You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that it loses itself early and does not find itself any more. --Mark Twain
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.
He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government's defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.
But there's one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government's terrorist "watch list."
That means he can't use an airport kiosk to check in; he can't do it online; he can't do it curbside. Instead, like thousands of Americans whose names match a name or alias used by a suspected terrorist on the list, he must go to the ticket counter and have an agent verify that he is James Robinson, the pilot, and not James Robinson, the terrorist.
"Shocking's a good word; frustrating," Robinson -- the pilot -- said. "I'm carrying a weapon, flying a multimillion-dollar jet with passengers, but I'm still screened as, you know, on the terrorist watch list."
The American Civil Liberties Union estimates more than 1 million names have been added to the watch list since the September 11 attacks.
It isn't like this system is hard to beat. Buying a ticket with your initials rather than full first name evades the list, and a terrorist need only buy a ticket for a short flight a few days before an attack to be sure he's gotten past security.
Furthermore, even if it worked, this would only protect us against attacks which are unlikely to recur. The watch list, like the war on liquids and the ban on my Leatherman Micra, does nothing to increase security, it makes everyone's life harder, and distracts security staff from the work of identifying real threats.
Why do it then? Because it gives the appearance that security has been increased. Whether it actually changes anything is irrelevant to too many people.
In other news:
Besides the airline pilot, there's the James Robinson who served as U.S. attorney in Detroit, Michigan, and as an assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration; and James Robinson of California, who loves tennis, swimming and flying to the East Coast to see his grandmother.
He's 8.
The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, "I don't know."
Though he doesn't even know what a terrorist is, he is embarrassed that trips to the airport cause a ruckus, said his mother, Denise Robinson.
Denise Robinson said that no one in the government even told her her son is on the watch list but that it wasn't hard to figure out. Checking in at curbside three years ago, the family was told they couldn't get boarding passes and were hustled to the ticket counter.
She said the ticket agent made a number of phone calls and kept asking which among her husband and two sons was James.
"And all of a sudden he says, 'How old is he?' " Robinson recounted. She said she responded numerous times, "He's 5."
This is how our transportation security community spends its time.
A penguin who was previously made a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army has been knighted at Edinburgh Zoo.
Penguin Nils Olav has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard since 1972.
Over the years, he has been promoted through the ranks after being adopted by Royal Guard who visited the zoo.
During the ceremony, Nils had a sword dubbed on each side of his head, where his shoulders should be, to confirm his regimental knighthood.
The Beeb also reports that "The proud penguin was on his best behaviour throughout most of the ceremony, but shortly before the ritual was concluded, and possibly suffering a bout of nerves, he was seen to deposit a discreet white puddle on the ground."
King penguins are the second largest species of penguin, behind the emperor penguin. They nest on islands around the edge of Antarctica, and feed on fish squid and krill in the open sea off of Antarctica.
A study by Norwegian, French, and South African researchers earlier this year found that the penguins are at risk because of global warming. Warmer years resulted in two effects: an immediate decrease in breeding activity, and a decrease in penguin survival (measured two years after a warm year). Warm years reduce the number of prey available to penguins, reducing chick survival, as well as weakening growing juveniles. The mechanisms are a bit more elaborate than that, and the way they traced the causation is pretty neat, really.
Obama didn't hesitate. "I would argue that if you are making more than $250,000, then you are in the top 3, 4 percent of this country," he said. "You are doing well."
McCain took a far more discursive approach to answering the question but ultimately settled on a dramatically higher figure: "I think if you're just talking about income, how about $5 million?"
The Arizona Republican quickly added that he was "sure that comment will be distorted," and his campaign said Sunday that he was joking.
More precisely, he said:
WARREN: Everybody talks about, you know, taxing the rich, but not the poor, the middle class. At what point, give me a number, give me a specific number. Where do you move from middle class to rich? …
MCCAIN: How about $5 million? No, but seriously, I don’t think you can, I don’t think seriously that the point is I’m trying to make, seriously, and I’m sure that comment will be distorted but the point is…that we want to keep people’s taxes low, and increase revenues. … So, it doesn’t matter really what my definition of rich is because I don’t want to raise anybody’s taxes. I really don’t.
McCain's spokesman later tried to walk the whole answer back as a joke. If so, it's of the ha-ha-but-really variety, not of the absurdist variety. McCain himself simply has no sense of what constitutes wealth in America, so he chose a number that seemed to him large but not beyond the realm of reality. A number which only a tiny fraction of Americans can achieve.
Americans tend to care what becomes of the rich to a degree that's a bit illogical, because we all hope one day to be rich. So increases on the marginal tax rate for people earning millions of dollars, or estate taxes that only impact people who leave several million dollars to their heirs (outside of various tax shelters) manage to be unpopular even with people who earn nowhere near that much money, and have no realistic chance of inheriting nor bequeathing such an estate.
What McCain is doing here plays against that. If being rich means earning half a million dollars a year, that means breaking into the top 1% of households. I like those odds. Obama's "rich" would includes somewhere between 5% and 10% of households, which is even better odds. McCain is restricting richness to less than one in 1000 households. I don't like those odds at all. That's, well, elitist.
To continue with the LA Times account:
Even so, the remark highlighted the candidates' disparate outlooks. Analysts who study income distribution said the answers appeared to reflect shifting political calculations more than economic reality.
Economists said in interviews Sunday that neither candidate was wrong because there are no agreed-upon definitions for the terms that describe income segments.
"To be fair to both of them, 'rich' is an adjective," said James P. Smith, a senior economist at the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan think thank in Santa Monica. "Economic science is not going to tell you that 'this' is the cutoff point."
Yet the $5-million level, Smith said, includes "almost nobody." Experts said that of all the households in the nation, fewer than one-tenth of 1% had an annual income of $5 million or more.
McCain, with his beer heiress wife, his 8 houses, his $520 loafers, his private jet, and his rock star lifestyle, is clearly rich. I'd rather have the person making policy for me be someone who understands what it's like to live the life of an average American, and McCain simply hasn't got that.
Drum responds to a discussion of land use in the era of expensive oil by commenting:
A focus on increased density is going to mean a funny political switcheroo for a lot of liberals. We're mostly accustomed to fighting evil corporations on behalf of the little guy, but it turns out that most suburban (and many urban) zoning regulations have been put in place by exactly the little guys we're used to teaming up with. Developers, on the other hand, would happily build out every last acre to the maximum possible density and maximum possible profit if only they were allowed to. So if we're in favor of higher density, we're frequently going to find ourselves siding with big developers and very much against local public opinion — and believe me, you haven't really taken on the task of changing public opinion until you've sat through a planning commission meeting trying to out-talk an angry mob of homeowners who are dead set against a proposed zoning change that might affect their property values by 1%. Strange bedfellows indeed, but those are the bedfellows we're going to have to get used to.
“For somebody who has been called ‘elitist,’ going to Hawaii is not exactly going against type,” Schoen said. “I would rather have him going to national parks.”
First, I'd note that Hawaii has 8 national parks, so these are not necessarily mutually exclusive propositions.
A NOTE FROM THE REAL WORLD....Hawaii is an elitist vacation spot? Seriously? Just for the record, folks, Hawaii is about the least elitist vacation spot on the planet. It ranks right in between Disneyland and the Grand Canyon on the elitism meter, and probably a couple of notches below a visit to Yosemite.
Growing up on the East Coast, Hawaii seemed like a pretty elite vacation spot. The Caribbean and even Europe occupied roughly the position Drum is giving to Hawaii. Since moving to California, I've been struck by the different patterns in vacation spots. Californians seem to take fairly frequent vacations in Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, islands in Oceania, or various points in Asia, but not so much in Europe or the Caribbean. It isn't surprising given the geography, but it is a mental adjustment. Therefore, Kevin's is a note from California, a state with an at-times-tenuous connection to the real world.
Kansans, FWIW, tended to vacation within the continental US. These regional differences matter, since California isn't a swing state, and swing state voters will react differently than I would.
I hope and pray that they won't make their minds up based on silliness like this, or at least that they'll recognize that this is about family, not about campaigning.
I've said it before, and will keep saying it until the DNC starts running ads quoting me: Like all indie acts, John McCain's early work was better.
This ad is a good start:
But here's the thing:
John McCain's maverickness was an act. It was never genuine.
Indie acts sell out to corporate interests and start putting out crap.
Their audiences abandon them, replaced by fickle fans who can be swayed by radio play.
John McCain has sold out.
The Republican brand is so tarnished that there are no fickle fans left for it to draw in.
It's possible to say that his early work on campaign finance reform sounded good, but it hasn't held up. His vaunted independence turned to crap pretty fast once all that oil money was on the line. He sold out, and his early fans, like all indie fans, are contractually obligated to hate him and all he does henceforth.
Indie acts sell out for a reason. There's more money in being a corporate shill than in being an independent voice doing what you know to be right. Usually, at least. Radiohead seems to be doing OK, and other indie artists are finding that they can leave their labels and keep their fans. And Barack Obama has found a way to raise tons of money from small individual contributions without pandering to lobbyists. But McCain can't do that, and has to make a choice.
When an indie act goes corporate, they make the decision that their tiny, fanatical base of supporters are worth less than the audience they can reach if they tone it down, start sounding like everyone else, and abandon their integrity. They can make up for originality and integrity with a better promotional budget. Selling a million crappy albums will earn them more than selling a thousand great ones, so that's what they do.
That's been McCain's calculus. He's picking up every nonsensical Republican slogan, and brought in Karl Rove and as much of the Bush team as he could get to run his show. He's dredging up all the hateful nonsense we've gotten used to in the last 8 years, the same hateful tactics which destroyed him in 2000. He sold out, and his fans should be pissed at him. His hope is to bring in more new fans than he loses, but there's not a giant pool of people desperate for another 4 years of the same horror they've seen for the last 8. Like the other IndyMac, McCain is in deep trouble.
Disillusioned IndieMac fans don't have to come to Obama if that's not their thing. Bob Barr isn't likely to go mainstream on his fans at this point, and seems to have assembled a nice little combo. Sure, voting for Barr might make it more likely that Obama wins, but this isn't about winning, it's about the music.
Saturday at 2 PM, Scienceblogs and New York City Skeptics are organizing a meetup for Scienceblogs readers. Anyone in the area and interested in hanging out with a bunch of cool folks should head on down to Social, 795 8th Ave (betwixt 48th and 49th St.) sometime between 2 and 4.
Phill Kline lost his bid for a full term as Johnson County DA. Having lost his re-election campaign for state AG in 2006, the county's Republican party installed him in the post, despite the fact that he did not carry the county in that statewide election. This move peeved a lot of people, and Kline pledged not to run for a full term. Then time passed and the lying scumsack filed for election. Hopefully now he'll take the hint and do something useful with his time. I'm sure that, given how he's run his campaigns, he'd have no trouble lining up a job mucking out stalls in any of the area's stockyards.
Robert Hecht, the DA for Topeka's county, also lost his primary. I don't know enough about that race to comment, but I do recall being very dissatisfied with his investigation of open meetings violations by then-AG Kline and the creationists on the state Board of Ed. in 2005.
Lynn Jenkins, Kansas State Treasurer, is currently in the lead over Jim Ryun in the Republican primary for the Kansas 2nd. Ryun was the incumbent in that seat from 1996-2006; Nancy Boyda beat him in 2006 in her second attempt on the seat, and is popular with voters. The primary candidates are split by fewer than 1000 votes with 31 precincts yet to report.
Mary Pilcher-Cook beat outgoing state Board of Education member Sue Gamble in a Republican senate primary; Gamble has been among the most forceful advocates of accurate science on the Board, and would have been a marvelous Senator; Pilcher-Cook is known for her anti-abortion activism. Former BoE member Iris Van Meter, an evolution opponent who did not seek re-election in 2006 has lost her bid for the state Senate. Outgoing creationist and former Board chairman Steve Abrams has won his state Senate bid.
Mary Ca Ralstin will be the Republican nominee for Sue Gamble's old Board seat. Having beaten crypto-creationist Brandon Kenig, she now faces off against Sue Storm. Both are excellent candidates.
Robert Meissner, who has made statements suggesting a willingness to water down evolution education, has beaten nutbar opponent Alan Detrich for the Republican nomination for the seat currently occupied by science supporter Bill Wagnon. Meissner will face off against the excellent Carolyn Campbell.
Kathy Martin, the incumbent Board member who advocated school prayer and theology classes while calling ID creationism "science-based and strong in facts," has eked out a narrow victory in her primary campaign against Bill Pannbacker. The margin stands at 1200 votes. Chris Renner will be challenging Martin in the general election.
In the race for former Board Chair Steve Abrams's old seat, David Dennis has a healthy lead over Marty Marshall. Dennis was the TfK endorsee, meaning science advocates are guaranteed to pick up that seat.
In the race for Carol Rupe's old seat, neither party held a primary, but it will be important to see Walt Chappell beat Dennis Hedke. Republican nominee Hedke's position on basic science remains ambiguous, which should not be acceptable.
So, the school board race came out fairly well, but not ideally. There will still be a few tough races, but two seats will stay in pro-evolution hands, one will definitely become pro-evolution, and two will have competitive races with a chance to replace another creationist. It could've been better, but not by much.
With only a handful of precincts reporting, Phill Kline appears to be going down in the Republican primary. We can only hope and pray that the second "l" continue to stand for "loser."
In the Board elections, the excellent Mary Ca Ralstin has the edge in the race to replace Sue Gamble, subtle creationist Robert Meissner is whopping rabid wingnut creationist Al Detrich, incumbent lunatic creationist Kathy Martin has a healthy lead over sane opponent Bill Pannabacker, and, in the race to replace Steve Abrams, David Dennis has the barest of leads (12 votes of 180 counted with 10 of 266 districts reporting). If David Dennis wins that race, and Ralstin wins hers, a pro-science majority is probable. Assuming Meissner wins (likely), the race to replace Bill Wagnon as the representative for Lawrence and eastern Topeka is likely to be the most vigorous race. Carolyn Campbell will surely appreciate any help you can give her.
If Kenig beats Ralstin, that'll be a race to watch. Kenig has been very cagey about science education, and some observers are calling him a stealth creationist. He could just be clueless about the issue, but that's not a vast improvement.
In other news, Lynn Jenkins has a slight margin over Jim Ryun in his bid to rematch against Nancy Boyda. Apparently Ryun hasn't figured out that Kansas voters don't care for him. Phill Kline is currently losing to Steve Howe by a rather impressive margin. Steve Abrams is likely to be the nominee in his Senate race, while Sue Gamble is in a tight race.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
