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Today is Minnesota Senator Al Franken's Birthday. In honor of that, I'm reposting this historically accurate and important essay, which first appeared on this blog on April 23, 2009 at 3:56PM:
I personally put Al Franken in the Senate
Al Franken is about to be seated as the Junior Senator from Minnesota after a long and costly battle between loser Norm Coleman and Senator Franken. Al won the election by just a few hundred votes, and three of those votes are mine.
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More precisely, if we say that theistic evolution is a form of intelligent design, then we have to stop saying that intelligent design is a form of creationism.
Over at HuffPo, Victor Stenger writes: Read more
I'm sometimes asked why I do this. Why, people ask me, do I spend so much time generating post after post after post day after day after day? Obviously, one reason is that it interests me. Another reason is the passion that drives me to support science and science-based medicine and to detest the damage the pseudoscience, particularly pseudoscience in medicine, can do. There is, however, at least one more reason.
I'm referring, of course, to the adoration of my "fans." Read more
Many of the climate change denialist sites have been up in arms by comparisons of climate change denial to holocaust denial. Read more
Tim Curtin's incompetence with basic statistics is the stuff of legend. Curtin has now demonstrated incompetence at a fairly new journal called The Scientific World Journal. Consider his very first "result" (emphasis mine):
I first regress the global mean temperature (GMT) anomalies against the global annual values of the main climate variable evaluated by the IPCC Hegerl et al. [17] and Forster et al. [28] based on Myhre et al. [29], namely, the total radiative forcing of all the noncondensing greenhouse gases [RF]
Annual(Tmean) = a + b[RF] + u(x) Read more
Sometimes I wonder what the mailman thinks of me. One day he's delivering the new issue of Free Inquiry, the next he's leaving something from Creation Ministries International. Read more
When a young girl put a picture of herself, holding a book she had just gotten as a present, on the social networking site reddit, she was immediately subjected to intense verbal sexual assault by reddit readers who aptly demonstrated how awful it can be when boys and young men are left to say and do what they want without the social control of anyone knowing who they are. Read more
The following article is mirrored from TomDispatch.com. I thought that while we are watching the weather heat up, we should not forget that geo-politics heats up with it.
Six Recent Clashes and Conflicts on a Planet Heading Into Energy Overdrive
By Michael T. Klare Read more
It is by now old news that Martin Zimmerman has finally been arrested for the unprovoked killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, 17 yr old African American teenager on his way home from the store with a bit of junk food. It took over a month and huge public outcry to get even this small step towards justice but it is the right first step.
But in case you need something new to get outraged about I would like to call your attention to the equally, if not more, outrageous case of Kenneth Chamberlain's murder at the hands of Whiteplains NY police officers. Read more
I'm planning to do a follow-up to Tuesday's post about Elliott Sober's recent talk. That is likely to be a long post, so ti may be a day or two before I can get to it.
In the meantime, go have a look at my new post over at The Huffington Post. I suggest that on the subject of evolution and creationism, Americans would benefit from a bit more cynicism. Let me know what you think! Read more
I only have time for a quick post today, so let us take note of the happy fact that Obama has now come out squarely in support of gay marriage. In an interview today he said: Read more
One final thought on the Big Science/ Space Chronicles stuff from last week. One of the things I found really frustrating about the book, and the whole argument that we ought to be sinking lots of money into manned space missions is that the terms of the argument are so nebulous. This is most obvious when Tyson or other space advocates talk about the need for "inspiring" people, but it shows up even in what ought to be relatively concrete discussions of actual science. Read more
Starting now, I will be writing blog post now and then at Minnesota Progressive Project. I'll be focusing on the intersection of science and politics, the politics of science, and now and then I'l rant wildly about something random.
My inaugural post is HERE. It is about the possibility of a Science Debate in Minnesota and consists mainly of an interview with Shawn Otto. Read more
