Old Ex Cathedra

Sam Brownback is one of the scientifically illiterate who, in a shameless pander during the South Carolina Republican Candidate Debate, shot his hand up to show that he stands shoulder to shoulder with the ignorant in denying evolution. (He is Senator from the now notorious Kansas, where the people assert they are less evolved than the rest of us.)

Now he’s trying to have it both ways in an editorial he wrote for the Times which borrows heavily from (and debases) Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

Brownback hopes he can salvage the impression he created of a superstitious neanderthal (not that he believes in neanderthals) by treating science as a salad bar – and helping himself to a little of this, a little of that. But modern science is a complex construction, with all the parts working together. If you start discarding the parts of an airplane you don’t understand, it isn’t long before the thing won’t fly.

I’m not sure that these electrons can contain my full disdain for people like Brownback. Does he have the same suspicion of cell phones and television that he does of evolution? I doubt his imagination is any more capable of understanding electromagnetic radiation than it is of understanding biology. Let’s see what he says:

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

Ah yes: If you are asking me whether I believe in Edison’s Electric Light, well, that’s one thing. But electromagnetic waves carrying voices and images? That’s going a bit too far. Delivering messages by invisible waves is the role of the universe’s guiding intelligence.”

Besides which, microevolution plus a few million years becomes macroevolution and speciation. It’s all part of a whole. (“Well, look, you can talk me into morse code over wires, but images transmitted through the air?”)

Anyway, it’s hardly worth the time to demolish the whole defensive backpedal and rationalization. Particularly because it probably has nothing to do with what Brownback believes, but is about what Brownback thinks that the people who will vote in the primary want him to profess.

However, for those of you who don’t want to click through to the editorial itself (and really, why bother. It’s as bad as you think. But this isn’t about you, this is about me. I’m venting) here are a few choice bits.

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths.

Here you can see the debasement of Gould’s idea in action. And you can see a muddled intelligence struggling to rationalize a move on national TV which is rightly seen as ignorant.

Here’s the contradiction between the two:
Science tries to discover the truths about the universe by relentless verification and falsification.
Faith gets the truths about the universe by revelation.

When two scientists disagree, they know how to find out who is right. What happens when a Muslim and a Christian disagree about the divinity of Christ?

Furthermore, Brownback here claims that “faith deals with spiritual truths.” Let’s pretend that Brownback is at once intelligent enough to know what this means, and honest enough to mean what it says.

How is speciation a spiritual truth? What is spiritual about that? Speciation is a truth about the nature of created order and how it operates. The kind of thing that Sam thinks the scientists know better than the theologists. And yet there he was, on national TV, raising his hand and the hopes of the theocrats.

Brownback evokes the tired old “it’s just a theory” by asserting that even the evolutionists don’t agree: “There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today.” And yet, both those camps agree that speciation arose through evolution and not through special creation. Physicists argue about how to link quantum mechanics and relativity, but that dispute doesn’t help the cause of those still out flogging phlogiston.

The incoherence of Brownback’s editorial is astonishing, but my outrage is turning to other things – so I’ll just leave you with his conclusion, which I want you to compare with the lines, quoted above, about the domain of science and the lack of a contradiction between science and faith:

we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

There it is again – the wedge between science and faith. Science says follow the facts, regardless of your convictions about what must be true. Faith says when the facts are at odds with revealed truth, so much the worse for the facts.

The Making of America database, a free online database of primary source materials primarily focused on the antebellum period through reconstruction. 10,000 books, 50,000 articles.

And just in case you hadn’t heard, ancestry.com is giving free access to their military records through June 5. That’s how I discovered that around the time my father was born, my grandfather didn’t work for the B&O as I’d thought, but for the Union Railroad. And my maternal grandfather wasn’t just a Klan member, he was a mine superintendent. What’ll turn up in his history next, the mafia? Illegal medical experiments? Oh yeah, and (I can’t get to this without signing up, so I don’t know the details yet), the FBI investigated my paternal grandparents for German sympathies during WW I.

No wonder I’m so evil.

Here I was worrying about scientific literacy; that turns out to be the tip of the iceberg!

Bryan Caplan, who fights under the banner of Bob’s opponents (the Economics Department at George Mason University – a notoriously libertarian department at a notoriously bad lacrosse school. 6-10 for the year, but they did walk away with an honorable mention for academics) has written a book about how bad democracy really is.

Well, really, it’s about how ignorant and irrational and bad at decision making the voters are. (Who needs to be a decision maker when we have The Decider in the top office?)

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters.

The NYTimes explores the problem:

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.

Caplan’s point, broadly speaking, seems irrefutable. But it is always the case: democracy is the worst possible system…except for all the others. The NYTimes reminds Caplan about the problem of legitimacy in government:

[S]ome time ago, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington pointed out the weakness of dictatorships that justify their rule by only the quality of their job performance: as soon as something goes wrong — a war is lost or inflation skyrockets — the public has no further reason to put up with a despot…. A democratic public may not always like — or understand — the government’s policy, but the consent of the governed gives the citizens a reason not to reject the whole system.

On the other hand, they come to a misguided conclusion of their own:

Caplan recognizes that politicians, like voters, are prone to error. In his zeal to question the public’s judgment, however, he may underplay the role of political elites in shaping that judgment. Would the public choose badly if it had better guidance? John R. Zaller, a U.C.L.A. political scientist, argues that even the more politically aware citizens are driven largely by partisanship and by the cues they take from political leaders…. Maybe the public doesn’t measure up because the politicians are not doing their job properly, not the other way around.

But that depends on what you imagine a politician thinks his job is: surely they believe that a significant role is keeping their seat! Which, especially if they are doing an imperfect job, is not always best served by providing honest guidance to the voters.

To put it another way:

What is this place? The lightest attention limns it: the evidence is everywhere, widening with the decline of light. Poverty in positive feedback. Cascade of chain-failing banks. Earnings not even enough to cover debt service. Volume discounts rewarding the spree mentality. Illiteracy passed down as the only family heirloom, actually cultivated by every trick in the marketing book, because merchandisers, like politicians, prosper from a maimed electorate.

[Richard Powers, =Operation Wandering Soul=]

And there it is, isn’t it. There is a broad constituency for the maimed electorate, but not very many people whose self-interest is served by a well-educated and rational electorate.

Steven Pinker, writing in the NYTimes Book Review, opens a review with an essay, worth repeating.

A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation’s energy source. A consumer tells a reporter that she refuses to eat tomatoes that have genes in them. And a newsmagazine condemns the prospects of cloning because it could mass-produce an army of zombies.

These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy — inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science…. Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it…. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

The costs of an ignorance of science are not just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well….

I am so disgusted with this institution. Making an anti-war statement on the cover? Using the institution for a political statement? What in the world are a bunch of epidemiologists doing spending time and resources on this? Did they study how many of the Iraqi people were slaughtered under their ruthless dictator? Did they study how many were gassed? Did they study how many were fed into wood chippers? Did they study how many were uncovered in mass graves? Did they study how many lives have been saved because of our heroes going into Iraq to free the country? How about studying how many people were slaughtered in Rwanda or Somalia? How about studying how many are being slaughtered now in Darfur?

I am sick and tired of this shameless liberal bent and the “I HATE AMERICA” crowd apparently thriving at our own JHU. I am sickened and disgusted.

The only way I know to have an impact on this hijacking of our so-called institution of higher learning — or more accurately, institution of liberal propaganda — is to vote with our donations. Not one more dollar from my family and extended family will go JHU.

- Debbie Meagher, Monkton, Maryland, letter to the editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine

My goodness! What was on the cover of Johns Hopkins Magazine that prompted that outpouring of rage? Was it “Impeach Bush”? Was it a photograph of Harry Whittington’s wounds and the headline, “This asshole who did this is the Vice-President of the United States?”

Nope. It was a number. Just a number: 654,965. The cover story was a report on the epidemiologists at Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health whose research estimated an “excess mortality” of 654,965 Iraqis since our invasion of their country, and the controversy it caused.

Perhaps you remember the virulence of the conservative attacks on the research — research conducted by people at the school that practically invented the discipline of public health in America. George W. Bush, a man whose intellect needs no further discussion, called their methodology “pretty well discredited.” Very few conservatives saw the high irony — or the low comedy.

Go read the article yourself. While readers of the Hopkins magazine might forgive the writer of that article if he’d defended the researchers, I don’t think he did that at all. It looked to me like an honest attempt to get and present the facts about the methodology, the questions, and the controversy. And it attempts to consider the issues of right and wrong, and how suppression of the facts obscures the moral issues.

I’m heartened by another letter by Kelly Sanders that appeared in the same issue and reminds us “This is a debate between something and nothing.” This Republican administration hasn’t conducted its own research, nor have any of its affluent conservative friends. They’re content to throw mud from the sidelines. And conservatives like Ms. Meagher are happy to join them — trying to make the truth go away by shrieking in impotent rage against people who dare to tell it, who dare to make them think about right and wrong.

Hopkins 12, Duke 11!!!!

Hopkins Slides Past Delaware, 8-3, Into National Championship Game! The Hopkins Blue Jays will meet the Duke Non-Rapists Monday at noon Eastern time. Be there or be square! Many thanks to Renato Barahona, whose recent book I’m rereading now, for giving me the heads-up.

This is a one-item weekend woot. But very cool:

• Want to sync up your Thunderbird address book and Sunbird calendar with your iPod? mozpod. Still beta, only supports T-bird, but the setup really gives you confidence.

Btw, I lost patience and snarfed the latest nightly for Sunbird 0.5 (it’s supposed to be a release candidate), installed it, entered a pack of U.S. holidays and the flights and plans for Patrick and Christine’s wedding, and it all went in beautifully. And, more to the point, seems to be staying in there.

Oh, OK, one more:

• Creative photos by Chema Madoz on haha.nu, which looks like it’s worth exploring too.

One of my own fundamental passions, which I thankfully discovered early in life, is the pursuit of beauty. Not beauty which has to do with my own vanity, but rather beauty which is expressed in some kind of artistic way. The kind of beauty that represents the best that humanity can contribute to the universe.

Duke Ellington contributed many examples of beauty to humanity’s repertoire, including a little song entitled “On A Turquoise Cloud” from 1947. It helps a bit that this song was written in my favorite key of D flat, but for me each listening has always had a deeper effect on my soul, despite the corniness of the song’s title.

I have included a piano reduction (OATCDH), played by the very capable Dick Hyman, and also the original recording (OATCDE), featuring the hushed trombone of Lawrence Brown, and the wordless vocal of Kay Davis.

I will have much more to say about the nature of beauty . . . later. Feel free to begin the discussion now, if you wish.

New data from the Pew Research Center, “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007” is showing the pendulum has well and truly swung. Democrats (self-identified) continue to widen the gap from people who call themselves Republicans to 15 points, 50% to 35%.

The most encouraging news for me is the rebound in support for affirmative action, now up to 70%. If we can keep conservatives from sticking the “quotas” label on affirmative action (the Reagan administration’s most effective lie in pursuit of its goal of racial inequality), we have a chance to make some progress.

A good majority of Americans think the de facto Republican policy of applying the mighty engines of government to increase the disparity between rich and poor has gone too far, and another sizable majority favors spending money to help the poor, even if it means increasing the deficit. Looks like the Reagan and Bush II deficits are coming home to roost as people realize that if we can run deficits to shovel money into the pockets of corporate officers and stockholders, and all we’re getting in return is death and disgrace, we can afford to spend some money to do the decent thing.

But Democrats had better pay attention to this because there’s a warning here: when support for traditional Democratic programs has strong majorities that continue to grow but support for the Democratic Party itself remains tepid, it’s past time for Democrats to start acting like Democrats again.

The right-wing pundits called the 2006 election results a swing toward the center, and the corporate media picked it up and echoed it till it became filled with truthiness. But it’s clear from this polling data that Americans’ former fascination with conservative “strength through stupidity and dull nastiness” continues to turn to disgust and that we’re turning back to the values America stands for.

Who knows? If we continue along this path for another 50 years or so, we may join the company of civilized nations again.

Much has changed since then. For one thing, the demise of Communism seems to have resulted in an economy entirely based on white slavery and credit card fraud, which ought to be enough to make fans of Ronald Reagan think twice. – Roy Durfee

God knows it ought to be, but I’ve never seen anybody who could make them think even once.

Ba-da-CRASH. Thank you, we’ll be here all week. Be good to your servers.

A warning from the Union of Concerned Scientists: Don’t transport firewood. Non-native insects, some of which have no natural predators in our forests, can hide in firewood, and people putting a load of firewood in the back of the SUV and carrying it to camping and picnic sites can spread the bugs.

There’s no national alert from the National Park Service because that might, you know, protect our national parks.

Pass it on.

[T]he real question is not whether all men desire to live freely. I think that’s an open question…. The real question is, do all men desire their neighbors to live freely? And there the answer is clearly no. – John Agresto

Agresto is a former University President who spent a year in Iraq trying to stabilize and reconstruct their higher education system. He’s merely one in a chorus of people who’ve worked in Iraq and who’ve come back to call what we’ve done to that country a disgrace and a disaster.

He stands out a little because he’s a lifelong conservative and personal friend of Donald Rumsfeld, so it’s significant that he no longer feels obligated to keep silent about what his friends are doing. But he isn’t unique there either. There’s a lot of that going around. Loyalty, when it’s gone unappreciated and unreciprocated as much as it has with this gang of conservatives, only stretches so far.

The Bush administration’s legacy to conservatism may turn out to be that rank and file conservatives will be a little less lemming-like and a little more skeptical of their own leaders. Who knows? conservatives might even start to apply moral judgments to things other conservatives say and do.

But that’s not the biggest point, because what Aresto said is at least as important as the fact that he said it. As an old Texas cattleman I knew was found of saying, now we get down to the nut-cuttin’: the thing that makes democracy succeed or fail isn’t how much freedom you want to have, but how much freedom you’re willing to give.

Are people on the left willing to back off from the control of hate speech they seem to have found in their hands? It’s a difficult challenge. Perhaps if we could be satisfied with the humiliation we’re delivering very effectively right now and forget about using the armed violence of the state to enforce it, we might find salvation.

Are people on the right willing to back off from their insistence on controlling their neighbors’ sex lives, reproductive rights, and religious practices? This isn’t just a difficult challenge, it goes to the heart of what a significant number of conservatives are. I don’t know how small government conservatives can convince the Christian Jihadists that small government isn’t just a means to an end: it doesn’t just mean they can now practice their bigotry with fewer restraints.

For one thing, the conservative movement made that very promise to the former segregationists and delivered on it. Now the Christofascists want their turn. I don’t know how economic conservatives (we used to call them Reagan Republicans, but I think very few of them would be proud of that label now that we know how deeply racist that administration was) can willingly turn away the very people who are their best hope of an electoral majority.

But unless we do it, unless we’re willing to let our neighbors live freely, we’d better give up on any hope we have of liberty.

One of the joys of blogging is that, in search of something to blog about, I can meander off into the byways from link to link, and it’s all research! Thus I wandered from the Carnival of Bad History to an article on what Lincoln really said to the ProgressiveHistorians blog to a story about a bank robbery in Hungary.

It seems the Hungarian police got the wrong guys. Twice. And no, this doesn’t reveal how the Hungarian police are Keystone Kops. Some of them graduated from the FBI Academy and German police academy, and they consulted with law enforcement agencies and FBI Academy instructors from the very beginning.

Boy, said I, at one point in the narrative, if I’d been a cop who had to explain this, I’d have said something like, “what we did was follow the evidence. Most of the time the evidence leads you to the truth, but sometimes it leads you down the garden path.”

And mirabile dictu, that’s exactly what DoDo, the author of the piece said. But with a difference: following the evidence was the cause of their problems.

The thing is that you can ‘prove’ almost everything if you doggedly search for refinements to your hypothesis. In effect, you fit the theory around the evidence. In contrast, in science, the goal is (ideally) to test hypotheses by checking how well they predict new evidence, and to run rival hypotheses against each other.

Even scientists all too often fail at this (I guess some here would say: most or all of the time), so what to expect of policemen and lawyers. – DoDo at Progressive Historians

People who are trying to arrive at the truth (that small portion of it that applies in their situation, that they have some hope of knowing) are obliged to acknowledge their hypotheses and theories. Theory is central to the enterprise of investigation, whether it be scientific or engineering or the theory of how a crime happened. When you start carving on your theories to fit the evidence, the very best you can hope to achieve is the sort of thing 19th century naturalists came up with to provide a setting for their observations: theories that don’t explain much of anything outside the facts found in the field that day.

The purpose of evidence isn’t to create theories. You can gaze through a microscope as long as you like and you’ll never see a theory of biology or even a hypothesis engraved into the organelles under the lens. Nor are hypotheses mere accretions of evidence and theories mere accretions of hypotheses. The purpose of evidence isn’t to form hypotheses and theories, it’s to validate them. DoDo says you’re to test your hypotheses to see how they predict new evidence, but predictive validity is just one of the kinds of validity.

Still, predictive validity, because the thing you predict will either happen or it won’t, reminds us of the importance of designing, if not a critical experiment, at least an experiment that will deliver a telling blow: an experiment deliberately designed to invalidate one or more of your hypotheses and, if you’re ambitious, your theories.

Blindly following the facts is going to get you into trouble. Not as much as blindly ignoring the facts and letting your hypotheses and theories go untested, but trouble nonetheless. If you don’t watch out, you may be lowering the total number of understood things in the world.

Agaaaaaaain!

Anybody old enough to remember Lou Christie’s smasheroo from 1966?

OK, that one was easy. And certainly the Regents’ greatest hit trips right off your tongue (for the mere children among us, it was the cover version that really made it big a few years later). Now here’s a real test: “Bread and Butter” was the Newbeats’ first hit — and if you’re as old as me, you’ll remember the shock at discovering that the lead singer was a white guy. OK, everybody knows “Bread and Butter.” But without googling, can you name the Newbeats’ second hit?

The real reason for the post is, Lightning is about to strike. As is Sunbird. At long last, the Mozilla calendar project is about to release version 0.5. Keep your eye on the Mozila Calendar Weblog for news.

Another stack of saved woots, and we’ve emptied our woot bins and swept out the corners of our woot warehouse. Trouble is, I keep coming across things I’m enthusiastic about, so it’s probably premature to think of Weekend Woot’s retirement.

• Not a saved woot, a new one: Anil Dash’s intro to lolcats. I suspect my finding lolcats is the signal that the fad is officially over. I just found out about OMGWTFBBQ last week, and the kids are doing this thing with O RLY that I haven’t quite figured out. But there’s some really funny lolcat stuff, especially at I Can Has Cheezburger?, lolcats, and UmmYeah.
• And another new woot, cheery and funny writing in this restaurant review by The Local’s Kathleen Harman.
• Even more delightfully misinterpreted signs at the US Department of Laughs
• Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson shows us a better way to recycle cars. Unfortunately, it stops with a cliffhanger. Does anybody know what “the biggest exception of all” is?
• The Minneapolis Institute of Arts introduces Unified Vision: The Architecture and Design of the Prairie School. A huge collection of Prairie School furniture and objects, plus an online tour of the Purcell-Cutts House.
• CLARKSDALE, MS–Ida Mae Dobbs, longtime woman of Willie “Skipbone” Jackson, called a press conference Tuesday to respond to charges levied against her by the legendary Delta blues singer. “Despite what Mr. Jackson would have you believe, I am not an evil-hearted woman who will not let him be,” Dobbs told reporters. “I repeat: I am not an evil-hearted woman who will not let him be. To the contrary, my lovin’ is so sweet, it tastes just like the apple off the tree.”
• Let’s Say Thanks: a kid-oriented site that sends messages to our troops in the Iraq theater.
• From Making Light, 60 Panels for cartoonists, combining 22 Panels That Always Work, 22 Panels That Always Work (Sometimes), and 16 Panels That I Don’t Think Work All That Well (But Which People Keep Using Over And Over).
• Like blowing stuff up? How about 100 Tons of Explosives [embedded video]?
• There’s lots of aviation sites, but I’ve spent more time captivated Great Aviation Quotes than any of them.
• For serious aviation reading, I don’t think you’ll find a better newsletter than Bob Miller’s Over the Airwaves.
• Al Lowe’s Computer Enhancers, error messages and enhancements for M$ products.
• Teachers take note: the OpenCourseWare Finder
• Like most suburbanites, we set up a bird feeder outside a window. It rapidly became a squirrel feeder. Our squirrels only liked some of the seeds, so they left a pile of rejected seeds underneath, along with a note to do better next time. If you’ve done that, you’ll appreciate this device, reported by Runolfr [embedded video].
• Speaking of embedded videos, have you ever seen one in a marquee (shudder).
• From the awful to the sublime, and emptying out our wootbucket, pictures and videos of Tesla coil sparks, including the coolest car anti-theft device you ever saw.

If you still think it isn’t Christ whom liberals hate, remember: They hate Falwell even more than they hate me. – Ann Coulter

Take a moment to savor the perfection of that logic.

And oh by the way, Ann, no we don’t.

The occasion for this ripe dollop of Coulter is the passing of Rev. Jerry Falwell. She doesn’t do Falwell’s memory much good as she spends fully a third of her article (sorry, Ann, no link for you) defending his comments about the Teletubbies, comments he repented of long ago. The flower of conservatism adds her own special mark to this reminder of an embarrassment for Falwell by calling Teletubbies a cartoon five separate times. It isn’t.

If you want a good eulogy, pass most of his fellow conservatives by and try this splendid piece by Leonard Pitts, Jr. in the Miami Herald.

Rest in peace, Jerry, and may God forgive you for the eulogies spoken by the people you taught to hate.

Lonely is the flight
Of the nocturnal firefly,
But stars throng the sky.
- Boris Akunin

So we’d better screw it up, hide it, and lie about it.

You’ve probably heard about a handful of outrages that have made it past the filters. It’s much, much worse. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ A-to-Z guide about this conservative Republican administration’s political interference in science shows how widespread and effective the conservative attack on science has been.

The UCS isn’t being hysterical. If anything, they’re being too cautious. Here’s a more recent article in Salon about how the Republicans in the Bush administration are undermining the Endangered Species Act. You may know that the administration has placed a record low number of new species on the endangered list. What you may not know is that the administration hasn’t voluntarily placed a single species on the list. Not one. The species made the list only after successful lawsuits, lawsuits in which conservative Republican political appointees directed Fish and Wildlife Service scientists to oppose the listing.

There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists. – Park ranger, quoted by Bruce Schneier

I could point out Schneier’s perceptiveness in the article, but most of you will already have clicked through, if you hadn’t already read the article.

Or I could point out the magnificent article by Thomas Curwen in the LA Times on an attack by a real bear, and its follow-up, also by Curwen.

But instead, this one goes out to the true believer who posted a reply yesterday to an article David wrote last November on Richard Dawkins. Evidently he’s not a careful reader and thinks Dawkins wrote the article himself:

Richard Dawkins, i am a devout Christian and have been for many years, i have seen visions, heard many great things, and survived extraordinary circumstances.
The views that you share on your web sites, are sure to cause out rage among many others who read through, no matter what they belivee,

He goes on in that vein for quite a while, but I think we all pretty much know what he said. Icing on the cake: he posted his reply 4 times.

This is probably cruel, but I’m thinkin’ pic-a-nic baskets probably aren’t in his future.