Chris Mooney sets up an interesting dilemma:
It’s hard to decide what’s the bigger outrage here: 1) That Bush didn’t tell the public his real “dissenter” view on global warming; or 2) that Karl Rove set up a secret science advisory session for the president with a novelist.
Hmmm. Lying and misrepresenting his views, vs. wallowing stupidly in ignorance…which is more damning? Fortunately, since he’s guilty of both, we don’t have to make a decision and can just spit and curse with a little extra disgust.
Remember: more than half of the voting population put this man back into office.
That must be the half that can stomach any of Crichton’s recent work.
Admittedly, exaggerating potential problems caused by science (for scare value) has always been Crichton’s thing, but I never really cosnidered him an actual authority on any of that stuff.
I wouldn’t characterize Crichton’s latest “offering” as “exaggeration”.. more like outright lying.
What is weird is how a work of (bad) fiction gets touted as some kind of authority.
Voting machine tampering put him back into office. I doubt he would’ve won, if the election had been an honest one.
On Mooney’s if you step back to Marburger.. and there go to Wu’s link:
http://sciencedems.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1043
then You can see “suspending of grant at Oregon State of University”-link to an Oregon paper how professors attacked on 29-yr student, and trying to prevent publication his forest recovery study/report in Science..
THAT looks State of Fear, too.
I haven’t read his recent stuff. After slogging my way through “Sphere”, I swore I would never read another Crichton book again. So my comments were more about books like “Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” (which were at least decent reads).
There, you see the dangers of encouraging indiscriminate book-reading, PZ?
Remember: more than half of the vote tampering population put this man back into office.
What? Bush read a book?