Why indeed? Please read this excellent article by Johann Hari at the Independent, detailing the tragic hijacking of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights by religious bigots. Here's a taste: Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to…
Science isn't about a particular batch of results. Science is special because of the way in which it gets those results. The following is from a well-written essay in the NYT entitled, "Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy":
Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.
I attended Catholic grade school, so I was highly trained to diagram sentences. Truly, at least six years of spending an hour each day to diagram sentences. A very sophisticated method of warehousing students, I now realize. The silver lining is that this ground-in urge to create diagrams has spilled over into many other areas of my life. For instance, I was thinking about those un-curious website commenters who so often frustrate me with their entirely predictable thought processes. How would that thought process look on a diagram? Would it look as simple as it so often sounds?
It’s like Clint Eastwood has come to town and all the bad guys are hiding under the tables or in closets. President Obama is striking down one stupid rule after another his predecessor left behind. It’s a martial arts level kung fu pen-fest, signing (or consigning) the detritus of ignorance from the last eight years into the dustbin of… Well, he's overturned the international gag rule concerning abortion information. He’s undoing the restrictions on stem cell research. He has ordered Gitmo shut down within a year and a panel to look into what to do with the detainees. Before the vacillations of moral outrage erupt over the gag rule overturn, it should be considered how absurd and cowardly a ban on talking about something actually is. And I don’t mean from a national security perspective. Clearly, some information is sensitive in that sense and should not be publicly disseminated. But in the case of the gag rule, we’re talking about something that is, for all intents and purposes, Public Knowledge. If you know what to look for, anyone can find this information and not be arrested for having it. Yet grown men and women have been constrained from talking about it in the performance of their duties as doctors and nurses. What part of “choice” do the enemies of choice not understand?
After Tuesday's Inaugural oopsie- now obviously Justice Roberts' fault- Obama decided to retake the oath of office. I love the term that Greg Craig used when explaining the redo. "Abundance of caution". Read: to keep the conspiracy wingnuts from trying to oust the President on the basis of minutiae. Read:…