What are you doing, Al?

Al Gore is generally a good guy, and I think his message on global warming is an important one. He’s still traveling around, giving his slideshow that we’ve seen in An Inconvenient Truth, but apparently he has added some new material — and these aren’t slides that make me very happy.

The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the “rise of humans.”

Cool beans. So he believes that Homo sapiens evolved from other hominid ancestors, right? Nope. In the very same breath, he then continued to explain that according to his religious beliefs, this “rise of humans” was God’s creation of mankind — apparently 200,000 years ago. His graph then changed to include the caption “Adam & Eve” above this starting point.

Wha…?

He might as well have shown the chart of global temperature vs. number of pirates — it’s nonsense that completely undercuts the serious of the science he’s discussing.

It’s strange how this one little slide makes me far less enthusiastic about the prospect of another Gore run for the presidency. Even if he doesn’t actually believe in a literal creation event for mankind, he’s not above pandering to the ignorant.

What the F…?

Let’s support the troops! I always thought those stupid yellow ribbon magnets that people stuck on their cars were insulting in their triviality, but I did not know how low we could sink in the insipidity of token nods to those who are making sacrifices in the services. Mike Dunford received some helpful email from the military:

Effective immediately, the word “Families” will be capitalized in all Army correspondence. Please ensure wide dissemination of this change. Thanks for your continued efforts to do all you can to provide steadfast support to our Army Families.

There’s an “F” word on the tip of my tongue that would be appropriate here…

Once more unto the frame

You’re bored with it? I’m bored with it. All bored now. But since the discussion is still going on everywhere, and I’m frothing rabid (as everyone knows) and always ready to snarl and bite even when (especially when?) I’m beset with ennui, I’ll call your attention to Greg Laden again. He’s pointing out that Nesbit/Mooney have poorly framed — I swear, I never want to use that word ever again — their argument for the evolution-creation conflict, which might explain why they are being so poorly received by some of us who are focused on that ugly mess. That, and the fact that parts of their report read like a pious Discovery Institute press release, which sets our jangled immune systems on fire like a bee sting triggering anaphylactic shock, and no one’s slinging any epinephrine our way.

It looks like they talking about approaches more like we find in Kennith Miller’s “Finding Darwin’s God: A scientist’s search for common ground between god and evolution.” This needs to be clarified, and if this is in fact what they are talking about, then there is something very important that they don’t get, and they need to be flogged, then ignored. If, on the other hand, they are just kind of talking vaguely about this issue and are not explicitly arguing for a god/science chimeric view, then they should be very eager to be educated on this and then to move on with framing but using a very different approach.

We can’t use an approach that brings god into the evolution picture. This is not because of atheism (though that position would make this same argument). It is because it is a) bad science; b) a wedge for bringing various forms of creationism into the classroom and c) illegal.

OK, Greg has put up some very specific issues and questions that fans of the f-word should deal with it. Please do.

Now, since I’ve bored myself again, but since I did mention “rabid” and “flogging”, I’ll recommend that everyone read this article. It’s much more entertaining, even if the thought of 103 literally rabid Christian fanatics gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s alright if you’d rather talk about that than the f-word, too.

Crud. Laden has added a link to an interview with Nisbet. How would you f-word the idea that the earth goes around the sun for Copernicus? He gives an answer I guess I should have expected.

George W Bush wins an award!

He should be so proud — he has taken first place in the 2007 Jefferson Muzzle Awards. These are awards given for “egregious or ridiculous affronts to free expression in the previous year”, and little Georgie won it for:

For its unprecedented efforts of discouraging, changing, and sometimes censoring the reports and studies of government scientists in order to make them more supportive of political policies, a 2007 Jefferson Muzzle goes to… the Bush Administration.

It’s a well deserved honor. The description goes on to list several specific instances of Bush administration manipulation of scientific assessment, particularly in areas of climate and environment where scientific conclusions conflict with Republican bidness ties.

What if the right role for science is to shatter the frame?

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Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that “many scientists don’t really know what they’re up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians” — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We’re also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It’s more than a cosmetological failure, though; as Nisbet says, “scientists, without misrepresenting scientific information, must learn to shape or ‘frame’ contentious issues in a way that make them personally relevant to diverse segments of the public, while taking advantage of the media platforms that reach these audiences.” I can go along with that, too.

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If you are reading this, you must not be a Christian

Well, I’ve been wrong all this time. It’s always been my opinion that if someone says they’re a Christian, they’re a Christian — I’m not going to nit-pick fine theological distinctions with someone, and if they want to claim the soiled and tattered title of Christianity, they’re welcome to it. An important figure in American religion and politics, James Dobson, has shown me to be wrong. He has his own special definition of “Christian”.

“Everyone knows he’s conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for,” Dobson said of Thompson. “[But] I don’t think he’s a Christian; at least that’s my impression,” Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party’s conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson’s characterization of the former Tennessee senator. “Thompson is indeed a Christian,” he said. “He was baptized into the Church of Christ.”

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson’s claim. He said that, while Dobson didn’t believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless “has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith.”

“We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians,” Schneeberger added. “Dr. Dobson wasn’t expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to ‘read the tea leaves’ about such a possibility.”

Thompson has said he is leaving the door open for a presidential run and has won plaudits from conservatives who are unenthusiastic about the Republican front-runners. A Gallup-USA Today poll, released Tuesday, showed Thompson in third place among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain.

I have to marvel at that. Suddenly, the ranks of the un-Christians have swollen immeasurably; a lot of the people I honestly like who go to church but aren’t jerks about their religion, i.e., they don’t proselytize, have been excommunicated by Pope Dobson, and are on my side in the War Against Religion. I have suddenly learned that none of the members of my family are Christians anymore — they may be a bit shocked to hear that, since they still go to church, but heck, High Authority, the Word of God’s Holiest Representative in North America, is not to be gainsaid.

Any of you readers who are not true Christians in the eyes of Dobson might as well give it up now and join me in total godlessness. When the Republic of Gilead is established and the Dobsonites run the country, you’re going to be up against the wall with the rest of us heretics, anyway.