him in the campaign is to see how Obama leverages race politics. Will Obama use "Uncle Tom" on Cain? Will Cain trump him with the fact that he experienced real racism and hardship growing up poor in the segregated South, while Obama was raised middle-class white in Hawaii?
Just what percentage of the people living in New Orleans are involved in in the port, gas terminal or fishing? Be generous and count the shopkeepers, schoolteachers, policemen, plumbers, etc and such required to supply the needs of the dockworkers and fishermen and their families. New Orleans should be at most 20% of its current population.
Cities grow. This is the nature of cities. Shops grow. There's a whole gambling industry there (bet you forgot that) - call it entertainment and tourism both. The rest of the places you mention are tied into a local economy. Nothing pops up "just to pop up", nothing happens in a vacuum. The population of a city grows because needs of the people there are met by increases in both business and population.
And as well you know, the French established the city where they did because (A) it had a semi-protected harbor and (B) the floodwash delta was very fertile farmland. Conducive to - dare I say it - growing a relatively large city for the time period.
Tell me again why we are growing cities there instead of pricing things such that most new growth happens a few miles inland where it doesn't flood every couple of years?
Flood plains are land "nobody wants." Therefore people who want to build Really Fucking Cheaply (and avoid property taxation!) will build there. If you want to re-jigger the system and change the rules for how it's going to work, and try to make it pricier to live there, go ahead. But you're going to have to accept that this is going to require the intervention of what you right-wing kooks call "big government" to make happen, and that it's going to come at the cost of preventing farmers from having the access they have grown to expect in terms of economic interaction otherwise.
They opposed it (most people did in those days, gays were weird), and they were mostly from Polynesia. I don't know that I've seen any Republican focus on trying to dig up cases of voter fraud, though. They talk about it in some districts, but that's about it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We are just missing some smart person with no preconcept and unwilling to rule anybody.
Rethinking email
You don't have to be a citizen to vote, you just need a signature. I don't remember that it made any huge difference in the outcome of any election, but I didn't really pay attention either.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is a keystone to the GOP's long-tem goals, for a brutally ignorant voter is an easily manipulated voter. Home-schooling nine times out of ten (the tenth done to avoid an already starved / abandoned / dangerous school system) really means Right-Wing madrassa-style indoctrination into the rich Republican tapestry of hate and exploit 'the others'.
Not having to pay taxes to help other kids and society in general is just rich, delicious, filling, Chris Cristie-approved gravy.
That, and all the Godzilla movies.
Seriously, you can see smoke, fire, water, air pollution (even from a plants a hundred miles away), a blade flying off, etc. But you can't see radiation, and that scares people.
I was trained to map fallout patterns, radiation levels, optimum time of exit, etc., so it doesn't really scare me. I know what's involved.
The Democrats, even liberal Democrats, are owned by the entertainment industry.
Don't pull a "No True Scotsman" on the definition of "liberal."
Really? I'm sure states differ, but I sign next to my typewritten name at the polling place since I register beforehand. Where do you only need a signature, can sign by any name you want (without being asked your name)? Is that Hawaiian policy?
> let the media explain it to the masses. That is their job, after all.
Sure, trust the media to do their job. Now there's a good idea.
Start a "The Scientific Party" and let the democratic process do it's work. If there's a demand for such thing, it will be.
If you just have simple plurality voting, the system will naturally crowd out all but two parties. A preference system, ideally a Condorcet method, is needed for many competing parties to survive.
Yeah, there's science on that.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It was Eisenhower's vision that created the highway system, based on his experience of managing army supply lines. Various groups had been lobbying for a highway system for more than 30 years, but those requests were repeatedly ignored as too expensive, and a problem for the states to deal with, until he got into office and finally made it happen. He almost singlehandedly championed the largest infrastructure project in the nations history, which directly contributed in a very big way to economic growth for 50+ years.
Wasn't one of our finest?? If you live in America, then your quality of life is absolutely better because of him.
> this is going to require the intervention of what you right-wing kooks call "big government" to make happen
Not really. Mostly it would involve having the government NOT do the stupid things it is now doing, mostly FEMA not bailing the same people out every couple of years and creating moral hazard. If your house flooded yet again and THIS time FEMA said it was the last time they intended to pay you or provide zero interest loans, whatever and that you had better take this check and use it to build somewhere a little higher up or put your house on very tall stilts you would do exactly that.
The city of Cameron, LA (an hour or so from where I live) has been destroyed to the foundations and the naked bank vault three times in the last hundred years. And guess what they are doing right now? Yup, rebuilding. At what point does this start sounding like Monty Python and Swamp Castle? At least this this time a fair portion are getting the hint and either building up or elsewhere. But it took two total wipeouts in a ten year window to put that lesson in and I'll bet you in another decade people will forget and build it right back up because they know FEMA will be there. Some of that city does need to be there, they do important work. But much of it could be somewhat more inland and still do what needs to be done. People insist on rebuilding on the same patch of ground though, because they can. Because FEMA will be there, regardless of the risk.
Democrat delenda est
> Republican focus on trying to dig up cases of voter fraud
That was the whole point of cutting assistance to ACORN, remember?
(BTW, gays are still weird.)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Vote fraud, not voter fraud. We've had the infamous butterfly ballot, and ballots being rejected as invalid for dubious reasons such as the "hanging chad". The number of voting machines in Wisconsin districts has been very uneven, with a strong correlation between Democratic leaning districts and fewer machines. Takes hours of waiting in line to vote there, versus little to no wait in Republican leaning districts. Photo ID is just another barrier, another soft way to disenfranchise certain sorts of voters. See Caging.
I find it particularly hypocritical to make noise over alleged voter fraud, in order to commit all these other frauds with the vote.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
NPR did a pretty cool history of that event
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5522133
Essentially, most of the engineering groundwork was laid out during the previous administration, the senate had approved it 89-to-1 before going to Eisenhower (Louisiana sen. didn't want to raise the gas tax from 2c to 3c per gallon), Eisenhower was hospitalized under some kind of intestinal distress when he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and he kinda thought he was enacting something that would build a system more similar to the autobahn in Germany than what we really got.
But cool beans nonetheless.
we can stop that forever
I'm not sure that's what was said.
by forcing ourselves to become "noble savages"
I don't think all environmentalists want this, either.
On the contrary, Republicans (in particular) have been looking for it for a long time. But even so, they have not been able to come up with much evidence of it.
How hard do you REALLY think they are looking? Keep in mind that if they look to hard, they might find their own. There were reports from the 2008 primaries of Ron Paul get zero votes out of specific precincts. The people that voted for him protested loudly, and the voting authorities said, "Oh, we must have missed those." Then there was all sorts of shenanigans going on with the recounts around the Alaskan senatorial seat.
The Republicans are looking hard for fraud.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
That's like saying selling rock cocaine on a street corner qualifies you to be CEO of Pfizer.
OK, you're right. I left out the fact that he's got really good hair.
Exactly my point. Would you want one of those guys to be president?
Do you know how many times in the past 40 years the candidate with the most money won his election, at all levels of government? It's very near 85%.
Yes, here in the US, the candidate with the most money gets to rule. It's as close as you can get to an absolute. It's a way we've been able to make bribery part of the process. You can't be elected unless you have already sold every single one of your principles to the highest bidder. It's exactly why we have three unbelievably destructive "free trade" agreements flying through congress right now on their way to becoming law and costing the United States another 600,000 jobs. Republican and Democrat, they can't vote this thing in fast enough despite 78% of Americans being opposed to it (Zogby, Sept 27). And the handful of lawmakers that are opposed to those "free trade" agreements? Not a single one is Republican, despite half of the freshman teabag congressmen coming out against free trade agreements during the election. As soon as they got into office, those shiny new ideologues decided it was more important to pay back their campaign donors than actually do what's best for their constituents.
Of course, many of them have "real-world" experience in "the private sector". Which is code for "they know how best to fuck over people".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm sorry, it's too late for that. Since only a small portion of the citizenship are providing the largest portion of campaign contributions, the only activities we're going to see in government are those that are going to benefit a small portion of the citizenship.
The president who was in the White House during what was arguably the greatest time of crisis and did the best job was the president who had the LEAST experience "running any kind of large organization". Abraham Lincoln.
I'm sorry, your arguments are conventional wisdom, but I think history has proved that they are just wrong. There is no correlation between "experience running a large organization" and being president who is good for the country.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Poor woman has kid, we pay her more, she has more kids in order to get more.
Oh bullshit. Show me one iota of proof that people deliberately have more babies to get more assistance. Do you think that assistance comes close to covering the cost of raising a child, even raising the child poorly?
Yeah, people just looooove being on welfare. It's such a glamorous lifestyle! Reagan's "welfare queen" was proven to not exist and be complete and total bullshit, as is your argument.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
You think a Lieutenant runs a large complex organization?
I'm not saying military service doesn't make for better presidents. I believe it does, actually. I just don't believe being a GENERAL necessarily makes for a better president.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wow! An unsupported anecdote! Quick, stop the presses boys, ignore the data, this man has an anecdote!
The only joke here is you. Back your arguments with sources or GTFO.
Thanks! Its always nice to find out when the version of history I've been told was embellished.
How would marinas need to change? They all already have to deal with tides. I haven't seen any that are built with exactly zero tolerance for the highest of high tides.
A professed belief in God is an absolute requirement to be elected president
To be fair, it's just a de facto requirement.
Being conservative doesn't mean dealing in facts. Being a rational human being means dealing in facts. How you get the facts and what you do with the facts after you have them is the crucial point. Do you get them from studies funded by lobbyists, and are you bound conditionally by their support or are you free to observe and implement in an unbiased manner?
Twinstiq, game news
If these politicians are happy with minimum wage, then why are their salaries more than minimum wage? Clearly they believe minimum wage is sufficient, and therefore that is what they should be paid. The value of being a politician is the position to improve, not the riches.
Twinstiq, game news
Just because he accepts the facts on global climate change doesn't mean the rest of his ideas are based in reality. Just look at his solution: the "free market". Seriously? We should just let capitalism fix everything? The same capitalism that causes massive economic meltdowns for the majority while a small minority gets richer than ever, that actually tries to calculate a dollar value for a human life when deciding whether or not to make a recall that will prevent hundreds of deaths? The same system that caused climate change in the first place and has no incentive to stop it?
Science should absolutely be king in politics. But Bob Ingliss and his ilk have no place in a science-based governent.
What next a conservative that notices that cutting govt spending on teachers, etc in the middle of a (de/re)pression results in worse unemployment. Or that maybe trickle down economics has failed every singe time its been tried (not just in the US). Or that maybe giving large companies more cash in the form of reduced regulations, low interest rates, etc is a 2/3nd order stimulus and is worse than useless when large companies are sitting on cash stockpiles?
But, you know its all about party/dogma over country for a significant percentage of the elected representatives in congress. Otherwise we would actually have a discussion about cap/trade/etc. The problem is that "raising" taxes in the form of carbon taxes, while potentially a better idea than cap/trade absolutely goes against the dogma of the R's in congress who will do everything in their power to assure they get their way. The D's are afraid of even mentioning carbon taxes, although I'm betting a large number of them would support it over cap/trade but don't think for a minute it would be palatable across the isle so they don't even try.
That's like saying selling rock cocaine on a street corner qualifies you to be CEO of Pfizer.
No, it's not. Not even close.
OK, you're right. I left out the fact that he's got really good hair.
Sorry, for a minute I forgot that this was /. and having an adult conversation was prohibited by the TOS. Please carry on...
I'm not sure "adult conversation" means what you think it does, friend.
Your unwillingness to enumerate the reasons why running a corporation successfully would have anything to do with running a government successfully says everything worth saying.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, now that same President is the only person in the 2012 race with actual, on-the-job experience of being president. So, if you are correct that experience "running a large organization" is so important, than that would seem to indicate that the one guy who has experience as President should be elected President.
Do you see how this focus on "experience" can be misleading?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sound familiar?
McKAY: I should be in that meeting. I am the foremost expert on the defence capabilities of this city.
ZELENKA: You know how it is -- when military steps in, scientists take a back seat.
McKAY: Until they need us.
ZELENKA: I don't think they need us.
McKAY: Yeah, they don't think they need us, right up until the point that they need us, and then, they need us.
ZELENKA: Then they need us.
http://www.gibby.net.au
I thought the point of cutting assistance to ACORN was that we don't like helping people set up child prostitution rings.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Did you have to demonstrate that you were a US citizen?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We could close the deficit eliminating social security, medicare and medicaid.
If you do that you're essentially converting the FICA taxes which are dedicated to SS and Medicare/caid into general fund taxes. And you're also embezzling the current surplus in the SS trust fund. I don't think that's going to fly very well with most Americans.
If you do that you're essentially converting the FICA taxes which are dedicated to SS and Medicare/caid into general fund taxes.
You can create a tax with the same characteristics and call it "payroll tax" instead of "FICA" if you like, which means that you're just arguing semantics about the words on the paycheck.
And you're also embezzling the current surplus in the SS trust fund.
There is no trust fund. The idea that the federal government can write itself a bunch of IOUs and call it a trust fund is nothing but a fraud on the American people. And if you don't think so, ask any economist what would happen to interest rates if Uncle Sam decided that the trust fund should adopt a diversified investment portfolio instead of holding exclusively federal bonds.
I don't think that's going to fly very well with most Americans.
You think any of the other solutions are going to fly any better?
Can science determine who is hotter, Marilyn Monroe or Scarlett Johansson?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Obviously you don't live anywhere near a coast.
Intentionally, yes.
The sea level rising a couple feet at the coastal city nearest to me, means probably 5,000 or more people whose homes have a foot of water in them. It also means a major re-planning and rebuild of a lot of the dock structures for the shipping port, and re-planning/rebuild of many of the structures at the local marina and launch docks for recreational boating. It also means a major change in coastal erosion patterns, wildlife, and navigability for the surrounding area due to the creation of highly shallow flat areas that are nevertheless waterlogged / "under water."
Thanks for making my point for me. The geologic variation over the past half billion years is about 300 meters. Whats important is the "short term" fuzzyness of that graph which is about 100 meters.
My point is that the enviromentalist scare mongers are trying to convince me that we must "etc etc etc" because the sea level is most likely going to rise a foot or so over the next century and at least ten feet over the next millenia.
So, for the sake of argument, we go Pol Pot on our civilization to prevent our own activities from raising a foot. Thats nice. Now the dilbertian solution to the natural variation a hundred times larger is obviously to go "pol pot" on our civilization a hundred times. I think a strong well populated economically sound country will recover from an impact 100 times more severe than human caused global warming with much less human suffering than a post-Pol Pot america.
I don't deny human caused global warming or human caused sea level change. I claim the "solutions" proposed my enviromentalist types for it are inhumane, a crime against humanity.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
We have the term because they exist. It wasn't invented. You don't just get welfare. You get Medicaid, WIC, food stamps, help with housing and heating/cooling, and much more. And it is a perpetuating cycle.
You apparently don't know how to play the system.
My in-laws are all (highly-rated) teachers, who complain about teacher accountability. It encourages teaching to the test and ignores the reallity that you get many classes where the main question is "Will this be on the test?" Those students are so unmotivated that if you announced to the class "Anyone who comes to my office during office hours today will get an automatic A." you'll get back "Why do we have to go all the way to your office?"
You're really insanely obsessed with the notion that being even slightly responsible is "going Pol Pot", aren't you?
I recycle cans and bottles. Doesn't make me a fucking mass murdering dictator. I leave that kind of behavior to Republican "I have the right to do whatever I want no matter who it hurts" assholes like yourself.
One, it's not his property. That parcel is not owned by him, but has been leased for hunting by his family since the 80s.
Two, that's not even the name of the parcel. The larger land area, not owned or leased by the Perrys, containing that parcel has been called "Niggerhead" since, well, a very long time.
Three, "niggerhead" was a popular name for sites throughout the country. Since the 60s the names have been slowly changed. There's still an island off Australia by that name. You much for trying to erase history due to PC concerns?
Four, despite the fact that Perry's family alternately either turned over the rock and had the word painted over, some people around there still call the place by its original name.
At most this amounts to a lack of being proactively sensitive to the PC concerns of the thin-skinned.
I think the rock with the name should remain, a constant reminder of that county's racist past (it was a "sundown county" -- blacks don't dare be found there after sundown).
Converting such a regressive tax as the FICA tax to the general fund is just more shenanigans. If you're going to drop SS then be honest about it and raise the income tax.
If the US Government doesn't pay off the T-Bills in the SS Trust Fund it's going to have a negative effect on the other T-Bill that the government sells. The reason the trust fund is not in "a diversified investment portfolio" is risk. US T-Bills have always been a sure thing and when they are not any more we're in big trouble.
Over 70% of the people support raising taxes on the wealthy. In the 1950's and 1960's the top marginal tax rate was more than 70% and the country did pretty well so I don't see why we can't now. (And I'm not proposing raising it to 70% again but going back to 39% isn't going to cause much pain).
Converting such a regressive tax as the FICA tax to the general fund is just more shenanigans. If you're going to drop SS then be honest about it and raise the income tax.
That is the rational thing to do whether we keep social security or not. But if people are going to be irrational and want social security to be funded out of a special regressive tax instead of the general fund, they can continue be irrational and prefer to keep the special regressive tax in order to claim that we aren't raising anyone's taxes.
If the US Government doesn't pay off the T-Bills in the SS Trust Fund it's going to have a negative effect on the other T-Bill that the government sells.
No it isn't. For one thing, since the whole thing is just an accounting trick, you can "pay them off" trivially because if there is no more social security then there is nobody who you actually have to give money to. You just have the defunct social security administration turn over its bonds to the general fund, then have the treasury pay the general fund for the bonds out of existing tax revenues.
The reason the trust fund is not in "a diversified investment portfolio" is risk. US T-Bills have always been a sure thing and when they are not any more we're in big trouble.
That's why they call it diversification. If you invest in a thousand different things and hedge your investments you can achieve similarly low risk overall -- arguably even lower because you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
But the point I was making is that the bonds in the social security trust don't have any economic effect so long as they're sitting there. If instead the social security administration were to sell those bonds on the open market and then use the money to buy stocks or commodities or the like (i.e. establish an actual trust fund), the result would be an economic catastrophe -- because the bonds would stop being a legal fiction written on a piece of paper and start having an economic effect, namely to raise interest rates.
Conversely, if the social security administration would turn every single one of them over to the treasury immediately, or light them all on fire, and then pay future social security payments in excess of social security tax receipts out of federal income tax revenues, there would be exactly no difference in the result to anyone anywhere. The bonds have the same fiscal and economic effect as not existing so long as they remain in the hands of the social security administration, which means that there is in actual fact no trust fund.
Over 70% of the people support raising taxes on the wealthy.
Over 90% of people are misinformed. What does it prove about what makes good policy? See also: Absurd consequences of semi-direct democracy in California.
In the 1950's and 1960's the top marginal tax rate was more than 70% and the country did pretty well so I don't see why we can't now.
You can't see why the decades coming out of WWII after all the major powers but us and the soviets had been bombed into the stone age would be different than today?
(And I'm not proposing raising it to 70% again but going back to 39% isn't going to cause much pain).
It also isn't going to generate anywhere near enough revenue. We have a thirteen-digit hole in the budget.
No, the real point of cutting assistance to ACORN was that they registered people to vote that the Republicans didn't want voting. The prostitute thing was just a set up smoke screen that had no basis in reality.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why he's an ex-conservative politician.
you are BoyOfHack?? .. hack wolfteam,gunbound,etc??