intelligent design

I actually met Tyson on our way to New York at Washington DC's Union Square Station. I was with Chris Rabb of Afronetizen and we just bumped into him.

Chris just started talking to him and I was just standing agog. He actually reminds me of Fuzzy Bear from The Muppets. A really, really smart and sexy Fuzzy Bear. Make that what you wish.

I love this clip because the point he wants to make is that the universe was not made with us in mind. He also had the audacity to have pictures of aborted fetuses with extreme birth defects to make exactly that point.

Takes balls of steel in today's political environment to do that.

PS : As per his wikipedia entry, NdGT was vote the sexiest astrophysicist in the United States by People Magazine.

(cross-posted at Liza's suggestion, from Cocking a Snook!)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

—Voltaire

Whether or not you ever watched his game show, if you're a Thinking Parent you probably know that the anti-science, anti-human sophistry of Ben Stein is now a movie called "Expelled", on its tightly controlled private propaganda tour prior to its actual "public" opening in the US April 18. [THAT'S DAY AFTER TOMORROW, folks!] My Sunshine State's whole [bible-thumpin'] legislature was invited [to the sneaky preview] but not reporters.

I am flabbergasted that someone like Ben Stein, a man who actually had a game show built around how nobody was smarter than him, would become an apologist for the anti-evolutionists aka Intelligent Design movement. His membership in Mensa should be revoked immediately for the offensive anti-science, let's pander to the extreme right narrative of the pseudo-documentary, Ben Stein is Expelled : No intelligence Allowed.

Well, when PZ Meyers, my favorite science blogger, demands we join his minions and spread the word of a counter documentary for ID propaganda, am all over it. Sit back and pass the popcorn, it's time for Expelled Exposed.

As a scientist, one of the things that has horrified me the most about the current practices of the Republican Party is their anti-sceince, almost "Dark Ages" thinking. I have previously written about the right wing Intelligent Deception campaign against the teaching of Evolution, and the right wing Denial Lobby that falsely claims that global warming science is "junk science" and that scientists don't agree about whether global warming is real.

Peter Roskam (a personal injury lawyer running against Iraq vet and Democrat Major Tammy Duckworth in the IL-6 CD) is the latest Republican to publicly make these claims.

For the record, according to people I talk to at GISS, a joint NASA/Columbia U program, about 90+% of scientists agree that global warming is happening and the debate now among climatologists really comes down to just how fucked we are and how short our window of opportunity is to mitigate the effects,

But what horrifies me the most is the outright censorship of science that the Republicans are engaging in. The head of GISS, Jim Hansen, went public on 60 Minutes&lt describing the censorship he faces in his scientific reports and lectures from the Bush Administration. Republican Joe Barton (TX-6) threatens global warming scientists with loss of funding and Congressional investigations if they don't toe the Republican denial line on global warming. Hell, the Bush Administration has even quietly removed study of "the Home Planet" from the NASA mission statement, thus potentially hampering more research into climate change.