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Palin Mocks Science

Posted by PZ Myers, Pharyngula at 3:31 PM on October 25, 2008.


In which John McCain's running mate mocks the entire international research community.

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This is too much. Sarah Palin gave a policy speech today in which she claimed that she wanted more support for children with disabilities, more tools to test for disorders, and while also decrying the expense of scientific research.

Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

I am appalled.

This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models — what does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work? — and countries like France and Germany and England and Canada and China and India and others are all respected participants in these efforts.

Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies, and these are animals that are particularly amenable to experimentation. Molecular genetics has revealed that humans share key molecules, the basic developmental toolkit, with all other animals, thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage (something else the wackaloon from Wasilla denies), and that we can use these other organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core processes in the formation of the nervous system — precisely the phenomena Palin claims are so important.

This is where the Republican party has ended up: supporting an ignorant buffoon who believes in the End Times and speaking in tongues while deriding some of the best and most successful strategies for scientific research. In this next election, we've got to choose between the 21st century rationalism and Dark Age inanity. It ought to be an easy choice.

Digg!

Tagged as: science, ignorance, palin

PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He runs the science blog, Pharyngula.


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Nail on the head!
Posted by: cwilsondrum on Oct 25, 2008 5:34 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Now, If we can just get some talking-head ignoramus on network television to point out the obvious,maybe some people will think.........naw, who am I kidding,the same jackasses voted for bush TWICE!

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Fruit-fly research and retarded kids
Posted by: fanny666 on Oct 25, 2008 5:57 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
That's hilarious. Wow. Her child has Trisomy 21, which is a genetic disorder also known as Down's Syndrome. Here's some fruit-fly research aimed at understanding why that 21st chromosome ends up with 3 copies:

Drosophila and Down's Syndrome (an entire review article on the subject)

Drosophila and Down's Syndrome

Drosophila and Down's Syndrome

Drosophila and Down's Syndrome

Those are just very recent examples. The list goes on and on and on and on... "I kid you not."

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: I want proof of Trisomy 21 Posted by: Purple Girl
» RE: I want proof of Trisomy 21 Posted by: gilliani
Sarah's Future
Posted by: AlexLawyer on Oct 25, 2008 8:13 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Not to worry, Palin's 15 minutes of fame--or, more commonly, infamy--are about over. She'll prance back to Alaska in her high-priced, RNC-issue pumps and get sympathy from her fellow travelers as a woman unjustly scorned. She'll probably start a talk show on Christian media after the Alaskan public has had enough of her. Sorta like Oprah, except that she'll burn books instead of reading them. The kinds of people who take Pat Robertson and James Dobson seriously will tune in faithfully for a daily dose of stupidity. She can even bring in George W Bush, her fellow victim of the liberal media.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: Sarah's Future Posted by: weathered
» RE: Sarah's Future Posted by: Plexius2
» RE: Sarah's Future Posted by: AMERICAN VETERAN
» RE: Sarah's Future Posted by: liz_imp
lskloven
Posted by: lskloven on Oct 25, 2008 8:14 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
This woman is a complete moron. She is a threat to our basic freedoms. She still does not know what a vice president does, as illustrated by her response to a third-grader's question. Her theme of "drill baby drill" shows her complete ignorance on environmental issues. She has zero comprehension of the economy, and she probably could not find Iran on a map. Woe be us all if McCain-Palin wins the election!

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demogagory
Posted by: richardpmendola on Oct 26, 2008 7:38 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I pray Barak Obama and his party will stabilize the economy and restore confidence within a year or two. But imagine if he cannot... Palin will give 2012 a shot in any event, but the possibility of "us vs them" as the essence of a competitive platform may well be at hand. Oh, the things people believe! Swallow a camel, gag on a gnat.

Fear=hatred=demogagory=jackboots.

Our best bet is Obama doing his job.

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Woman who Rejects Medical Attention for 8 Hrs.....
Posted by: Purple Girl on Oct 26, 2008 7:57 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Is teltale enough for me she not only holds science in low regard, but also Life.
Ddi She think god would come down and assist her in a difficult birth should the need arise while on the plane back to Alaska?Did she invision herself the Virgin Mary and God would se her and her Baby Through.
I still have serious questions about When that child was Really determined to have Down Syndrome....Oxygen depeletion!?!
And besides KNOWING the baby has real health concerns to begin with, Why would you Delay medicl attention. I call that Reckless Endangerment with forethought and malice!
Then to deny the beneficial opportunities for Stem cell therapy as a means to eleviate or reduce such Birth defeats...She wants to re up the funding for what Special Oylmpics instead of reducing the number eligible to compete?
I worked with Adult Developmentally disabled, FYI they don't Grow out of It! her focus is on 'Special needs Kids'...What about the Teenagers, adults, elderly?
How can this Woman after only 6 months of an infant (who is by nature dependent) KNOW anything about the struggles of those who have the condition or their caregivers throughout a life time???
Frankly I don't find her new found committment anything but Self serving and probably Motivated by Guilt or just over compensation to deflect responsibilty for her Own Neglectfull actions- A cover Up of her own culpability.She placed that child in grave danger and I want to know WHY!!!!

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» caronome.... Posted by: Bayardtom
in the words of an internet comic...
Posted by: JoshuaLudd on Oct 26, 2008 8:35 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Science: It works, bitches!

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Amazing Disgrace
Posted by: AlexLawyer on Oct 26, 2008 9:23 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Purple Girl,whatever it is, Trig Palin can still look forward to being the smartest one in the family.

It's amazing that a university graduate and daughter of a science teacher who reads all published books and magazines voraciously doesn't know about the role of Drosophila in genetic research. And it's a sad commentary on our country that thousands of people applauded when she condemned a line of research that has been around for more than a hundred years, laid the foundations for modern genetics, and continues to be productive today.

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If it takes a $11,000 a week makeup stylist to make her
Posted by: bitsfick on Oct 27, 2008 3:30 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
look presentable now? In 2012, how much makeup will take to hide 53 years, five children and possable 6th? Will all of the men out there who are voting for her because she is "HOT" in her short skirts, knee high boots and FM heels, still vote for her when she is a post menopausal 53? How will she look then doing her winky, winky flirting with the camera bit? The woman has no substance, when her looks are gone, and they are fading fast she will go back to the ignominy she so richly deserves. you betcha.

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Why Fruitflys? Multi-Generations
Posted by: curiousdwk on Oct 27, 2008 6:07 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
One reason why so much genetic research is done using fruit flies is that their lifespan is short. Which means that the genetic carry-down for multi-generations can be observed in a short timespan. Imagine only observing tests of genetic offsprings every 25 years or so. Imagine science under Palin.

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The Republican War on Science
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 27, 2008 7:27 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Reference: "The Republican War on Science" by Chris
Mooney, 2005, Basic Books.

It has the following URLs:
http://www.waronscience.com/home.php
http://www.chriscmooney.com/
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05268/576883.stm

See also:
"Undermining Science, suppression and distortion in the
Bush Administration" by Seth Shulman, 2006
www,ropercenter.uconn.edu

"The Republican War on Science" by Chris Mooney says:

Because Trofim Lysenko convinced Josef Stalin that
genetics is wrong, 12 million people died of starvation.
The coal companies convinced President George W. Bush
[and Senator Inohe] that global warming hasn't happened
and 12 hundred people died in hurricanes in 2005. For the
same reason, people died in the wildfires in Oklahoma. 12
hundred is less than 12 million, but GWB is still comparable
to Stalin. Both adopted anti-science policies for ideological
reasons and thereby murdered large numbers of their own
citizens.

The US economy has been devastated by George W.
Bush's war on science. Sarah Palin would make a full-
blown depression a lot worse.

There is something that needs to be made explicit: Truth is not determined by a vote of scientists. Scientists are not authorities. Nature is the Only authority. There is only one vote that counts, and Nature casts it. It isn't just "not nice" to fool Mother Nature, it is impossible. Scientists understand and believe this so innately that they never say it, but other people may think that scientists wield power or authority.
Reference: book: "Science and Immortality" by Charles B. Paul 1980 University of California Press:
The Eloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1699-1791)
page 99: "Science is not so much a natural as a moral philosophy".
page 106: Nature isn't just the final authority, Nature is the Only authority. When you try to disobey Nature [In older language: "When you try to tell God how to run the Universe".], the result is less subtle than a train wreck: The rocket explodes on the launch pad. Oklahomans die in wild fires when it should be winter. The Gulf coast suffers the worst hurricane season ever. Tornado season extends into January.

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The Bush Administration's War On Science
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 27, 2008 7:34 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted February 27, 2008.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/78056/

Our government is waging a war against science, endangering
millions of lives in the U.S. and beyond.

Over the past eight years, the lives of millions of people in the
United States and beyond have been endangered by the US
government. No, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking
about the quiet, systematic war the government has been waging
against science.

You may have heard about gross examples of the government
censoring scientific documents. For example, it was widely
reported last year that a government regulatory group excised at
least half of the statements Centers for Disease Control director
Julie Gerberding was set to make at a congressional hearing about
how climate change will affect public health. You may also have
heard about the scandal in 2004 when a whistleblower at the
Environmental Protection Agency revealed that five of the seven
members on a panel of "independent experts" stood to gain
financially from shutting down a scientific investigation of a
controversial mining technique called "hydraulic fracturing." The
panel claimed that in its expert opinion, the technique didn't
require regulation, despite many scientists' concerns that it might
pollute groundwater.

But these are the stories that hit the headlines. There are hundreds
more where they came from, and many of them are documented
meticulously in a study released earlier this month by the Union of
Concerned Scientists (UCS) called "Federal Science and the
Public Good." http://www.ucsusa.org/
scientific_integrity/
restoring/federal-science.html

The UCS report documents, in chilling detail, how agencies have
fired scientists who disagreed with government policies. For
example, in 2003, experts in nuclear physics were dismissed from
a panel within the National Nuclear Security Administration
because some of them had published about how the George W.
Bush administration's beloved "bunker buster" weapons weren't
very effective. And scientists who spoke out against the
administration's stem cell policy were booted from the President's
Council on Bioethics.

Worse, the government has falsified scientific studies to bolster its
policies and undergird its ideological positions. Perhaps the most
egregious example of this was when the EPA lied outright to
Americans that the air around ground zero directly after Sept. 11
was safe to breathe. In fact, according to the UCS report, the EPA
made this statement without even testing the air. As a result, the
authors of the report write, "thousands of rescue workers now
plagued by crippling lung ailments continue to feel the impact of
this public deception." There's also an example of the Food and
Drug Administration inventing a fake study to support its decision
to approve the drug Ketek, along with many others.

Most intriguing, though, is the UCS report's suggestion that many
federal regulatory agencies may in fact be breaking the law by
cutting real science out of government policy decisions. Both the
Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act require the EPA
and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to base their decisions on
"the best scientific data available." And yet the UCS has
documented countless examples of both agencies, as well as
others, refusing to take into account the latest research on climate
change,
.............the article continues..........

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Sarah Palin is mentally ill as well as stupid.
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 27, 2008 7:42 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Religion is caused by any one or more of about half a dozen mental illnesses.
The truth about religion can be found in these books:

"The Neuropsychological bases of god beliefs" Dr. Michael A. Persinger MD,
psychiatrist 1987 "Religious people are just like my temporal lobe patients"

"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind" Julian
Jaynes Professor, Harvard University 1976 "Religious people are just like
schizophrenic patients"

"The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice" Roger A. MacKinnon, M.D.,
Robert Michels, M.D. W. B. Saunders Co. 1971 "Religiosity is a common
symptom [of] schizophrenic patients"

"The God delusion" by Richard Dawkins. "Religion is caused by a kind of
computer virus that infects the living computer, the human brain."

"The Science of Good and Evil" by Michael Shermer, 2004 "Morality and Ethics
are now in the jurisdiction of Science and greatly improved thereby."

Many books in the new science called "Sociobiology": Morals and ethics are
instinctive and they evolved.

"God: The Failed Hypothesis" by Victor Stenger. Scientific proof that god does
not exist.

"The God Part of the Brain" by Matthew Alper 1996. "The USA is anomolusly
religious because many early founder groups were religiously insane and fleeing
prosecution in Europe. Religion is a genetic disorder."

"The Accidental Mind" by David J. Linden, 2007 Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press. Religion is caused by the extreme klugeyness of the "designed"
by evolution brain. In particular, the narrative creation system cannot be turned
off. It generates false narratives that are believed by the generating person. This is
seen in experiments done in the laboratory. This book has the best explanation of
resistance to evolution: "There has also been an assumption that if one accepts the
idea that life developed without divine intervention, it necessarily follows that all
aspects of religious thought must be rejected. Those who take this line of
argument to extremes argue that when religious thought is rejected moral and
social codes will degenerate and "the law of the jungle" will be all that is left. It is
imagined by religious fundamentalists that those who do not share their particular
religious faith are incapable of leading moral lives." These suppositions are not
true many times over. Linden later mentions that the creationists [intelligent
design advocates] are exactly 180 degrees wrong rather than just a little wrong.
Being exactly wrong, they are unable to unlearn their error. See Sociobiology or
Sciobio.

"Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism" edited by Petto &
Godfrey, 2007. The ID and creationist crowd are trying to do away with science.
They see science as a "godless religion." Science is a process, not a religion.

"Manufacturing Belief" by Lewis Wolpert
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/05/15/lewis_wolpert/

"The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris

"Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon", by Daniel Dennett
Let's do scientific research on religion and find out what causes it.

"Origins of the Modern Mind" by Merlin Donald 1991 "So what did you expect
from a brain that is based on the Chimpanzee brain?

"Atheism, A Case Against God" by George Smith

"God is not Great; how religion poisons everything" by Christopher Hitchens, 2007

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Religion is a SCAM and Sarah Palin is a DUPE.
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 27, 2008 7:49 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
As a sophomore undergraduate student in Physics, your homework in Probability
and Statistics class may include figuring out when the second coming would be
required, assuming that the bible was 100% true in the year zero. That is, when
would the bible be down to 50% true? The popular and professors' answer in
1965 was the year 500. The true answer: A friend of mine was born and raised in
Budapest, Hungary. As an adult, he came here and stayed. After 25 years, he
visited his home town of Budapest. He was unable to communicate with his high
school classmates because the Hungarian language had changed so much. The
correct answer is less than 25 years. The first gospel was not written down until
50 years after the alleged events and then in a different language. The people who
told the story were at about the same level of civilization as "wild Indians", I mean
Native Americans before Columbus got here. We have all played or seen played
the game called "Telephone" in which a story is passed down a line of re-tellers.
By the Sixth re-telling, the story has no resemblance to the original. The gospel
story had to have been re-told at least 6 times before it was mis-translated the first
time. [Note that whoever wrote it down the first time was free to write whatever
he wanted to. The storytellers were illiterate and unable to check his written text
by reading it. Besides that, he wrote in Greek rather than Aramaic.] Conclusion:
There is no truth anywhere in the bible, and there never was. There is no way to
know what "jesus" or "mohammed" or any other such character actually said or
did.

ALL of the jurisdictions that were formerly in the jurisdiction of religion have
been taken over by Science. There is no longer a need to debate the issue.
Religion is an unfortunate side effect of having evolved from a chimpanzee-like
animal in a very brief 6 or 7 million years. "God" will not save us from the
consequences of global warming or an asteroid impact or a tornado because there
is no such critter as "god.". Ethics and morality are instinctive, not derived from
religion. Female instinct has greater force in morality than male instinct because
the female is in command of the sexual encounter. Look up "Sociobiology". The
origin of the Universe is the subject of Cosmology which is part of astronomy
which is part of the science of physics.
Religion is a SCAM. ANY religion, there are 10,000 to choose from at any one
time. People keep inventing new religions [for the benefit of the "prophet," of
course] and forgetting other religions. ALL preachers, priests, imams, rabbis,
iatolas, etc. belong in jail for "grand theft, bunko type".

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Research Fruit Fly
Posted by: paganpat on Oct 27, 2008 11:13 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Amazing, where did Palin go to school? Everyone especially our leaders need to be educated in science, and realize how research and design works. Someone must do some research on those that have not studied the fruit fly and how, they themselve, tend to over populate , what Ya think?

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