Worms, Roxanne! Worms!

New Oxford American Dictionary blog editor Lauren Appelwick is reporting “refudiate” as the 2010 Word of the Year, joining past recipients “unfriend”, “truthiness” and so many other wonders of the internet age. Lexicographer Susie Dent makes her subjective choice each year (many collected here). As she is employed by the Oxford University Press, additional credibility is lent to her selections I can only assume by virtue of “Oxford” and “University” being used in the same sentence. Thus, an internet search for “word of the year” often tags the “Oxford” or “Oxford Dictionary” or some similar modifier to the “WOTY”. I have fun fracturing the mother tongue all the time. But I don’t expect any of my misconstruations to make their way into the lexicon of American English. Particulalry when they are disavowed as mistypes then claimed intentional. I don’t know about you, but for me, “Oxford” unfairly or not conjures up images of staid and primped stuffed shirts. Make no mistake. They never got over our insurrection and are mocking us again. And that is ginormously discombobulating.

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NOMA is a Myth?

A FaceBook friend just shared a post called The Myth of Separate Magisteria that argues that Steven Jay Gould's premise of Non-Overlapping Magisteria is flawed. He argues,

"One might as well say that conflict arises between men and women only when they stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble. Science produces discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs (not only religious ones) based on revelation rather than evidence, and the religious must decide whether to battle or accommodate secular knowledge if it contradicts their teachings.

I usually claim NOMA when pressed on whether Science can disprove God. The realms of revelation vs. evidence can be kept separate as long as religion keeps stepping back as verifiable research claims ever more territory. Scientific understanding will keep stepping on religions skirts until the faithful stick to claims that can only be held on faith, and stop claiming "truth" about things for which there is contradictory evidence. God is a fuzzy and non-falsifiable idea. Science will never disprove God. But it has disproved most of what the Bible claims about God's involvement in nature, the Earth, and the Universe. So these ways of looking at the universe do overlap, until such time as the weaker one bows out of the territory. As with the flat Earth, the Sin theory of gravity, the God's Pillars principle of Earthquakes, God's Wrath principle of extreme weather, the Geocentric universe, the Young Earth, and so on.

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Getting Science Under Control

After the election of 2008, we fans of the rational and provable had high hopes that government may give as much credence to the scientific process and conclusions as to the disproved aspects of philosophies promulgated by churches and industry shills. We watched with waning hope as a series of attempts to honor that ideal got watered down. But at least it was an improvement. But the 2010 election quickly reveals a backlash. Those whose cherished misunderstandings had been disrespected for the last couple of years now will have their day. As Phil Plait says, Energy and science in America are in big, big trouble. He begins,

"With the elections last week, the Republicans took over the House once again. The list of things this means is long and troubling, but the most troubling to me come in the forms of two Texas far-right Republicans: Congressmen Ralph Hall and Joe Barton."

He goes on to explain why. It comes down to them being proven representatives for Young Earth and fossil fuel interests, doing whatever they can to scuttle actual science by any means necessary. Especially where the science contradicts their pet ideas. Barton has published articles supporting climate change denialism. His main contributors are the extraction industries. Hall has used parliamentary tricks to attempt to scuttle funding for basic research. The Democrats offered to compromised by cutting funding, and he refused in hopes that the whole bill would fail. It passed. Then Hall publicly called Democrats on the carpet for using tricks to fatten the bill by the amount that they offered to cut. The Proxmire spirit lives on.

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Lessons Learned?

What can be drawn from this recent election that speaks to America? To listen to the bombast, this election is all about money. Who has it, where it comes from, what it’s to be spent on, when to cut it off. An angry electorate looking at massive job loss and all that that implies tossed out the previous majority in Congress over money. This is not difficult to understand. People are frightened that they will no longer be able to pay their bills, keep their homes, send their children to college. Basic stuff. Two years into the current regime and foreclosures are still high, unemployment still high, fear level still high, and the only bright spot concerns people who are seemingly so far removed from such worries as to be on another plain of existence. The stock market has been steadily recovering over the last two years. Which means the economy is growing. Slowly. Economic forecasters talking on the radio go on and on about the speed of the recovery and what it means for jobs. Out of the other end of the media machine, concern over illegal immigrants and outsourcing are two halves of the same worry. Jobs are going overseas, and those that are left are being filled by people who don’t even belong here. The government has done nothing about either—except in Arizona, where a law just short of a kind of fascism has been passed, and everyone else has been ganging up on that state, telling them how awful they are. And of course seemingly offering nothing in place of a law that, for it’s monumental flaws, still is something. [More . . . ]

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Tabbi on Olbermann

Matt Tabbi has a way about putting things into perspective:

I just found out about the suspension of Keith Olbermann for making political contributions . . . We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney's hair and Tiger's text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined ... and it's Keith Olbermann who should "pay the price" for being unethical? Because, and let me get this straight, he donated money, privately, to politicians? This is absurd even by GE's standards. There is no reason, not even a theoretical one, why any journalist should be prevented from having political opinions and participating in election campaigns in his spare time.

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