Bush’s Science Policies

Ron Bailey has a rational discussion of them, and a well-deserved slap at scientists who fancy themselves policy makers:

…a word of unsolicited advice to scientists who want to play in the public policy arena. Facts by themselves do not immediately entail the adoption of particular policies. Many of the scientific “facts” cited by activists arise from contested epidemiological data and controversial computer models. For example, if humanity is significantly warming the planet, it is entirely possible that the best policy is to encourage rapid technological progress and economic growth so that any problems caused by such warming can be dealt with more effectively and fairly in the future. And how does one make the trade-off between possibly harming a few species of birds through the use of DDT, and using the insecticide to prevent the deaths of millions of people each year from malaria? These are political decisions. Suggestive scientific data certainly help guide our decisions, but they do not mandate any particular policies

Bush’s Science Policies

Ron Bailey has a rational discussion of them, and a well-deserved slap at scientists who fancy themselves policy makers:

…a word of unsolicited advice to scientists who want to play in the public policy arena. Facts by themselves do not immediately entail the adoption of particular policies. Many of the scientific “facts” cited by activists arise from contested epidemiological data and controversial computer models. For example, if humanity is significantly warming the planet, it is entirely possible that the best policy is to encourage rapid technological progress and economic growth so that any problems caused by such warming can be dealt with more effectively and fairly in the future. And how does one make the trade-off between possibly harming a few species of birds through the use of DDT, and using the insecticide to prevent the deaths of millions of people each year from malaria? These are political decisions. Suggestive scientific data certainly help guide our decisions, but they do not mandate any particular policies

Bush’s Science Policies

Ron Bailey has a rational discussion of them, and a well-deserved slap at scientists who fancy themselves policy makers:

…a word of unsolicited advice to scientists who want to play in the public policy arena. Facts by themselves do not immediately entail the adoption of particular policies. Many of the scientific “facts” cited by activists arise from contested epidemiological data and controversial computer models. For example, if humanity is significantly warming the planet, it is entirely possible that the best policy is to encourage rapid technological progress and economic growth so that any problems caused by such warming can be dealt with more effectively and fairly in the future. And how does one make the trade-off between possibly harming a few species of birds through the use of DDT, and using the insecticide to prevent the deaths of millions of people each year from malaria? These are political decisions. Suggestive scientific data certainly help guide our decisions, but they do not mandate any particular policies

How Could They Tell?

There are rumors abounding that Arafat is brain dead.

If so, let’s hope that the rest of him follows shortly. Couldn’t happen to a nicer terrorist.

[Update a few minutes later]

What he said.

He’s a bad man who’s been terrible for his people and if there’s any justice, when he dies he will receive 72 virgins who look exactly like him.

Another Planet

A little island near the mouth of the Hudson River.

I don’t know if this article is intended to be funny or not, but I found it hilarious, and dripping with irony.

Upper middle class Brooklynites called red state voters misinformed and self-interested. And outside the Apollo Theater in Harlem, residents cried that the fix was in and Bush had stolen another election.

“I’m devastated,” writer Emma Starr said as she left the nation’s largest member-owned and -operated food co-op. “I have proposed that we should have two distinct nations. Why should we be forced to live together under the rule of an evil dictator?”

…One-third of voters surveyed in nationwide Associated Press exit polls called themselves conservative, one-fifth liberal.

The opposite was true in New York, where about one-third of voters called themselves liberal, compared with one-fifth who identified themselves as conservative.

Three quarters of the city’s voters pulled the lever for Kerry, compared with 48 percent of voters nationwide…

…Dr. Charles Goodstein, a psychiatrist at NYU Medical Center, described the patients with whom he spoke Wednesday as deeply saddened.

“It’s had a real impact on them,” he said. “There’s a sense of hope that’s been given up, the loss of an ideal, a kind of pessimistic view of the world.”

He said, however, that what he was seeing was not clinical depression and he expected the somber mood to lift eventually.

Yes. Let us pray for them–as people from Jesusland, it’s the least we can do.

[Update on Thursday morning]

Jeez. Here’s another one, even worse.

“I’m saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country – the heartland,” Dr. Joseph said. “This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country – in the heartland.”

“New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what’s going to injure masses of people is not good for us,” he said.

His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush’s statements as other Americans might be. “New Yorkers are savvy,” she said. “We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say.”

“They’re very 1950’s,” she said of Midwesterners. “When I go back there, I feel I’m in a time warp.”

Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn’t apologize for it.

“People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities,” he said.

Like those in the rest of the country, New Yorkers stayed up late watching the results, and some went to bed with a glimmer of hope that Mr. Kerry might yet find victory in some fortuitous combination of battleground states. But they awoke to reality. Some politically conscious children were disheartened – or sleepy – enough to ask parents if they could stay home. But even grownups were unnerved.

This thing almost reads like an Iowahawk parody, but I think that the reporters are serious.

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