another way politics poison everything…
Unfortunately, people often act against their best interests and do so not because they haven’t been told what would be a better choice or had evidence withheld from them, but because they’re rebelling...
View Articleplaying politics with the future of space travel
Few things can make people go as full mental jacket as they can when politics is involved. Since politics tend to work on rumors, half-truths, soundbytes, and knee-jerk partisan reactions to just...
View Articleconservapedia faces off against einstein
Yeah, yeah, I know this clip is from Rachel Maddow and it’s a liberal show. But the issue she’s covering in the segment is one that’s close to any skeptic with a science blog: politically motivated...
View Articleat this rate, forget about fixing global warming
You have to give Ken Cuccinelli his due. When he really, really wants to harass someone for a political point, he’s willing to throw a lot of time, effort, lawyers, and taxpayer cash on it. After...
View Articlewhy dog eat dog politics is a really bad thing
Famous atheist and political commentator Christopher Hitchens, managed to find just enough time between chemotherapy and his grueling schedule of debates and public appearances to write a column about...
View Articlewhen public fury and fear start calling the shots
Ordinarily, science blogs wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time on politics in general. After all, even if any science blogger has a thing for playing pundit, actual science should still make up most of...
View Articleand now for something totally out of character…
Over the last two years, I’ve never posted something that happened to me just to tell an odd or funny story. I’m trying to run a science blog here, not a personal diary. But a very bizarre and awkward...
View Articlepolitical civility is dead. long live political civility?
Maybe it’s just me, but when did campaigns for civility and moderating one’s tone become the new black? As much as I can appreciate Comedy Central’s political superstars’ attempts to purge some of the...
View Articlewhy science and politics don’t mix, revisited
Yesterday, over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait echoed the sentiment that science isn’t faring much better under the Obama administration than it had under President Bush’s reign. Better, I assume in...
View Articlewhy politics and science still don’t mix
We’re back to the Slate for today’s post, not to take a look at another one of Carl Zimmer’s reliably superb and thorough examples of how to do proper science writing, but to illustrate once again how...
View Articleconservapedia hits rock bottom, keeps digging
Last time we mentioned Conservapedia, a window into the minds of the most radical of the radical right with such a paranoid view of the world that they created an encyclopedia of their fantasies and...
View Articlewhy global warming is so cold, revisited
Right now it’s January, and you know what that means, right? It’s the annual post inspired by the sudden rash of searches for why it’s cold in winter if the world is actually warming up, and the media...
View Articlehow to tell when your rhetoric goes too far
It never ceases to amaze me that pundits and commentators ask us not to politicize a tragedy and then either go right ahead and do just that, or try their best to cover for those whose daily discourse...
View Articleexcuse me senators, you want to do what?!
In times of war, a lot of laws tend to get suspended, overlooked, or modified to provide some sort of a military exemption and these changes are then rarely discussed once the war is over. During the...
View Articlehow can we deal with an echo chamber web?
We all know someone who only listens to what she wants to hear, the devoted Fox News or MSNBC viewer, a dedicated Red State or Daily Kos reader, and the periodic fire breathing comment section dragon...
View Articlethe conspiracy theories of rabid partisans
A big story by Politico asserts that the famously archconservative Fox News is moving to the political center, probably to attract a younger and less partisan audience the share of which it saw...
View Articlewhen voters just won’t care about the issues
It’s always been a common refrain in politics to call one’s opponents or detractors ignorant and we’re all quite aware that ignorance exists across the entire political spectrum, and that people who...
View Articleparanoia, paranoia, the evil globalists are coming to get me…
One of the biggest reasons why I don’t look forward to elections and rush to shut off all political news shows in earshot is that today’s politics simply infuriate me. From giving clueless dullards...
View Articlethe peter principle stacks the deck against science
According to the famous Peter Principle, everyone eventually rises to a level of incompetence in an organization and nowhere does it seem to be more true than in Congress. As pointed out by many...
View Articleit’s not the words that matter, it’s the man
At the Slate, political blogger David Wiegel decided to play media mythbuster and publicly clarify Rick Santorum’s instant punch line of a quote about "smart people" not supporting what he sees as the...
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