Well, Quint I could prepare a pithy response to that if I had any idea to what you were referring . Space? Environmentalism? Wombats?
Tasmanian Bush Bash over Wombat control.
Jews in the beggining of Nazi Germany ? Well at least the rich part.
First I need to inlcude a disclaimer. I am NOT saying that the candidates under consideration were the best qualified for the job. I am NOT saying that inudstry science or industry scientists are better than others. I am only trying to make a point about what exactly constitutes independant science.
Also, I should note I have not in fact read all of the reports jshore linked to. I am primarily responding to the quotes he included and the conclusions drawn from them.
On this one, I’d just like to question the propriety of claiming that it is unfair to refuse someone because they are predisposed to a certain position. If she is to help grant money to researchers, is it not prudent to question her political bias towards the outcome of such research? I’m not sure this example qualifies as a gross breach of peer review ethics.
I have to object to this characterization as well. What exactly is wrong with recomending reading the bible? I don’t recomend it, but It seems to me they are putting some statement or other regarding the bible by this candidate as evidence of scientific unfitness. I doubt very much if he said that science proves bible reading reduces menstral cramps. If he had, I’m sure that would have been in the quote. And yet, they seem to be attacking him as if he had said this.
Clearly there may be more information about these candidates in the report. There may even be more examples, possibly even better ones. I have a couple questions. As you read the report, how many scientific candidates are questioned because of bad science and how many simply on the basis that:
They believe in god;
They were not liberally predisposed;
They were linked to industry.
Specifically, I question how many were opposed because they did bad science. I would also be curious to find out how many such candidates previous administration placed on such advisory boards.
Again, I am certainly not saying that we should only nominate religious or industry scientists. I don’t mean that at all. But if we are going to claim that independance, political nuetrality, and balanced representation of opinions are important to such panels, then we have to drop requirements which imply that such things automatically eliminate candidates from consideration.
Maybe so, but that’s an entirely different thing than what rjung was claiming. The fact that Lay and Stewart can afford good attorneys capable of slowing down prosecutors has fuck-all to do with the Bush administration.
Furthermore, it’s absurd to compare the Stewart case to the Enron case. The latter is more complex by several orders of magnitude. It is therefore unsurprising that it would move slower.
Well, you are quoting only part of the facts against him. It is also noted that by Lancet that he has a sparse publication record. Indeed, his “qualification” appears to be that he is an anti-abortion activist. And, I personally do not think it is appropriate for a medical professional to recommend reading the bible for relief of a medical condition in almost any context. You don’t go to doctors for that type of advice; you go to your minister or whatever. I suppose if he said it in a more ecumenical context, e.g., that if you subscribe to a religious faith then that faith may help you in times of pain, that would be one thing … But, apparently (it is hard to know the exact context), he recommended a specific religious text…the Bible…which sounds like proselytizing to me. I don’t know about you, but I don’t turn to medical professionals for religious indoctrination.
Come on, pervert, you’re being kind of silly here. These peoples’ qualifications are not being questioned just because they believe in god, or are not liberal, or work for industry. The point is that they are apparently being chosen for these positions in the first place because of these credentials and not because of their scientific credentials. [For one thing, I don’t see why Democrats, most of who profess religious faith…I don’t know about Waxman in particular…are going to be against someone because they believe in god.]
You have the editors of Nature saying that the Waxman report raises serious charges, by a serious person, and that they deserve to be taken seriously and responded to by the Administration. And, you have an Administration that had refused to give a serious response to them at the time that editorial went to press and to my knowledge has still not responded to them. (The editorial does not say they know Waxman’s charges to be correct but they do indict the Administration for pursuing an ideological-driven approach on major policy issues involving science, such as global warming, missile defense, and stem-cell research.)
You have the Editor-in-Chief of Science (who, by the way, wrote that editorial several months before the Waxman report so he didn’t get his evidence from there…in fact, the Waman report references this editorial) saying that what is happening is unprecedented and even unlawful.
And, according to the Waxman report, you have got a former EPA Administrator saying that the sort of White House interference with the section on global warming in the EPA environmental report would never have happened in his day. (And, I would hope not since one of the things the White House apparently wanted to do was replace words describing the general consensus of the scientific community with the results of one paper published in one journal…where the editor and publisher of the journal both agree that the paper had serious flaws and should not have been published at least in its current form. It was so bad that the EPA scientists decided to just drop global warming from the report altogether rather than include the misleading language.)
Exactly what more evidence are you looking for here?!?
Whoops…I just realized this link I posted doesn’t work…Here is the correct one:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5607/625](]editorial[/url)
I believe that you do not need a paid registration to view this, although I could be wrong. (You may or may not need a free registration.)
Well, more substantial objections would be nice. Seriously, do you think that a partisan researcher at the Cato institute could find liberal associations amongst the science appointments by the Clintons? If they quoted the study mentioned by Lissa and said that it showed a bias against products, then listed a few seriously liberal scientists would you accept this as evidence of a bias on Clinton’s part?
Obviously not. But are you saying that if a couple “respected” journals agreed, then you would accept this evidence? All I am suggesting is that broad claims of industry connections, non contextual religious aspertions, and vague accusations of research bias do not a conspiricy make.
Now, having said that, I think there is some circumstantial evidence that Bush is changing the political or ideological tests that these scientists have had to go through in the past. He may even be changing them in extrodinary ways. However, I would argue that he is not creating such tests out of whole cloth. There is a lot of information out there about “junk science” generally compiled by conservatives accusing scientists or scientific panels of liberal bias. Clearly some of it is bogus. But some of it is quite reasonable. All I am suggesting is that maybe its time to shake up the community of government scientists a little. Perhaps bush is going too far. But I need to see more informatiion on how “his scientists” are doing (or have done in the past) bad science.
Here are a couple links. They are not small articles, rather they are sites which contain a large number of articles. Just wanted to warn any skimmers out there that you may not find easy skimming here.
This site is very partisan, but contains some good information.
When asked for a list of reasons to vote for George W. Bush in 2004, the collective Bush-backers of the SDMB provided the following list:
[ul]
[li]He’s not a Democrat.[/li][li]He gave me a $300 rebate.[/li][li]The economy is starting to suck less.[/li][li]We’ve only had one 9/11-style terrorist attack.[/li][li]He started the “No Child Left Behind” program.[/li][li]He’s promising to spend money on AIDS in Africa and a moon base.[/li][/ul]
And, of course, the unspoken “Vote for Bush or terrorists will nuke our country,” which will be the theme of his re-election campaign, no doubt.
Is there anything else?
Well, there is his pro-nuclear policy.
Yes, I favor increased amounts of smaller nuclear plants. Go figure. It’s still better than coal.
There’s also his proposed space initiative. Which only has one problem. NASA.
There’s also the unspoken theme, “He doesn’t make me feel stupid. Or mean.” And “He makes me feel as good about American kicking somebody’s ass as I do when I watch a Rambo movie.”
Yes, but that wouldn’t make it so. And, it seems rather doubtful that a quite centrist politician like Clinton would do such ideologically-driven things. Let’s face it, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are not comparable images of right- and left-wing ideology. Maybe if you got Ted Kennedy elected President then we would see Science or Nature lambasting him for being too ideological in his appointments. But, that hasn’t happened.
When the two most respected scientific journals agree, then yes, I think this provides damn good evidence…At the very least, it is up to the Administration to refute this. And, when the Administration refuses to seriously engage in a discussion on this, I think we have to say that if they refuse to put up a defense, then we must find in favor of the prosecution.
Praise the Lord!
(1) You are changing the topic again. What we are talking about is stacking committees that are supposed to be providing scientific guidance to the government. We are not talking about individual scientists. As for government scientific panels, where is the evidence on this?
(2) I would say that most of it is bogus and only a little of it is reasonable. And, the stuff that is reasonable…like the argument that there is no evidence for deleterious effects from power lines…are attacking claims that haven’t really had much traction in the scientific community anyway. Hell, I don’t even see the mainstream environmental groups bringing up this issue. (Maybe they did at one point in the past … I don’t know.)
(3) You are conveniently overlooking that the same thing has been happening in the other direction too.
(4) The point is that Bush is bringing it all to a whole new level by making the process such that it tends to weed out people with differing ideological views even if they are good scientists and includes people with agreeable ideological views even if they are poor or marginal scientists.
Well, you have presented no evidence of this and certainly no evidence that this belief is shared by, say, people of the stature of the two leading multidisciplinary science journals on the planet.
Well, you are half right. It is indeed very partisan. Steven Milloy’s credentials as a scientist are none too impressive. His credentials as a right-wing spokesman, however, are awesome.
Well, I suppose…In the same way that the Cato Institute is more balanced than the Free Republic. I mean, come on, Fumento is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute which just hired on Robert Bork. Yup, that is nearly the very center of political thought! :rolleyes:
Just because some right-wing organizations have been attacking science doesn’t make them right. You are just muddying the waters here to distract us from the fact that reputable people are noting that what this Administration is doing in regards to science and science advising is unprecedented. As I understand it, even the Reagan Administration didn’t do this sort of stuff, or at least to the same magnitude.
pervert: The argument you seem to be making is similar to the one conservatives have been making in regards to the “liberal media”, namely:
(1) We conservatives are making a lot of noise and coming up with lots of examples where we feel the media is biased.
(2) Therefore, it must be biased.
(3) Therefore, having the Fox News Network is just providing balance to the “Communist News Network”.
I thought that whole “liberal media” bias thing was kind of bogus but there it is admittedly hard to come up with objective criteria or arbiters. In science, by comparison, it is easier (although by no means easy).
[P.S. - Speaking of making a lot of noise…If you want to see a depressing comparison of the amount of money spent by a conservative media watchdog group to make claims that the media has a liberal bias and the amount spent by a liberal media watchdog group to make claims that the media has a conservative bias, compare the budgets of the Media Research Center and FAIR. I forget where I saw thsee budget figures but it was a frightening discrepancy!]
By the way, if you want to read someone who I think is truly an honest broker of good and bad science, check out Robert Park’s weekly What’s New column or, better yet, his book Voodoo Science. (Speaking of which, I can’t freakin’ find my copy and am tempted to hop in the car this minute to run out and buy another one!)
He definitely has strong opinions and maybe they are not always right, but he’s fun to read and does truly care most about science first and foremost. He is not afraid to attack “conservative” sacred cows (like missile defense, various Bush Administration machinations, and creation science), “liberal” sacred cows (like alternative medicines and the dangers of powerlines), and science fiction affectionatos’ sacred cows like manned space exploration.
No, I am muddying the waters because they are muddy, and you are trying to claim that they are clear. This is an old article puporting the same sort of shennanigans by Clinton and Gore. This one, however might be more balanced. It contains in part
Again, I am not claiming that Clinton was overly biased nor that Bush is not. I don’t have enough good information to decide. My own politics leads me to view government science in general as suspect. Personally I follow some of the junk science bruhaha enough that I don’t mind if we change some of the government science committees. The mention of the PG&E case specifically, is what pushed my button.
But all that is just my opinion. Proving such a thing would require a rigorous definition of bias, and some good applications of it to more than a few months of a single administration. Something which is beyond the scope of my time and which is not provided by the Waxman report either.
My main objection in this issue is the seemingly automatic way in which certain things are accepted as evidence of bias while others are ignored or even accepted as evidence of objectivity. While there is an almost universal acceptance of the idea that industry affiliation can produce bias, there is almost no support for the equally likely concept that regulatory agency or activist group affiliation can lead to bias.
I guess in the end, I am concerned about our definition of bias in this context. If government regulatory agency funded scientists are more likely to produce studies showing negative characteristics about certain products, we call that science. If industry funded scientists are more likely to produce studies showing positive aspects of those products, we call it bias (or worse). The problem is that neither view is appropriate.
This is an interesting (though limite) study of the idea that certain biases exist in the scientific community.
This one is more expansive, although also limited to medical studies. David Horowitz writes a good deal about liberal biases in academia. This is a summary of one such study.
BTW, do you know what was changed in the EPA report on global warming?
Well, my argument is similar to this line of reasoning. Except I do not particularly ascribe to the liberal or conservative bias in the media. Both exist as far as I am concerned. What I am saying in regards to the science committees is that we need to drop the hyperbole in this regard. If waxman wants to do a study comparing the level of education, number of peer reviewed studies, Nobel prizes, or some other scientific achievments of past presidential scientific advisory boards with Bush’s, then fine. We can debate whether Bush is finding better scientists or not. But the whole tone of the debate sounds to me much more like the media bias debate.
Simply inquiring into candidates political preferences seems odd, but not particularly evil. Consider it like a sort of affirmative action. Its not like he is issuing memos dictating the outcome of studies. Or did you find evidence of this?
BTW, if you are able to find information on scientific bias let me know. I get more media bias than is useful when I google the subject.
Thanks for the link to Robert Park… I remember reading his book some time ago. I would make similar claims about Fumento. I don’t agree with some of his articles. I do recomend his hate mail section. I specifically remember wanting to use him as a cite in a debate on health care. I searched the subject on his site and found he disagreed with me! Shock and horror! I had to change some of my position as a result of what I learned.
Hey, rjung – Jeff Skilling was just indicted on 35 counts of fraud and related charges (and frankly, he’s more central to the Enron collapse than Lay).
Do you still want to claim that administration is going to let the Enron folks get away “scott-free”?
I don’t see “Kenny Boy,” close personal buddy of George W. Bush, the guy who loaned George his private jet for use during the 2000 Presidential campaign, anywhere near a set of manicles yet, do you?
(And none of this “Ken Lay wasn’t important” stuff. A fish rots from the head down, as the old saying goes.)
I apologize if this has been covered, I only did a quick scan and search of the thread.
I think if a person is a social conservative, and social issues are their highest priority, that person should vote for Bush. Gay marriage, abortion, etc. these issues will be better represented for your view by Bush.
In the past, I might have said the same thing about being an economic consevative, but I don’t think Bush is proving himself to being very conservative with his budget.
I personally am socially liberal so W will never get my vote.
Yes. The flipping of Fastow and the indictment of Skilling puts Lay significantly closer to a set of manacles. Only a completely blinkered partisan would claim otherwise. I’m sure this is not a pleasant day in the Lay household.
Seriously, do you really think the Bush administration is somehow shielding Lay from prosecution, given the news over the past month? Better adjust that tinfoil hat, dude.
If you had bothered to familiarize yourself with the facts of the Enron case, you’d know that Skilling was central to the SPEs that led to Enron’s downfall. Indeed, one of the clearest breaches of the accounting rules governing SPEs was Skilling’s placement of himself at the helm of the general partners of those entities – general partners who are supposed to be independent from the company utilizing the SPEs.
That isn’t to say that Lay isn’t at fault – he is – or that he shouldn’t be punished – he should. And I believe he will. But Skilling was the financial illusionist who set up the house of cards. He is, in a very real way, the big fish the feds most want to put away.