That's the message of Audrey Schulman, writing in Orion Magazine. Her article is entitled, "How to be a Climate Hero." Schulman describes psychology experiments where the subject is surrounded by stooges, everyone in the room doing a mundane task. Eventually, something untoward happens. For instance, smoke starts pouring out of…
In the April 24, 2008 edition of Nature (available online only with a subscription), it is reported that the Swiss Federal Government has issued guidelines to help granting agencies "decide which research applications deeply offend the dignity of plants." Those studies that fail to treat plants with "dignity" won't be…
I'm tired of hearing Neocons cavalierly talking about "nuking" one or more Middle Eastern countries. These days, Neocons often talk about this "need" to use nuclear weapons to show people in the Middle East that "we" mean business. I have personally heard this sort of talk several times (when you…
I’ve been following the reviews of the Ben Stein “Expelled” movie since it was first shown. Many of them properly criticize it for its many inherent cinematic flaws. Others angrily take it to task for its clear violations of sense or sensibility. There is also ExpelledExposed.com, the not-mentioning of which I get chided for every time I post about this movie.
Then there are some who applaud it for “speaking the truth” and “opening conversations”. On my second post about this movie, I asked people to send me links to any non-negative review coming from sources outside of the Discovery Institute (Answers in Genesis, EvolutionNews.org, etc). I suspect that there is now an effort afoot to produce as many positive reviews as there are negative ones, in order to keep things “fair and balanced” online.
After the initial spate of bad reviews by reputable critics, various Christian columnists have been lauding it for exposing the religious suppression of the “Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design” and especially the efforts of reviewers (and scientists, and “W” appointed conservative judges) to associate this “scientific theory” with the openly religious (and mostly equivalent) ideas of Creationism. Bad intellectuals, bad experts.
But, what is this Scientific Theory? Well, an idea has to have 3 elements to qualify as a scientific theory :
The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland…