Some good news!

After being imprisoned and facing a lynch mob, the teacher in Sudan whose class named a teddy bear “Mohammed” has finally been freed. She has a very positive attitude and says nothing but generous things about the people of Sudan, and thanks the Sudanese government for letting her have a bed while she was in prison.

I think she’s a bit deranged, actually.

A bed is an exceptional gift to a prisoner? She was sentenced to prison for naming a teddy bear? Mobs were howling for her execution for that “crime”? And she says, “I wouldn’t like to put anyone off going to Sudan.”

Too late. I’m quite put off, and think the Sudan is a hell-hole for lunatics.

Disco Institute is vamping in Iowa

I almost feel sorry for Guillermo Gonzalez. The Discovery Institute is turning him into a political football, and making his denial of tenure a far greater mess than is warranted. They’re going to hold a press conference on Monday.

The fight will rage on over Iowa State University astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who advocated for intelligent design, the theory that disputes parts of evolution, and lost a bid for tenure.

Advocates for Gonzalez said in a release distributed Tuesday that they will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. Monday in Des Moines. There, they said, they will discuss documents they contend will prove that Gonzalez “lost his job” because he supports intelligent design, not because he was deficient as a scholar. Gonzalez’s backers say an appeal to the Iowa Board of Regents and possibly a lawsuit would be the next steps.

…

The news conference scheduled for Monday at the Capitol will include attorneys for Gonzalez, representatives of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization that supports discussions of intelligent design in science classes, and one or more state legislators, staff of the Discovery Institute said.

The most likely result of this caterwauling: no change in Gonzalez’ status at all, and he’ll have to find another job elsewhere. Search committees everywhere, though, will see him as pure poison, a grandstander who will turn every criticism into a public event. He will be known as the Intelligent Design creationist with a team of lawyers.

If by some bizarre stroke of highly politicized luck he is given tenure, he’s going to be the non-collegial colleague who is taking up a tenure line that they could have given to someone more productive. This will not be a happy situation for him or his department.

Gonzalez can’t win in this fight.

The Discovery Institute, though, stands to benefit from turning Gonzalez into a martyr — they’ll be waving the bloody shreds of his career at everyone, blaming the Darwinists, when the real destructive force here is the DI itself. Anyone else in this position would quietly go through internal channels to review the tenure decision, and when that failed, would quietly go about applying for new jobs…with the intent of doing a better job of fulfilling the requirements for tenure at a new position. This situation comes up a lot — tenure approval is not automatic by any means — and you just have to move on. I’ve been there myself.

I suspect, though, that the DI simply sees a state full of presidential candidates and an opportunity to score some political points. We’ll have to tune in on Monday and see if any of them take the bait and try to use a national candidacy to play games with an individual decision by a single university.

Mitt the hypocrite

On the one hand, Mitt Romney wants questions about his lunatic religion off the table; on the other, he thinks representation in government should be proportional to the popularity of their religion, which he uses as an excuse to exclude Muslims for consideration in his cabinet. I don’t think this means he’s going to allow the roughly 10%+ of the population who are atheists/agnostics to be represented, though—after all, he considers only people of faith fit to govern.

Oh, heck, it’s probably not fair to call him a hypocrite. He’s a consistent religious bigot, he’s just unwilling to admit it.

Congratulations, Australia!

You’ve managed to remove your li’l Bush clone.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq.

Labor Party head Kevin Rudd’s pledges on global warming and Iraq move Australia sharply away from policies that had made Howard one of President Bush’s staunchest allies.

All the articles I read on the Australian elections used the lovely phrase “humiliating defeat.” I like it. Now we just need to humiliate our wanking Republican politicians here at home.

The logic that makes him confident history will remember him as the man who brought peace to Iraq

Since George W. Bush no longer owns a baseball team, he can take credit for whoever wins the World Series this year. After all, somebody will win despite his absence.

George W. Bush is a friend of the oil industry who has shown little interest in cultivating research into alternative energy or conservation—therefore, when (or if) someone develops a strategy for providing energy as the oil supply declines, George’s heroic boosterism for oil will be remembered as the stimulus for the future.

The Bush administration dallied when Katrina struck, but New Orleans is still there, and George W. Bush now deserves full credit for the brave efforts of Louisiana’s citizens to rebuild.

This Orwellian “logic”, that individuals who neglect or oppose an endeavor are to later be rewarded with accolades for their hindrance, comes to mind on reading this ridiculously effulgent piece praising Bush for the recent stem cell breakthrough.

I believe that many of these exciting “alternative” methods would not have been achieved but for President Bush’s stalwart stand promoting ethical stem-cell research. Indeed, had the president followed the crowd instead of leading it, most research efforts would have been devoted to trying to perfect ESCR and human-cloning research — which, despite copious funding, have not worked out yet as scientists originally hoped.

So thank you for your courageous leadership, Mr. President. Because of your willingness to absorb the brickbats of the Science Establishment, the Media Elite, and weak-kneed Republican and Democratic politicians alike — we now have the very real potential of developing thriving and robust stem-cell medicine and scientific research sectors that will bridge, rather than exacerbate, our moral differences over the importance and meaning of human life.

This is insane. The work that led to understanding the way to switch somatic cells into pluripotency required work on embryonic stem cells—the research Bush opposed. That scientists found ways to work around the Bush restrictions does not rebound to the credit of the man who threw up obstacles. This is also not a medical breakthrough at all: it opens the doors for basic research into how cells develop and differentiate (which may, of course, lead to medical advances), but to claim this develops “stem-cell medicine” is exactly wrong.

Reading that over-the-top praise for the man who hindered this progress reminded me so much of Powerline that I suspected John Hindrocket of authoring it…but no, it was my other bête noir, the Discovery Institute and Wesley J. Smith. I should have known. That’s one right wing think tank that has really mastered the art of double-speak.

Stem cell breakthrough

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

A recent discovery in stem cell research is no minor event: researchers have figured out how to reprogram adult cells into a state that is nearly indistinguishable from that of embryonic, pluripotent stem cells. This is huge news that promises to accelerate the pace of research in the field.

The problem has always been that cells exist in distinct states. A skin cell, for instance, has one set of genes essential for its specific function activated, and other sets of genes turned off; an egg cell has different patterns of gene activation and inactivation. Just taking the DNA from a skin cell and inserting it into the egg cell isn’t necessarily going to create a functional egg cell, because genes essential for egg cells may be switched off in the skin cell DNA, and we don’t know how to specifically switch them on. The process of somatic cell nuclear transfer has been hit or miss for that reason, with very high failure rates—scientists are basically trying to make the right configuration of genes switch on by giving the nucleus a good hard kick, and hoping that something in the cells will reconfigure the pattern of gene activation into something appropriate.

What the discovery by Takahashi et al. accomplishes is to reveal how to specifically switch on the right pattern of genes for a pluripotent stem cell. They have discovered the reset button for mammalian cells: a simple trigger that puts the cells in the right state to become anything else.

[Read more…]

Our local newspaper embarrassment

My fellow Minnesotans know what I mean when I groan over our local conservative columnist at the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten. Her latest column is a tirade against the horrible culture of victimhood in our universities, citing a recent incident in which a student newspaper editor decided to decorate the office with a handmade noose to motivate his black co-workers. Kersten thinks this is just awful. Not the insensitivity of the editor, of course — being ignorant of history is par for the course for Republicans, as is race-baiting. No, she’s appalled that he was fired.

The column is a hoot. She even obliviously quotes the guy making a “but my best friend is black!” excuse.