My former boss used to joke about paying for his retirement by sequencing the genomes of the greatest racehorses of all time and then using the information to handicap races. He'd better hurry up, though, because somebody else stole his idea.
Imagine you're faced with an employee who has failed miserably at his job. You call him in to take him to task and he replies, "I did the best I could." Wouldn't your only logical course of action be to sack him? If you're paying him to do a job and his self-admitted best isn't enough, then clearly he should be fired, right?
Shouldn't we hold the President to that standard?
For a group with so much legitimate ammunition available, left-wing pundits are irritatingly inept at making their case against President Bush's policies. Their folly is epitomised for me by their inability to write an editorial without referencing the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner on the USS Lincoln in May 2003. Every time someone writes a piece demanding that the President be brought to task for mishandling the war in Iraq they snarkily gloat about how absurd that moment seems now. Confidential message to Maureen Dowd: your argument would be more cogent if you allowed the readers to occasionally make their own leaps of logic instead of repeatedly slapping them in the face with the blindingly obvious.
The left isn't going to win anybody by being pedantic about the President's weaknesses. More and more Americans are becoming disenchanted with the President's bland reassurances about the war, our readiness to deal with domestic emergency and about the economy. It is obvious to all of us that Iraq is a mess, that New Orleans was left in the lurch and that gas prices are skyrocketing, yet Democrats only want to smugly murmur "I told you so" in our ears. Where are the alternatives? Why aren't they taking advantage of public desire for different solutions by actually presenting some?
I'm going to be attending both the IGES and ASHG conferences in Salt Lake City this October, giving a talk at the first and a poster at the second. After the meetings I'm spending two days hiking in some of Utah's scenic national parks and then stopping in Boston for a few days on the return trip. Some relevant dates:
I agreed to webmaster the HCR website at Brasenose, so I had to cycle into the city today to get a login to the server. Of course the bloke I was supposed to see was playing some FPS when I came in and he had to sheepishly mash the keyboard until he found some combination that made his screen go blank. Whenever I feel lazy at work I should just think about all man hours being wasted by IT departments around the world.
I like cycling back up the hill on a hot day. We're getting a last-minute taste of summer here, with temperatures around 30° today, so the trip definitely makes you break out in a sweat. For someone who never got much regular exercise it feels good. It feels like a worthwhile accomplishment. It makes me feel better about myself as a person. I wonder what kind of chemicals get released when you exercise that makes that happen.
Anyway, now I'm just enjoying my slow cool-down at my desk and having some water.
The New York Times recently featured a beefy two-part article about the debate between scientists and proponents of "intelligent design". The spooky thing about this most recent attempt to insert religion into science is the way they paint their perspective as a scientific alternative. By publishing popular books and an occasional paper in a scientific journal (the reviewers must've been asleep at the wheel) they have created the illusion that there is actual scientific debate concerning the validity of the theory of evolution.
The proponents of intelligent design try to fool the public into believing that this is a scientific debate by presenting a series of scientific-sounding arguments against evolution. All of their points are straw men couched in mixed metaphors, but they seem convincing to non-scientists. This mendacity is illustrated by their use of the term "neo-Darwinists" to describe their opponents (who comprise essentially all of mainstream biology), as if Darwinism is a cast-off relic of an earlier time recently resurrected by crop of crazed atheists.
These quacks become insidious when they try to push their agenda on the American education system. They encourage school systems to "teach the controversy" and let students make up their own minds. This position is dangerously agreeable to lots of American parents: It has a certain free-speech air of reasonable discourse about it, which makes it seem very American; furthermore most Americans do believe in God so they're relieved to have some compromise which apparently reconciles science and religion.
If this attitude becomes widespread it represents a deadly threat to science education. The academic window-dressing of intelligent design is immediately transparent to a scientist, but not so to a 7th grader curious about biology. Presenting intelligent design as a scientifically viable alternative to evolution is a criminal deception of the young. This is made worse by the fact that many scientists dismiss intelligent design in crass terms that offend faithful people who don't really care that much about evolution anyway. Discussion of the nature of the Creator belongs in churches, mosques and synagogues, not in biology labs.
