Showing posts with label scientific illiteracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scientific illiteracy. Show all posts

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Saints & Sinners


By a wide margin (60-33), the Senate rejected legislation proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) that would cap credit card interest rates at 15%. I wrote last month about the negative impact unregulated lending rates have on the economy. A 15% cap hardly seems an onerous burden on the lending institutions who would have to reduce their profit margins from demonic to merely scandalous. My two senators, Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, both opposed the Sanders legislation; I've written to them about it. You can see how your senator voted here. Please write him or her to express either disappointment or support of their vote...


Robert Frost's Banjo has a short history of bonnets...

Montana Democrat Max Baucus had doctors and nurses supporting single payer health care arrested and ejected from "hearings" on health care reform...

Chris Mooney warns against the dangers posed by scientific illiteracy. He saves his final salvo for the mainstream media:
Something that drives the science community nuts is this supposedly news media refusing to state clearly what is an established conclusion in science and instead doing on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand over something like evolution or global warming — which is throwing two talking heads on the air to shout at each other, one of whom represents a really well-established and credible position and has every scientific community in the world behind it, and one of whom is just completely way out of the mainstream. And creating a false equivalence between them, it's kind of cowardice. It's also a journalistic norm (that has) outlived its usefulness. But that's a huge aspect of the problem.
He's absolutely right about this. While I'm happy that the Seattle Times ran this interview, I'm mindful that they've also given op-ed space to the benighted ravings of the Discovery Institute. There is a such thing as an equality and inequality of ideas, after all, and a newspaper ought to take that into consideration when allotting precious editorial page space...

NOLA Happenings: The Saints And Sinners Literary Festival starts tomorrow at the Bourbon Orleans hotel...Tuesday is the first day of the New Orleans Wine And Food Experience...