50 replies to this topic

[Lazarus Long]

I am a person that sees religion and politics as essentially the same due to a historical analysis of the issue. I see this also as a tripartite struggle for social control with a reluctant third party, science. For a variety of reasons this battle has been waged for millennium but generally scientists are reluctant to participate because they prefer to be left alone to get their work done regardless of the consequences of that work. As a general rule the power struggle between theists and secularists is a distraction when not a perversion, dissipating their energy and best efforts in unproductive manners.

Technology should not be confused with science BTW. Technology is a complex adaptive application of science but is driven more by human relationship and concerns not by the same kinds of motives to understand that drives the scientist. Technology is dependent on science to function but it also must answer to the marketplace, law, and mortality, IOW the demands of the secularists, theists, producer/vendors and consumers. Technology is a complex admixture of elements that is both more and less than what it means. Technology can and often is manipulated by those with little or no scientific training or interest.

I am not really concerned with discussing technology here. I am concerned about the state of science in America. Please try not to confuse the two. I am seriously perturbed at the risk to us all if science becomes perverted by the motives of theists that are interested in pandering to fear, desire social control through the promotion of ignorance, and usurp control of the products of science granting them military and social power while ignoring the ever increasing risks of undesirable consequences caused by their actions. It is this very trend that has preceded each dark age we have recorded in every culture.

Here is a list of articles from Skeptic.com

It is important and has bearing on everything this Institute is attempting. It helps define the social schism we must address while not falling victim to it. Clearly the trend we can observe bodes ill.

The Politicization Of Science in the Bush Administration:  Science-As-Public Relations

Dylan Otto Krider

There’s a war going on—and not just the one in Iraq. This conflict may not get as much media play, but it could have just as great an impact on our safety, national prestige, and long-term economic health. It is a war over the integrity of science itself, and the casualties are everywhere: career scientists and enforcement officials are resigning en mass from government agencies, citing an inability to do their jobs due to what they see as the ruthless politicization of science by the Bush administration.  Bruce Boler, Marianne Horinko, Rich Biondi, J. P. Suarez and Eric Schaeffer are among those who have resigned from the EPA alone.  In a letter to The New York Times, former EPA administrator Russell Train, who worked for both Nixon and Ford, wrote, “I can state categorically that there never was such White House intrusion into the business of the EPA during my tenure.” 1  Government meddling has reached such a level that European scientists are voicing concerns that Bush may not merely be undermining U.S. dominance in sciences, but global research as well. 2

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently published the results of an investigation into the administration’s misuse of science called “Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” with a letter signed by over 60 leading scientists, including 20 Nobel Laureates. 3  President Bush’s science adviser Dr. John Marburger III’s response was hardly reassuring. 4 Part of Marburger’s defense was to use the common tactic to delay action by calling for “more research,” while in other cases he used verbal sleight of hand to avoid addressing the actual charge. For instance, when the National Cancer Institute’s web site was altered to suggest there was a link between abortion and breast cancer Marburger described the change as only a routine update. What actually troubled the UCS was that the findings of established science had been removed in favor of language that promoted the lonely crusade of Dr. Joel Brind.

For those unfamiliar with Dr. Brind, he discovered the supposed Abortion Breast Cancer link (or ABC as he calls it) after “making contact” with a local right-to-life group shortly after becoming a born-again Christian.   “With a new belief in a meaningful universe,” he explains, “I felt compelled to use science for its noblest, life-saving purpose.” 5   Despite the fact that Brind is completely at odds with his peers, the web site was updated with the following text:

The possible relationship between abortion and breast cancer has been examined in over thirty published studies since 1957. Some studies have reported statistically significant evidence of an increased risk of breast cancer in women who have had abortions, while others have merely suggested an increased risk. Other studies have found no increase in risk among women who have had an interrupted pregnancy. 6

After an outcry by members of Congress, the National Cancer Institute convened a three-day conference where experts reviewed the evidence, again concluding “induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk,” ranking the science as “well-established.” 7

To prove that he took the issue of global warming seriously, Marburger shamelessly cited a study that President Bush had commissioned from the National Academy of Sciences. The administration had asked the NAS to find “weaknesses” in climate science studies to justify their efforts to derail an international global warming treaty. 8 When the commissioned report instead confirmed human-induced climate change and mentioned fossil fuels as a major culprit the EPA decided to replace the findings in its Report on the Environment with a discredited study funded by the American Petroleum Institute. 9

Marburger also presented an argument that was made by Spinsanity, a self-described government watchdog website, which pointed out that just because a “frustrated scientist” had leaked an EPA report on children’s health to The Wall Street Journal, that did not prove there was a sinister intent to suppress it because bureaucratic delays in releasing information are common. 10

But the fact that so many scientists and government workers have risked their jobs by leaking information to the media makes this explanation weaker than it might be. As an editorial in The New York Times concluded, Marburger’s response is “little more than an attempt to put a positive spin on some flagrant examples of tailoring science to fit politics.” 11

Then there are those examples the UCS does not mention: the Corn Refiners Association and Sugar Association successfully lobbied Bush to pressure the World Health Organization to de-emphasize the importance of cutting sweets and eating fruits and vegetables in their anti-obesity guidelines. 12  Two scientists were ejected from a bioethics council due to what they believed to be their views favoring embryo research. 13  Data on hydraulic fracturing were altered so benzene levels met government standards after “feedback” from an industry source. 14   Another study (sponsored by Florida developers) claiming wetlands cause pollution, was used by the EPA to justify replacing protected marshes with golf courses to improve “water quality.” 15

Nothing is so trivial that it escapes top administration advisor Karl Rove’s insistence on staying “on message”—from forbidding NASA scientists to speak to the press about the global warming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, 16  to letting National Park Service gift shops sell books with the “alternative view” that the Grand Canyon was formed in seven days. 17

One need look no further than the USDA to see how compromised the research and enforcement environment has become.  Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman was a former food industry lawyer and lobbyist and her staff includes representatives of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and other industry groups.  So it should be no surprise that shortly after a dairy cow from Canada tested positive for mad cow disease a senior scientist came forward alleging agency pressure to let Canadian beef into the U.S. before a study concluded it was safe. 18  Nor should it shock us that whistleblowers accused an Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service supervisor of insisting a cow exhibiting symptoms of the disease be sent to a rendering plant before a technician could perform the tests mandated by agency guidelines. 19  But even the most cynical among us might be baffled by the almost cultish devotion to industry pandering exhibited when the USDA refused to give Creekstone Farms Premium Beef the kits it requested to voluntarily test its cattle so it could export to Japan because it might “create the impression that untested beef was not safe.” Creekstone may very well go bankrupt as a result. 20

Such reluctance only makes sense if the USDA fears that positive results are possible. Still, one hesitates to suggest the USDA is trying to sell as much tainted beef as possible before people start exhibiting symptoms.  One hesitates slightly less so after learning that EPA staffers were also prevented from performing routine analysis of the economic and health consequences of proposed regulations governing mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants.  After all, it’s a lot easier to suppress unfavorable scientific findings if there’s nothing to suppress.  But surely even they realize preventing an analysis of the consequences of our actions will not prevent those consequences from occurring.  That’s the rub.  Science doesn’t appear to factor into their reasoning at all.  The tests might come up negative.  They might come up positive.  The meat is considered safe either way.

Debates over Bush’s character usually devolve into familiar partisan arguments citing either his resoluteness in the face of widespread negative reaction as proof of his conviction, or the chasm between rhetoric and reality as evidence of Bush’s disingenuous denial. Both could be true enough to have created an atmosphere that encourages government officials to practice outright deception to attain administration goals.  To get an exemption from the Endangered Species Act the Pentagon simply changed a quote from an Army study saying government regulations “enhanced” training realism at Fort Stewart to “impaired.” 21  A Park Service brochure used a photo—supposedly taken in 1909—to prove that forests in the Sierra Nevadas were thinner before the implementation of “preventative thinning.”  The picture was actually a photo taken of a recently logged forest in Montana.

Such distortions seem always to be in the service of a crusade of true belief. Unquestionably Bush is a man of conviction.  The problem is that Bush does not seem to arrive at these convictions through faulty human pursuits like science.  He seems to suppose his knowledge comes from a higher source.

 
In the book The Price of Loyalty, Pulitzer prize-winning author Ron Suskind records former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s view that Bush based his decisions on “instinct,” and left others to “ponder the intangibles that [drive] the president—from some sweeping, unspoken notion of how the world works; to a one-size-fits-all principle, such as ‘I won’t negotiate with myself;’ to a squabble with a family member over breakfast.” 22   Former Bush terrorism czar Richard Clarke paints a similar picture of a White House staff inclined to ignore facts in favor of having truth “revealed” to them. Bush’s own wife says, “George is not an overly introspective person. He has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesn’t need to evaluate and reevaluate a decision. He doesn’t try to overthink. He likes action.” 23   Bush seems to value gut instinct over evidence, faith over fact, conviction over reality.  He doesn’t need science to know that our food is safe, that the Earth was created in seven days, or that Saddam Hussein was only seconds away from handing over nukes to al Qaeda.  If studies say otherwise then agencies have to be reorganized, committees reshuffled, and data reinterpreted until they get it right.

When agencies that used to be tasked with providing objective analysis no longer inform policy, their only remaining value is in bolstering preconceived conclusions.  The ultimate danger of this view of science-as-public relations can be seen in a recent proposal by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would grant the administration greater control over peer review of “all major government rules, plans, proposed regulations and pronouncements.” 24  David Michaels of the Department of Energy complained, “It goes beyond just having the White House involved in picking industry favorites to evaluate government science. Under this proposal, the carefully crafted process used by the government to notify the public of an imminent danger is going to first have to be signed off by someone weighing the political hazards.” 25  After an outcry from scientists, the OMB seems to have scaled back the proposal from disastrous to merely horrifying, but if past behavior is any guide the administration will keep returning to the cookie jar until science is an empty vessel firmly under the direction of the White House press office.

The White House’s inclination to mold facts to fit preconceived notions is crippling the government’s decision making abilities in the areas of health, safety, environment, and more importantly, in the War on Terror. A opinion editorial written by conservative columnist Richard Hoagland shortly before the Iraq invasion illustrates how the White House allowed prejudices to influence pre-war intelligence: “Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda for years. You can’t imagine that?  Sign up over there.  You can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency,”  Hoagland chides before praising Bush for pressuring intelligence officers to reach the conclusions they were previously unwilling to make. “The ‘politicization’ accusation suggests that those who find Iraqi links to al Qaeda are primarily interested in currying favor with the Bush White House.” 26  As former Bush administration official J. Dilulio put it, “When policy analysis is just backfill, to back up a political maneuver, you’ll get a lot of ooops.” 27

Astonishingly, even after intelligence lapses became known, conservative columnist David Brooks was calling for more political intrusion in the process: “For decades, the U.S. intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics,” he said. “What kind of scientific framework can explain the rage for suicide bombings, now sweeping the Middle East? …When it comes to understanding the world’s thugs and menaces, I’d trust the first 40 names in James Carville’s P.D.A. faster than I’d trust a conference-load of game theorists or risk-assessment officers.” 28  Never mind that those officers came ten times closer to assessing the actual situation in Iraq than the politicians who now interfere in the process like never before.  But recognizing that would mean bringing evidence into the equation.

The troubles in Iraq are not so much proof of the failure of the neocon vision for democratizing the Middle East, as they are a reminder of the disastrous consequences of removing empiricism from deliberation. All the problems that have popped up in Iraq were predicted long ago—from troop strength to the resilience of the insurgents—and available to anyone who cared to look. The administration not only chose to look away but actively swept them under the rug. When CIA war games were discovered to be training personnel to deal with the eventuality of civil disorder after the fall of Baghdad, The Atlantic Monthly reported the Pentagon forbade representatives from the Defense Department from participating because “detailed thought about the postwar situation meant facing costs and potential problems.” 29  Our refusal to face reality hasn’t been giving democracy much of a chance.

“Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue,” George Will wrote recently. “Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.” 30  Bush has finally met his match. The Universe is the one foe more steadfast than he is. It cannot be bullied or intimidated. The laws of physics know no compromise. This is a game of chicken Bush will lose. If he doesn’t take his foot off the accelerator, then the only question is: how will we recover from the crash?


Dylan Otto Krider is a freelance writer with a BA in creative writing with minor in astronomy/physics from the University of Arizona, and an MFA in writing from Vermont College, Norwich University.  He has written many articles for the Houston Press, Texas Magazine, Kenyon Review, Fiction Writer, Writer's Digest, and the Internet. His webpage can be found at www.dylanottokrider.com/index.htm

References:

1. Letter to Editor from Russell E. Train, “ When Politics Trumps Science,”New York Times, June 21, 2003.
2. “Euros Concerned for US Science,” The Scientist, Mar. 9, 2004.
3. “Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” Union of Concerned Scientists, Mar. 2004.
4. Dr. John H. Marburger III, “Response to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ February 2004 Document,” Apr. 2, 2004.
5. Dr. Joel Brind, “Reading the Data”, Physician Magazine, July/August 2000.
6. National Cancer Institute, Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer, Nov. 25, 2002.
7. National Cancer Institute, “Summary Report: Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer,” Mar. 4, 2003.
8. “Moving Target on Policy Battlefield,” Washington Post, May 2, 2002.
9. “Report by EPA Leaves out Data on Climate Change,” New York Times, June 19, 2003.
10. “Letter from Concerned Scientists Not Exactly Scrupulous on Facts,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 11, 2004.11. “The Science Adviser’s Rejoinder,” New York Times Editorial Page, Apr. 10, 2004.
12. “Eating Away at Science,” Mother Jones, May/June 2004.
13. “Bush Ejects Two From Bioethics Council,” The Washington Post, Feb. 28, 2004.
14. “Research on Oil and Gas Practices,” Politics & Science.
15. Resignation Statement of Bruce Boler, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility web site.
16. “NASA Curbs Comments on Ice Age Disaster Movie,” New York Times, Apr. 25, 2004.
17. “Critics Say the Park Service is Letting Religion and Politics Affect its Policies,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 2004.
18. “U.S. Scientist Tells of Pressure to Lift Ban on Food Imports,” New York Times, Feb. 25, 2004.
19. “Calls for Federal Inquiry Over Untested Cow,” New York Times, May 6, 2004.
20. “U.S. Won’t Let Company Test All Its Cattle for Mad Cow,” New York Times, Apr. 10, 2004.
21. David Brancaccio, Now, Apr. 23, 2004.
22. P. 165, Price of Loyalty.
23. “The Misunderestimated Man,” Slate, May 7, 2004
24. “White House Seeks Control of Health, Safety,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 11, 2004.
25. Ibid.
26. Richard Hoagland, “CIA’s New Old Iraq File”, Washington Post, Oct. 20, 2002.
27. “Why Are These Men Laughing?” Esquire, Jan. 2003.
28. David Brooks, “The C.I.A: Method and Madness,” New York Times, Feb. 3, 2004.
29. “Blind Into Baghdad,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan./Feb. 2004.
30. George F. Will, “Time for Bush to See the Realities”, Washington Post, May 4, 2004.

While I could have put this post in the religion forum as well because of the obvious political nature of theocratic versus secular struggle inherent in the division of Church and State I am keeping it in the more logical political section only but i may cross link it. To my scientific brethren I should add about politics and religion as it influences your lives and decisions regarding this issue that you can run but you cannot hide from the consequences of inaction and disdain for the ignorance of the masses and duplicity of those you might serve to accomplish your personal goals.

Events are moving inexorably toward crisis and confrontation and while it is rational to desire not to be caught up in the hysteria and false dichotomy of the body politic it is also impossible to ignore.

Here is a second article from the Skeptic that follows on the same issue.

“Political” Science
From the editors of Skeptic magazine

What, specifically, has the Bush administration done that has so invoked the ire of a sizable portion of the scientific community? The statement prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and signed by over 4,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates, 62 recipients of the National Medal of Science, and 127 members of the National Academy of Science, can be found at http://www.ucsusa.org/ along with the rebuttal by John H. Marburger III, the Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and a response to that rebuttal from UCS.

We are aware that the Union of Concerned Scientists has historically championed what many would consider to be left-leaning or liberal causes, and we are also sensitive to the fact that the political climate of this election year 2004 is an emotionally-charged one; nevertheless, either the Bush administration has taken actions to steer science in a direction parallel to its political agenda, or it has not. This is a factual question that can be answered with facts.  The UCS documents are extensive, so the following are just highlights. Readers should check the facts for themselves.


Political Vetting of Scientists

In the spring of 2002, Richard Myers, Chair of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University and Director of Stanford’s Human Genome Center, was nominated to serve on the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research.  According to Myers, shortly thereafter he received a call from Secretary Tommy Thompson’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services.  After a brief review of Myers’ scientific credentials (which are stellar), the Bush administration official began probing into Myers’ political preferences. “She wanted to know what I thought about President Bush: did I like him, what did I think of the job he was doing,” Myers said.  He describes himself as “nonpolitical,” yet he told the interviewer that:

I thought it was inappropriate to be asked these kinds of questions which led, I think, to an awkward situation for both of us. She said that she had been told that she needed to ask the questions and it appeared to me that she was reading from a prepared list.  Because of her persistence, I tried to answer in the most nonspecific way possible. I talked about terrorism and the fact that it seemed that the attacks of September 11 had brought the country together. But there is no doubt that I felt the questions were an affront and highly inappropriate.

Soon after the interview, Richard Myers was denied the position. He appealed his case to Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project and chair of the National Advisory Council, and Myers' nomination was approved.


Political Screening of Drugs

“Plan B” is an emergency contraceptive drug that consists of two high-dose pills that interfere with either ovulation or fertilization, or prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. The pills can be taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sexual intercourse to prevent pregnancy. The drug was approved by the FDA in 1999, and in 2003 the FDA granted the drug over-the-counter status (which it has in 33 other countries), when over 70 scientific organizations, including the AMA, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed the findings of a number of labs. In 2004, however, Steven Galson, Director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, overruled the advice of the agency’s staff and two independent scientific advisory panels (who voted 23 to 4 to grant over-the-counter status) by declaring Plan B “not approvable” for nonprescription status. Although Galson denies any political motive to his actions, there is no scientific reason why Plan B cannot be granted nonprescription status and, according to the UCS report, “FDA insiders also note that after the hearings on the matter late last year, conservative groups had mounted a political campaign to try to block the drug’s approval” and that after the FDA received the recommendation of its scientific advisory committees to grant nonprescription status, “49 members of Congress wrote to President Bush urging White House involvement.” It is well known that the Bush administration supports a policy of “abstinence only” when it comes to teenage sex, so such political machinations, although difficult to prove, are nevertheless apparent in this and other cases.


Bioethics or Biopolitics?

Ever since Dolly the sheep was cloned the field of “bioethics” has grown dramatically. Given the current administration’s stated objections to stem cell research, therapeutic and reproductive cloning, and other technologies deemed “unnatural” or “in disrespect of life,” it may not be surprising that biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and bioethicist William May were dismissed from the President’s Council on Bioethics. According to Blackburn, one of the nation’s top cancer scientists, she and May were dismissed because they frequently disagreed with the administration’s positions on biomedical research. For example, she was removed from the panel soon after she objected to a Council report on stem cell research. In an opinion editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, Blackburn “recounted how the dissenting opinion she submitted, which she believes reflects the scientific consensus in America, was not included in the council’s reports even though she had been told the reports would represent the views of all the council’s members.” According to the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972, advisory bodies are required to be balanced, yet the removal of scientists in disagreement with an administration’s stated position turns bioethics into biopolitics.

[knite]

Heres a question. Ive read many reports like these. The actions of the government and Bush in particular just sicken me. But, it seems like I can do nothing about it. Is there anything that can be done about it? If so, what? If there is, would those here help me in implementing it? I really feel that if something is not done, and done shortly we will spend the next 50 years cleaning up this mess that bush will most likely cause.

[Michael]

All:

Heres a question. Ive read many reports like these. The actions of the government and Bush in particular just sicken me. But, it seems like I can do nothing about it. Is there anything that can be done about it? If so, what?

Certainly. The subjugation of science in US public policy has not come about by accident. It has been the result of very intentional, concerted efforts by theocrats to put their policies in place in government. To reverse the tide, you can do what the theocrats have been doing to seize control of the political machinery of the United States, and thus create these messes: write letters, join lobbying organizations, and vote.

Pick either specific issues, or the subject as a whole, and write a letter to your Representative:

http://www.house.gov/

... and your Senator:

http://www.senate.gov/

Especially important for specific issues are members of House and Senate Committees, to whom you should write on specific issues of concern irrespective of whether they are your local representatives:

http://www.house.gov...mitteeWWW.shtml
http://www.senate.go...ittees_home.htm

It's also worth while lobbying the politiicans directly for more funding for research on the biology of aging: currently, the National Institute on Aging blows 50% of its budget on Alzheimer's disease, and much of the rest of it on geriatric medicine or social gerontology -- which are important for improving quality of life in the biologically old, but are basically defeatist, palliative efforts, instead of the important work of intervention in the aging process itself.
You can check out relevant lobbying organizations for ideas on issues that need your attention. For instance, on stem cell research, check out the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR) :

http://www.CAMRadvocacy.org

On building a sustainable economy so that civilization doesn't slide into a new Dark Age before we develop the technologies required to escape current limitations and achieve "Our Posthuman Future":

http://www.pewclimate.org/
http://www.sierralegal.org/
http://www.ewg.org/
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/

An excellent page of resources for advocacy targeted toward life extension issues is up at the Longevity Meme:

http://www.longevitymeme.org/projects/

You can also financially support these organizations, who will lobby and raise public awareness on the issues on your behalf.

You can also help to simply bypass these initiatives, by working at the state level: California's Proposition 71 was a great example, as are Californian efforts to improve CO2 emissions standards for vehicles in the face of Federal inaction on the CAFE standards. Cf these state programs on energy efficiency and climate change, in the face of the Bush administration's continued inaction and obscurantism on the issues:

http://www.pewclimat...tates/index.cfm

Similarly, you can contribute to the Methuselah Mouse, to mobilize venture capital to get working on serious anti-aging medicine:

http://www.mprize.org

And, at the end of the day: when elections come around, get out and vote. Get pro-science members onto your Board of Education; get pro-science people into Congress and into the whitehouse. Hell, get judges who believe in the separation of Church and state!

Take heart. There is LOTS for you to do.

-Michael

[Lazarus Long]

I even consider that I’d rather see “Sociology” as the title of this area rather than “Politics.”

This has already come up and been proposed. We are in fact working toward a reorganization with this idea in mind. I understand what you mean about Political Science being a 'king of oxymoron.' [lol]

[Lazarus Long]

BTW, I have read those speeches by Bill Moyers and since you mention them I do think they belong in this thread. I will look them up and post them if you don't get them first.

[Lazarus Long]

Here are some examples of what Chip is referring to and I have also raised the issue before about the growing danger of self fulfilling apocalyptic memes.

http://yubanet.com/a...cle_15874.shtml
Bill Moyers on Health and the Global Environment
By: Bill Moyers
Published: Dec 4, 2004

This week the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School presented its fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award to Bill Moyers. In presenting the award, Meryl Streep, a member of the Center board, said, "Through resourceful, intrepid reportage and perceptive voices from the forward edge of the debate, Moyers has examined an environment under siege with the aim of engaging citizens." Here is the text of his response to Ms. Streep's presentation of the award.

I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera whom you never see. And for all those scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain citizens whose stories we have covered in reporting on how environmental change affects our daily lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's wisdom. We tell their stories.

The journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's Silent Spring left off.

Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we journalists routinely cover - conventional, manageable programs like budget shortfalls and pollution - may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable, unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he writes, could be the accelerating deterioration of the environment, creating perils with huge momentum like the greenhouse effect that is causing the melt of the artic to release so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed that a weakening gulf stream could yield abrupt and overwhelming changes, the kind of changes that could radically alter civilizations.

That's one challenge we journalists face - how to tell such a story without coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want to understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge - to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.'

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144-just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of god will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer - 'the road to environmental apocalypse. Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total - more since the election - are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that i will send a famine in the land.' he seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same god who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America's providential history. You'll find there these words: "the secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie...that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.' however, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in god is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in god's earth......while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that god has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people." No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

I can see in the look on your faces just how had it is for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with the Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots:

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources.

That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.

That wants to open the artic wildlife refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the international policy network, which is supported by Exxon Mobile and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is 'a myth, sea levels are not rising, scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are 'an embarrassment.

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, 'Father, forgive us, for we know now what we do.' And then I am stopped short by the thought: 'That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.'

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to out moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: 'How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called 'hocma' - the science of the heart.....the capacity to see....to feel....and then to act...as if the future depended on you.

Believe me, it does.

[Lazarus Long]

In light of the previous article I will add this personal comment; those of you that think this is nothing more than hyperbole will find that as the tide of repression rises it is too late to fight back. Now is the time to initiate a consistent and determined rational campaign against dogmatism, demagoguery, and superstition. That struggle begins with a stringent application of the rule of law based on a strong appreciation of historical precedent and a relentless resisitence of complacency.

It was just such a campaign that was never mounted to defend the Wiemar Republic, just such an outspoken cry that failed to go out or be heard in timely manner to prevent every holocaust of the 20th Century, from the Armenians to the Hutu's and all manner of Jews between. Those that think it can't happen here, or that is only a threat to others do not understand freedom, do not appreciate the most important founding principles of our society, those who stand by idle and watch as others lose their freedom will inevitable find they have lost their own.

I must emphasize again that while the struggle for reason must begin with a strict adherence to the rule of law, if it fails there it most certainly will not end there.

Pennsylvania Schools Sued Over Creationism Plan
http://story.news.ya...ationism_dc&e=4
Tue Dec 14, 5:06 PM ET   Politics - Reuters
By Jon Hurdle

HARRISBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - Civil rights groups sued a Pennsylvania school district on Tuesday to block teaching of "intelligent design," an alternative to evolution that contends nature was created by an all-powerful being.
  
The American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed suit in federal court on behalf of parents of students in the Dover Area School District who object to the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution in high school biology classes.

The suit claims the policy -- adopted by the board in October and to become part of the curriculum in January -- illegally promotes religious beliefs under the guise of science education.

"Intelligent design is a Trojan horse for bringing creationism into the public classroom," Witold Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told reporters.

In the 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) struck down the teaching of creationism in public schools for violating the separation of church and state mandated in the U.S. constitution. Creationists believe that the earth was made by God, as described in the Book of Genesis.

Proponents of "intelligent design" argue that nature is so complex that it could not have occurred by chance as held by Charles Darwin's 1859 theory of evolution. Nature, they maintain, must have been created by some all-powerful force although that force is not explicitly identified as God.

While other U.S. school boards have taken steps to introduce the theory, none has gone as far as the board in Dover, the ACLU said.

A school district spokesman declined comment. In November, the Dover school district -- about 100 miles west of Philadelphia -- defended its policy, saying Darwin's theory is "still being tested" and that there are "gaps" in it.

U.S. Christian conservatives, who played a significant role in President Bush (news - web sites)'s re-election, have been pushing for decades for the teaching of creationism in schools.

Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, urged the school board to reconsider its decision.

"Public schools are not Sunday schools and we must resist any effort to make them so," Lynn said. "There is an evolving attack under way on sound science education and the school board's action in Dover is part of that misguided crusade."

The news conference in the state capitol building was also attended by two protesters carrying signs that read, "Evolution: Unscientific and Untrue."

[Lazarus Long]

As these articles are too long for the forum software I will post them in their own windows.

http://www.commondre...s03/1112-10.htm
Published on Wednesday, November 12, 2003 by CommonDreams.org 
Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform  by Bill Moyers
Founding Director, Public Affairs Television
President, The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy
November 8, 2003
Madison, Wisconsin
  
Thank you for inviting me tonight. I’m flattered to be speaking to a gathering as high-powered as this one that’s come together with an objective as compelling as “media reform.” I must confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with other journalists, about the very term “media.” Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve, articulated my concerns better than I could when he wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2001)

that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same. …David Broder is not Matt Drudge. “Meet the Press” is not “Temptation Island.” And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak for him. He does not speak for me. Yet ‘the media” speaks for us all.

That’s how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing our embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and belittling question, “Does Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?” Oliver North and I may be in the same “media” but we are not part of the same message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us live in “medialand,” and God knows we need some “media reform.” I’m sure you know those two words are really an incomplete description of the job ahead. Taken alone, they suggest that you’ve assembled a convention of efficiency experts, tightening the bolts and boosting the output of the machinery of public enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding each other’s sermons. But we need to be – and we will be – much more than that. Because what we’re talking about is nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized.

Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face should trigger alarms. Free and responsible government by popular consent just can’t exist without an informed public. That’s a cliché, I know, but I agree with the presidential candidate who once said that truisms are true and clichés mean what they say (an observation that no doubt helped to lose him the election.) It’s a reality: democracy can’t exist without an informed public. Here’s an example: Only 13% of eligible young people cast ballots in the last presidential election. A recent National Youth Survey revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young people polled believe that voting is important, and only 46% think they can make a difference in solving community problems. We’re talking here about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds and asked them, “Why don’t more young people vote or get involved?”

Of the nearly two thousand respondents, the main answer was that they did not have enough information about issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it again: democracy can’t exist without an informed public. So I say without qualification that it’s not simply the cause of journalism that’s at stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself. As Tom Paine put it, “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.” He was talking about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny press. Freedom and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future United States. They grew up together, and neither has fared very well in the other’s absence. Boom times for the one have been boom times for the other.

Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press radio and TV, three powerful forces are undermining that very freedom, damming the streams of significant public interest news that irrigate and nourish the flowering of self-determination. The first of these is the centuries-old reluctance of governments – even elected governments – to operate in the sunshine of disclosure and criticism. The second is more subtle and more recent. It’s the tendency of media giants, operating on big-business principles, to exalt commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting’s “money-making machine” at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the journalism that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth; they are isolating serious coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling “news holes” or far from prime- time; and they are gobbling up small and independent publications competing for the attention of the American people.

It’s hardly a new or surprising story. But there are fresh and disturbing chapters.

In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law – padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands. But they’ve found new ones now, in the name of “national security.” The classifier’s Top Secret stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially labeled “secret” there hovers a culture of sealed official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and spin, of misnamed “public information” offices that churn out blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned lies. Censorship without officially appointed censors.

Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires digesting the bones of swallowed independents, and you’ve got a major shrinkage of the crucial information that thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that coming as long as a century ago when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then of concentration in the young radio industry, became apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of early New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was passed (more on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy, mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values – to assure that the official view of reality – corporate or government – was not the only view of reality that reached the people. Regulators and regulated, media and government were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving those checks and balances that is the bulwark of our Constitutional order.

What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to free-market economics? That’s exactly what’s happening now under the ideological banner of “deregulation.” Giant megamedia conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.

Consider where we are today.

Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and – in defiance of the Constitution – from their representatives in Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly – the word is Barry Diller’s, not mine – been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the people’s need to know. When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to define “real news”, he answered: “The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” When journalism throws in with power that’s the first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

Which brings me to the third powerful force – beyond governmental secrecy and megamedia conglomerates – that is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful interests in the world. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor the notion of a vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power and its many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of honey. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert Murdoch’s empire to the nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates – the religious, partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our founding documents.

Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be democracy’s best friend. That is why so many journalists joined with you in questioning Michael Powell’s bid – blessed by the White House – to permit further concentration of media ownership. If free and independent journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way to intimidate and then silence mainstream journalism than to be the boss.

If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer’s chilling account in the current New Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is also its first media mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly control, includes the state television networks and radio stations, three of Italy’s four commercial television networks, two big publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country’s largest movie production-and-distribution company, and a chunk of its Internet services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would enable him to purchase more media properties, including the most influential paper in the country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other half think they might have to. Small wonder he has managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee his fortune – or that his name is commonly attached to such unpleasant things as contempt for the law, conflict of interest, bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, “his power over what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think, is overwhelming.” The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked recently why a British magazine was devoting so much space to an Italian Prime Minister. He replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two things the magazine stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi’s close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched automatically to Murdoch’s Sky Italia

So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and far more critical than simply “media reform.” That’s why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look around you. I’m serious: Look to your left and now to your right. You are looking at your allies in one of the great ongoing struggles of the American experience – the struggle for the soul of democracy, for government “of, by, and for the people.”

It’s a battle we can win only if we work together. We’ve seen that this year. Just a few months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared a relaxation of the rules governing ownership of media outlets that would allow still more diversity-killing mergers among media giants. The proceedings were conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by all the major media, who were of course interested parties. In June Chairman Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised regulations as a done deal.

But they didn’t count on the voice of independent journalists and citizens like you. Because of coverage in independent outlets – including PBS, which was the only broadcasting system that encouraged its journalists to report what was really happening – and because citizens like you took quick action, this largely invisible issue burst out as a major political cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You exposed Powell’s failure to conduct an open discussion of the rule changes save for a single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led to a real participatory discussion, with open meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that followed generated millions of letters and “filings”at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, the outcry mobilized unexpected support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules that cleared the Senate – although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in the House. But who would have thought six months ago that the cause would win support from such allies as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have moved “media reform” to center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst for a new era of democratic renewal.

We working journalists have something special to bring to this work. This weekend at your conference there will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics of reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs and strategies? How can we protect and extend the reach of those tools that give us some countervailing power against media monopoly – instruments like the Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and public broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and opinion.

But without passion, without a message that has a beating heart, these won’t be enough. There’s where journalism comes in. It isn’t the only agent of freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply human and therefore deeply flawed craft – yours truly being a conspicuous example. But at times it has risen to great occasions, and at times it has made other freedoms possible. That’s what the draftsmen of the First Amendment knew and it’s what we can’t afford to forget. So to remind us of what our free press has been at its best and can be again, I will call on the help of unseen presences, men and women of journalism’s often checkered but sometimes courageous past.

Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the establishment of press freedom. It wasn’t ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn’t drop like the gentle rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for by unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their hands inky at their own hand presses and called themselves simply “printers.” The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair put out in Boston in September of 1690. Its name was Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply wanted “to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention.” The government shut it down after one issue – just one issue! – for the official reason that printer Ben Harris hadn’t applied for the required government license to publish. But I wonder if some Massachusetts pooh-bah didn’t take personally one of Harris’s proclaimed motives for starting the paper – “to cure the spirit of Lying much among us”?

No one seems to have objected when Harris and his paper disappeared – that was the way things were. But some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its royal governor, things were different. The colony brought Zenger to trial on a charge of “seditious libel,” and since it didn’t matter whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But the jury ignored the judge’s charge and freed Zenger, not only because the governor was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal of Zenger’s lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client’s case was:

Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a Right, -- the Liberty – both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power…by speaking and writing – Truth.
Still a pretty good mission statement!

During the War for Independence itself most of the three dozen little weekly newspapers in the colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by giving space to anti-British letters, news of Parliament’s latest outrages, and calls to action. But the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was the onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England where he left a trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 1776 – just before enlisting in Washington’s army – he published Common Sense, a hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts to make an uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It’s been called the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought by a small literate population. Paine followed it up with another convincing collection of essays written in the field and given another punchy title, The Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up here is because he had something we need to restore – an unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people with the message that they mattered and could stand up for themselves. He couched his gospel of human rights and equality in a popular style that any working writer can envy. “As it is my design,” he said, “to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.”

That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that we’re still quoting. “These are the times that try men’s souls.” “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” “Virtue is not hereditary.” And this: “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” I don’t know what Paine would have thought of political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but he could have held his own in any modern campaign.

There were also editors who felt responsible to audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and ‘88 the little New-York Independent Advertiser ran all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious essays in favor of ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as clear arguments, but they are, and they were, unforgiving in their demand for concentrated attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed the best to its readers, and the readers knew that the issues of self-government deserved their best attention. I pray your goal of “media reform” includes a press as conscientious as the New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as both. Because it takes those qualities to fight against the relentless pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the First Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered in law. It wasn’t. Only seven years later, in the midst of a war scare with France, Congress passed and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. The act made it a crime – just listen to how broad a brush the government could swing – to circulate opinions “tending to induce a belief” that lawmakers might have unconstitutional or repressive motives, or “directly or indirectly tending” to justify France or to “criminate,” whatever that meant, the President or other Federal officials. No wonder that opponents called it a scheme to “excite a fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at home.” John Ashcroft would have loved it.

But here’s what happened. At least a dozen editors refused to be frightened and went defiantly to prison, some under state prosecutions. One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of Representatives, languished for four months in an unheated cell during a Vermont winter. But such was the spirit of liberty abroad in the land that admirers chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when he emerged his district re-elected him by a landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time President Jefferson – who hated it from the first – pardoned those remaining under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending, and so can ours, but it will take the kind of courage that those early printers and their readers showed.

Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the government is tempted to hit the bottle of censorship again during national emergencies, real or manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration resurrected the doctrine of “prior restraint” from the crypt and tried to ban the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the Washington Post – even though the documents themselves were a classified history of events during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were both warned by their lawyers that they and their top managers could face criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the material that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked – and, by the way, offered without success to the three major television networks. Or at the least, punitive lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious Nixon team could devise. But after internal debates – and the threats of some of their best-known editors to resign rather than fold under pressure – both owners gave the green light – and were vindicated by the Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy.

Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the Carter administration, in 1979, tried to prevent the Progressive magazine, published right here in Madison, from running an article called “How to Make an H-Bomb.” The grounds were a supposed threat to “national security.” But Howard Morland had compiled the piece entirely from sources open to the public, mainly to show that much of the classification system was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again rejected the government’s claim, but it’s noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by that time had retreated to a small left-wing publication like the Progressive.

In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear and present danger of punishment, none of the owners flinched. Can we think of a single executive of today’s big media conglomerates showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn’t even want ABC News reporting on its parent company, Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC’s Robert Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the network didn’t want to offend conservatives with a liberal sensibility during the invasion of Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael Savage whose diatribes on radio had described non-white countries as “turd-world nations” and who characterized gay men and women as part of “the grand plan to cut down on the white race.” I am not sure what it says that the GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue was offensive to conservatives, Savage was not.

And then there’s Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week that the once-Tiffany Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary – and taking kudos for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast “The Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the Pentagon” – the network’s famous eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the Republican National Committee – and at a time when its parent company has billions resting on whether the White House, Congress, and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations than currently permissible – CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries about Ronald Reagan that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his decision. But earlier this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series about Adolf Hitler, Moonves sang a different tune: “If you want to play it safe and put on milquetoast then you get criticized…There are times when as a broadcaster when you take chances.” This obviously wasn’t one of those times. Granted, made-for-television movies about living figures are about as vital as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s – and even less authentic – granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn’t even seen the film before they set to howling; granted, on the surface it’s a silly tempest in a teapot; still, when a once-great network falls obsequiously to the ground at the feet of a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one would have taken seriously as history, you have to wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to come, when the stakes are really high. And you have to wonder what concessions the media tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.

So what must we devise to make the media safe for individuals stubborn about protecting freedom and serving the truth? And what do we all – educators, administrators, legislators and agitators – need to do to restore the disappearing diversity of media opinions? America had plenty of that in the early days when the republic and the press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit – just a few hundred dollars – to start a paper, especially with a little political sponsorship and help. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren’t objective by any stretch. Here’s William Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine, shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s paper, Porcupine’s Gazette. “Peter Porcupine,” Cobbett’s self-bestowed nickname, declared:

Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not relate news as he finds it, is something worse than partial; and . . . he that does not exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor.


In Cobbett’s day you could flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict serious damage on open public discussion because there were plenty of competitors. It didn’t matter if the local gazette presented the day’s events entirely through a Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or Republican choice handy – there were, in other words, choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well informed. They also made it possible for Americans to exercise one of their most democratic habits – that of forming associations to carry out civic enterprises. And they operated against the dreaded tyranny of the majority by letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere. Here’s how de Tocqueville put it in his own words:

It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.

No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion of humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press that put the yeast in freedom’s ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming America’s Manifest Destiny to dominate North America. But one way or another, journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction.

Past and present are never as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages “ever open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering,” but said that whoever sat in an editor’s chair and didn’t work to promote human progress hadn’t tasted “the luxury” of journalism. I liken that to the words of a kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his four-page little I.F. Stone’s Weekly, “Izzy” loved to catch the government’s lies and contradictions in the government’s own official documents. And amid the thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.” Think about that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing that being in a position to fight the good fight isn’t a burden but a lucky break. How can our work here bring that attitude back into the newsrooms?

That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing field began to fade as the old hand-presses gave way to giant machines with press runs and readerships in the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions. But that didn’t necessarily or immediately kill public spirited journalism. Not so long as the new owners were still strong-minded individuals with big professional egos to match their thick pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter for a German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883 he was already a millionaire in the making. But here’s his recommended short platform for politicians:


1.Tax luxuries

2. Tax Inheritances

3. Tax Large Incomes

4. Tax monopolies

5. Tax the Privileged Corporation

6. A Tariff for Revenue

7. Reform the Civil Service

8. Punish Corrupt Officers

9. Punish Vote Buying.

10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections

Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one of today’s huge newspaper chains taking that on as an agenda?

Don’t get me wrong. The World certainly offered people plenty of the spice that they wanted – entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living – but not at the expense of news that let them know who was on their side against the boodlers and bosses.

Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded investigative journalism that took the name of muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days of early last century saw a second great awakening of the democratic impulse. What brought it into being was a reaction against the Social Darwinism and unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force today. Certain popular magazines made space for – and profited by – the work of such journalists – to name only a few – as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham Phillips. They ripped the veils from – among other things – the shame of the cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And why were they given those opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of McClure’s Magazine, when special interests defied the law and flouted the general welfare, there was a social debt incurred. And, as he put it: “We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our liberty.”

Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get back to putting the rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of its faith in good government.

When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a vigorous public movement of educators, labor officials, and religious and institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast system that would serve the interests of citizens and communities. A movement like that is coming to life again and we now have to build on this momentum.

It won’t be easy, because the tide’s been flowing the other way for a long time. The deregulation pressure began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn’t need much regulation because it was just a “toaster with pictures,” eliminated many public-interest rules. That opened the door for networks to cut their news staffs, scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to “The Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the Pentagon”), and exile investigative producers and reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of independent production. It was like turning out searchlights on dark and dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that drive was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate welfare program ever for the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the world – passed, I must add, with support from both parties.

And the beat of “convergence” between once-distinct forms of media goes on at increased tempo, with the communications conglomerates and the advertisers calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall, an octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure cable channels that can deliver interactive multimedia content – text, sound and images – to digital TVs, home computers, personal video recorders and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The goal? To corner the market on new ways of selling more things to more people for more hours in the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized pitches to you and your children. That will melt down the surviving boundaries between editorial and marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to the new-media hucksters as “branded entertainment.”

Let’s consider what’s happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today’s newspaper markets are monopolies. And now most of the country’s powerful newspaper chains are lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing their grip on community after community. And are they up-front about it? Hear this: Last December 3 such media giants as The New York Times, Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost all the country’s broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the case for that cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They actually told the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local journalism. But did those same news organizations tell their readers what they were doing? Not all. None of them on that day believed they had an obligation to report in their own news pages what their parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media conglomerates increase their control over what we see, read, and hear, they rarely report on how they are themselves are using their power to further their own interests and power as big business, including their influence over the political process.

Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who produced the book all love newspapers – Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire service reporter and news and feature editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its three hundred year history – a change that is diminishing the amount of real news available to the consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies. It is a world where “small hometown dailies in particular are being bought and sold like hog futures. Where chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devour other chains whole. Where they are effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, further minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy.”

They go on to describe the toll that the never-ending drive for profits is taking on the news. In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But newspaper management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the space for news, and was rewarded by being named Gannett’s Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them now own thirteen of the state’s nineteen dailies, or seventy three percent of all the circulation of New Jersey-based papers. Then there is The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500. Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Johnson administration – the Andrew Johnson administration. But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years.

You’d better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning – it won’t be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.

You can see the results even now in the waning of robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth reporting as news organizations try to do more with fewer resources. In the failure of the major news organizations to cover their own corporate deals and lobbying as well as other forms of “crime in the suites” such as Enron story. And in helping people understand what their government is up to. The report by the Roberts team includes a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat in coverage of nineteen key departments and agencies in Washington. Regular reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department dropped off considerably through the decade. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and, incredibly, at the Interior Department, which controls five to six hundred million acres of public land and looks after everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.

That’s in Washington, our nation’s capital. Out across the country there is simultaneously a near blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The public interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs – less than one-half of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time from broadcasters who have filled their coffers by looting the public airwaves over which they were placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang up in the House of Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey the law that says they must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office at the lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the Congress to heel. So much for the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on what seems a hopeless fight for a media system that serves as effectively as it sells – one that holds all the institutions of society, itself included, accountable?

There’s plenty we can do. Here’s one journalist’s list of some of the overlapping and connected goals that a vital media reform movement might pursue.

First, we have to take Tom Paine’s example – and Danny Schecter’s advice – and reach out to regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger tent than you have here. Those of us in this place speak a common language about the “media.” We must reach the audience that’s not here – carry the fight to radio talk shows, local television, and the letters columns of our newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our fellow citizens to understand that what they see, hear, and read is not only the taste of programmers and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by the people we vote for.

We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet open to all. The web has enabled many new voices in our democracy – and globally – to be heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals, non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can speak online, and often with an impact greater than in the days when orators had to climb on soap box in a park. The media industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it’s why concerns about media concentration are ill founded in an environment where anyone can speak and where there are literally hundreds of competing channels. What those lobbyists for big media don’t tell you is that the traffic patterns of the online world are beginning to resemble those of television and radio. In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then known) accounted for nearly a third of all user time spent online. And two others companies – Yahoo and Microsoft – bring that figure to fully 50%. As for the growing number of channels available on today’s cable systems, most are owned by a small handful of companies. Of the ninety-one major networks that appear on most cable systems, 79 are part of such multiple network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a channel on cable today, you must either be owned by or affiliated with one of the giants. If we’re not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be transformed into a system in which a handful of companies use their control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic potential of this amazing technology. So we must fight to make sure the Internet remains open to all as the present-day analogue of that many-tongued world of small newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.

We must fight for a regulatory, market and public opinion environment that lets local and community-based content be heard rather than drowned out by nationwide commercial programming.

We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and other information sources. Let the message go forth: No Berlusconis in America!

We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system – something made possible in part by new digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations – and fight off attempts to privatize what’s left of public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be the only free speech in America!

We must fight to create new opportunities, through public policies and private agreements, to let historically marginalized media players into more ownership of channels and control of content.

Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to get tougher about keeping a critical eye on those in public and private power and keeping us all informed of what’s important – not necessarily simple or entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news is “Entertainment Tonight.” And news departments are trustees of the public, not the corporate media’s stockholders

In that last job, schools of journalism and professional news associations have their work cut out. We need journalism graduates who are not only better informed in a whole spectrum of special fields – and the schools do a competent job there – but who take from their training a strong sense of public service. And also graduates who are perhaps a little more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present crop, though that’s hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of education, we get very few recruits from the ranks of those who do the world’s unglamorous and low-paid work. But as a onetime “cub” in a very different kind of setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken’s description of what being a young Baltimore reporter a hundred years ago meant to him. “I was at large,” he wrote,

...in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a front seat at every public . . By all orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . .But it would be an exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer or a midwife.


We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms. Let’s figure out how to attract youngsters who have acquired it.

And as for those professional associations of editors they might remember that in union there is strength. One journalist alone can’t extract from an employer a commitment to let editors and not accountants choose the appropriate subject matter for coverage. But what if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly managements? What if foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic bias, failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply refused any longer to quote anonymous sources – or give Kobe Bryant’s trial more than the minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard – or to run stories planted by the Defense Department and impossible, for alleged security reasons, to verify? What if a professional association backed them to the hilt? Or required the same stance from all its members? It would take courage to confront powerful ownerships that way. But not as much courage as is asked of those brave journalists in some countries who face the dungeon, the executioner or the secret assassin for speaking out.

All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not. What I know to be real is that we are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a romantic about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide may have been right when he said that all things human, given time, go badly. But I know journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag. Earlier this week the Library of Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview Kolakowski said: “There is one freedom on which all other liberties depend – and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would be soon suppressed.”

That’s the flame of truth your movement must carry forward. I am older than almost all of you and am not likely to be around for the duration; I have said for several years now that I will retire from active journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did not flinch. I take heart in your presence here. It’s your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.

###

[Ganshauk]

I was with you until you seriously considered Moyers as someone to listen to.

The guy is a frothing demogogue.

Look. Its very simple. Science and it's obvious progeny technology are inevitable. Every politician is perfectly aware of this. Especially the Bush administration. But to remain in power, a politician is forced to cater to the beliefs of his/her constituency.

Now, look at the platform that won the last election. Do people want blatant homosexuality splattered across the popular media? Do they want loose and immoral ideals like "clothing malfunctions" considered the norm? No. People want "Leave it to Beaver" type stuff no matter how unrealistic it is. They want to feel like thier lives are wholesome, have meaning, and are justified by God.

So a minority get totally bent when things dont go thier way. All the sudden the current admin is a bunch of religious right wingers bent on zealotism.

Trust me. Science will progress no matter what happens politically. If Bush can be accredited for instigating an alternatively powered vehicle, he will never invoke the name of God to denounce it.

Europe devoloped the musket, despite the church considering alchemy a basis for witchcraft.

Politicians reflect YOU, the voter. Being a minority is not always being smart. Sometimes a step backward is needed. Let people catch up. Life is two steps forward, one step back. Always. Just like a tide on a beach.

Ride the wave.

[Lazarus Long]

Hey Ganshauk long time no see. )

Politicians reflect the non voters too they just reflect their *dark side.*, like the physics of dark energy. Another example of the physics of politics and the null vote of nihilism.
hehehe [lol]

All we can ever do is ride the wave but some find better means to manage the force and learn to surf.

Still others (the scientists and their lab-tech assistants) learn to convert the tide or the flood to usable energy that transmutes threat into benefit.

The question returns to a cost benefit analysis and does every such analysis depend exclusively on a Zero/Sum analysis whereby for humans to benefit all other species must suffer from the competition?

Edited by Lazarus Long, 04 April 2005 - 01:58 PM.

[Karomesis]

with the future implications of rejuvinative therapy hanging over the heads of those in the know, the scumbag bastards we call politicians and "holy men" of one denomination or other will attempt to subvert this process with everything they have at their disposal including propaganda, fear, and the like.

And revenge is a dish best served cold, so I advocate going for the jugular as soon as possible, making rejuvination and immortality commonplace and rooting out the last remaining vestiges of knaves and charlatans we call priests and politicians.Thier dreams of social control will be destroyed, as the north wind lays waste the garden. Oh how I long for the day [lol]

[Lazarus Long]

In honor of the upcoming 80th Anniversary of the Scopes Trials I am going to put a few links to that history and some recent commentary in the NY Times that is raising making the controversy again current news.

But before doing that I think this article on the fact that American Science and Engineering is slipping in relation to Europe and Asia is important as it reflects a commitment over there to modern scientific teaching that appears to be lacking in our society and schools.

For example the growing debate over the use of ESC may end up decided by a stacked Supreme Court of bioconservatives. The question of Evolution vs Creationism in the form of Intelligent Design as well. If there is any chance in hell to alter this outcome it will be determined by the '06 elections for control of the Senate and House as well as State Houses.

Frankly I won't hold my breath as my American Culture appears more and more recidivist all the time.

http://news.yahoo.co..._usa_science_dc

U.S. losing lead in science and engineering-study
Fri Jul 8, 3:55 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half a century of U.S. dominance in science and engineering may be slipping as America's share of graduates in these fields falls relative to Europe and developing nations such as China and India, a study released on Friday says.

The study, written by Richard Freeman at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, warned that changes in the global science and engineering job market may require a long period of adjustment for U.S. workers.

Moves by international companies to move jobs in information technology, high-tech manufacturing and research and development to low-income developing countries were just "harbingers" of that longer-term adjustment, Freeman said.

Urgent action was needed to ensure that slippage in science and engineering education and research, a bulwark of the U.S. productivity boom and resurgence during the 1990s, did not undermine America's global economic leadership, he added.

The United States has had a substantial lead in science and technology since World War II. With just 5 percent of the world's population, it employs almost a third of science and engineering researchers, accounts for 40 percent of research and development spending and publishes 35 percent of science and engineering research papers.

Many of the world's top high-tech firms are American, and government spending on defense-related technology ensures the U.S. military's technological dominance on battlefields.

But the roots of this lead may be eroding, Freeman said.

Numbers of science and engineering graduates from European and Asian universities are soaring while new degrees in the United States have stagnated -- cutting its overall share.

In 2000, the paper said, 17 percent of university bachelor degrees in the U.S. were in science and engineering compared with a world average of 27 percent and 52 percent in China.

The picture among doctorates -- key to advanced scientific research -- was more striking. In 2001, universities in the European Union granted 40 percent more science and engineering doctorates than the United States, with that figure expected to reach nearly 100 percent by about 2010, the study showed.

The study said deteriorating opportunities and comparative wages for young science and engineering graduates has discouraged U.S. students from entering these fields, but not those born in other countries.

These trends are challenging the so-called North-South global economic divide, the paper said, by undermining a perceived rich-country advantage in high technology.

"Research and technological activity and production are moving where the people are, even when they are located in the low-wage South," Freeman wrote, citing a study saying some 10-15 percent of all U.S. jobs were "off-shorable."

[Lazarus Long]

In what should be considered a reversal of position in many respects a prominent Catholic Cardinal has issued a sort of semi official proclamation that while all but using the specific code words essentially takes the side of ID.

So now it is becoming unanimous, as virtually all the world's the leading religious institutions are taking a position against what they are calling Neo-Darwinism.

The brouhaha is developing through the NY Times and is worth taking note of as it began with an OP-Ed piece that says:

In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.

The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."

Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist."

Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."

Finding Design in Nature
http://www.nytimes.c...7schonborn.html
(full text in next post)

The NY Times has now lead with a significant article detailing the growing conflict that is also worth the read.

Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution

By CORNELIA DEAN and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: July 9, 2005

An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.

The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."

In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said Cardinal Schönborn.

He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.

Opponents of Darwinian evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal Schönborn's essay. But scientists and science teachers reacted with confusion, dismay and even anger. Some said they feared the cardinal's sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.

Cardinal Schönborn, who is on the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, said the office had no plans to issue new guidance to teachers in Catholic schools on evolution. But he said he believed students in Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just one of many theories. Many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.

Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory.

American Catholics and conservative evangelical Christians have been a potent united front in opposing abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia, but had parted company on the death penalty and the teaching of evolution. Cardinal Schönborn's essay and comments are an indication that the church may now enter the debate over evolution more forcefully on the side of those who oppose the teaching of evolution alone.

One of the strongest advocates of teaching alternatives to evolution is the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the idea, termed intelligent design, that the variety and complexity of life on earth cannot be explained except through the intervention of a designer of some sort.
(excerpt)

http://www.nytimes.c...09cardinal.html

Let's get this straight folks, sadly even as science is winning the pragmatic struggle to achieve precise and in-depth understanding of the processes governing biology it is losing the political struggle to defend the freedom to express those ideas in the manner that can be considered *unbiased*.

Science is losing the social *debate* and while I fully expect a turn around in the long run I ask you to consider just how long the interregnum looking more and more likely needs to be?

If the scientific community continues to turn an apparently elitist disdainful eye toward popular opinion and social trends at this time the result could be a trend toward a Dark Age. History shows how again and again these attitudes and institutional polemics have lead inevitably to book burnings and repression.

Globalization is more and more exposing the true Culture war as between Progressivism and Fundamentalism and all nations and all religions represent factions that are taking or being forced to take, sides.

Consider for example the subject of evolution as a bell weather, a canary in the depths of the human mine.

It once could be considered the subject of Blood Transfusion analogous to the technology of ESC and the background of blood typing that would have lead to genetic understanding centuries before it did. The church took a parallel position then to the one now that contributed to successfully holding back scientific awareness of biology and even genetics for three centuries, not merely the more obvious medical technologies.

Many of the advances of the 20th century might have begun in the 17th and 18th if the Church had not ordered the suppression of such investigations for violation of theological doctrine.

We strongly need charismatic orators and logicians to engage this process with élan, reason, and information.

Where are the Carl Sagans for evolution?

Who shall be our Clarence Darrow?

I suggest that regardless that some may call it a publicity stunt, as legislatures and Boards of Ed begin to organize against the scientific teaching of evolution perhaps it is also time to find a new John Scopes and frame the debate defined by the rules of the court.

http://archives.cnn....s.monkey.trial/

Remember that even though Darrow and John Scopes lost the actual court case they won in both the appellate court on a technicality and more importantly in the Court of Public Opinion that was greatly educated to the basic issues by exposure to the case.

In many instances this parallels the kind of confrontation that needs to be organized and engaged as the trends of forcing ID into the classroom is being successfully promoted by fundamentalist Boards of Education in a number of States.

As was proclaimed about the Scope's trial:

"As a case it is not as much a legal landmark as much as a social landmark. It was a clash between traditionalism and its values and modernism and its values."

— Law Professor Douglas Linder
University of Missouri-Kansas City

While it is important to win in the Courts and Legislatures, it is fundamentally more important to win the hearts and minds of the jury for the Court of Public Opinion.

Ignore this obvious political confrontation and the results could be far more dire than I prefer to discuss.

[Lazarus Long]

Because this pronouncement by a prominent Cardinal of the Catholic church is tantamount to a proclamation of official support for Intelligent Design and a clear shift in position I think it merits posting in full for review.

Finding Design in Nature

NY Times Op-Ed
By CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN
Published: July 7, 2005
Vienna

EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:

"All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator."

He went on: "To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems."

Note that in this quotation the word "finality" is a philosophical term synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, "It is clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity."

Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees: "Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason." It adds: "We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance."

In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.

The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."

Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist."

Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."

Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the "death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers.

Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.

Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, was the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

[Karomesis]

looking back in history,one finds that the further science progessed, the more religion was discovered to be a fraud. It was copernicus? who stated that the sun did not revolve around the earth, and for it he was despised as a heretic and jailed by the "church". Even though his proclamations were, in fact truth, it did not matter to the church. Various other myths , volcanoes are punishment from god, comets are a sign of the end of days, were also proven false.

So we find ourselves today in much the same quandary, one one hand you have holy men and other knaves proclaiming to the uninformed, that punishments of the most barbaric sort are meted out to those who would dare withold homage to thier diety. [:o] On the other you have technological progression that is moving at kurzweilian speed.Proving a worthy adversary for religions complacency and deception. The 120 years alloted man in the biblical record has already been proven false, the question is not if, but when the next fallacy in the bible will be discovered by the massess, the magnificent wall that once was religion is being slowly eroded by the acid rain of reason and logic, soon the wall will crumble to the ground never to rise again.

The more this erosion occurs, the more people will realize the error of their ways. Even suicide bombers and fundamentalist christians will begin to see the light [lol] I am proof of that. The most infected, ironically, have the greatest ability for change because of the laboriously taxing studies that they undertake on a daily basis. This allowed me, and others like me to realize the many contradictions found in thier bible. I searched for the truth, and found my path illuminated by the lamp of science and logic, this will happen at a much greater speed now that the internet is connecting people who would never have interacted before to share ideas.Once we are able to make speech recognition software cheap enough to be mass produced, I can actually exchange ideas with lunatics who would desire my destruction, and they can, in turn, avoid having their mosques ashes scattered in the wind. The internet allows for the evolution of ideas, and just the same, the birth and death of various ideas will be soon happeneing at breakneck speed.In this scenario do you believe there is much room for fairy tales being thought of in the same context as legitimate science?

It is also interseting how religion is changing its ideas to coincide with those of proven science, not the other way around. Fun words like "intelligent design" [huh] and others are the death cries of religion.Just as we will soon begin to merge with our technology, religion will be absorbed by the collosus that is science. [glasses]

I long for the day when we all think for ourselves, with the combined effort of the internet global brain we will soon control matters like aging, hurricanes, earthquakes, and various other unfortunate earthly occurences.

[jaguar]

Agreed Lazarus. Would you mind stopping by the suggestions forum and checking my post at the top? I've suggested to build a forum specificly for such purposed. If you find my idea lacking, please be willing to put me in my place.

[Lazarus Long]

Here is another opinion heard from that is too comprehensive to ignore. It seems that around the world our regressive policies with respect to science and education are becoming more obvious, even as they appear to be more popular domestically. We are in trouble as a nation. Please review this opinion from Britain in the context of the recent Pew Poll on the subject.

The problem with Public Relations for our cause is that the more that people (here in the US at least) seem to understand of the basics the less they apparently want to.

http://news.bbc.co.u...ine/4172504.stm

BBC
The struggle over science 

A POINT OF VIEW
By Harold Evans 

In his weekly opinion column, Harold Evans considers rising concern in the US over the Bush administration's hostility to science.

I used to get mad at the way it was left to America to bring to full fruition fine achievements by Britain's scientists, inventors and engineers. Take Alexander Fleming's penicillin, Frank Whittle's jet engine, Alan Turing's computer and Robert Watson Watt's radar.

All these breakthroughs found their fullest exploitation in the United States. Indeed, they all contributed to America's pre-eminence in science-based manufacturing and services.

Think of the personal computer and wonder drugs, of the jumbo jetliner, video games and the pacemaker, the laser that counts your groceries and the laser, or the global positioning satellite, that tells you to turn left at the roundabout.

That is why there is furious bewilderment here in the universities and the higher levels of business at the chilly indifference - not to say hostility - of the Bush White House to science. Actually, I've seen a movie like this once before and I know how it ends.

When I was a science reporter in Britain in the 50s, it was a thrill to visit the centre of government research, the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, Middlesex. It was hallowed ground.

I was in the lab where Watson Watt did his breakthrough work on radar in time for the Royal Air Force to find the Luftwaffe in the invisible skies and win the Battle of Britain.

I stood in awe before that much-photographed early computer - the wall-length monster called ACE - designed in 1945 by the wartime code-breaker, Alan Turing. It was then the fastest in the world, spewing out instant answers to reams of calculations I was allowed to feed into its innards.


Inertia

You would have thought that the National Physical Laboratory would be the darling of every British Government. Not so. I was invited to visit at that time because they were concerned the government did not fully appreciate that science in peace was as vital as science in war.

The researchers were doing what they could on a tiny budget and even that was about to be cut. Not just in the government, but in business and society, there was a general indifference to science and scientific education that seems odd today.

The consequence of that inertia in government and lethargy in business was that the US came to dominate the computer industry, despite all the brilliant work of Turing at Manchester University and others at Ferranti.

The question now tormenting Americans - who don't have a natural aptitude for worry - is whether the same writing is on the wall for them. Vinton Cerf is one who thinks it is, and he is no ordinary hand-wringer.

He's the mathematician who is often referred to as the "father of the internet". From 1972 to 1986, he was one of the key people in the US Defense Department who made it possible for distant and different computers to exchange packets of information - and that's the foundation of the internet on top of which rides the world wide web today.

Nothing daunted, he is now working on the protocols for planet to planet communication. In short, he knows whereof he speaks. And Cerf has just emitted a cry of pain.

The Bush administration does not take kindly to anyone who has drawn a federal dollar being critical - and being critical moreover in the businessman's' bible, the Wall street Journal.


Talent pool

So it is brave of Cerf to risk future disfavour and inveigh against "the stewards of our national destiny" for cutting money from key areas of research in its 2006 budget. That's a recipe, says Cerf, for "irrelevance and decline."

The president's science adviser, John Marburger, concedes that the budget is "pretty close to flat" but stoutly maintains "we are not going backwards", pointing to an extra $733 million for research and development (R&D) funding.

In fact, this is the first time in a decade that federal funding has failed to keep pace with inflation. And in the entrails of the complex budget - no one should go there alone - you find there is indeed less money in real terms for what's called basic research and less for Cerf's area of particular concern, computer science.

Funding university research for that has been falling through the first Bush term and is now about half what it was in 2001.

All told, anyway, America now ranks sixth in the world in the percentage of its wealth it spends on R&D. Yet the downward trend isn't solely the result of the parsimony of "the hick in the White House", as one motor mouth put it.

It is largely a reflection of rising educational standards around the world, so it's a comparative decline. In real terms, no single country can even come close to matching the US in the total scientific investment by government, corporations and foundations.

So what is there to worry about? Well, there are some facts Americans find hard to swallow after decades of striding the frontiers of science. Fewer of the Nobel prizes go to American scientists, down to about half from a peak in the 90s. Papers from Americans occupied 61% of published research in 1983, now the total is just under 29%.


'Freedom of inquiry'

It may not get better soon since a higher proportion of young Americans are opting for better paid law and medicine over science and engineering and visa restrictions on bright foreign students further dilute the talent pool. "The rest of the world is catching up," says John E. Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation.

Since some of these trends have been developing on the watch of presidents from Reagan onwards, I sought a science policy health check from luminaries in the field.

Professor Neal Lane at Rice University was the science adviser reporting directly to President Clinton, but as a former director of the National Science Foundation he cannot be dismissed as partisan.

Like others I spoke with, he is less concerned with the international league tables and the familiar salami processes of the budget, than the well-documented readiness of the Bush administration to manipulate and suppress scientific findings - manifestly to appease industrial interests and religious constituencies.

This is not just on global warming and stem cells, currently in the news, but on a whole range of issues - lead and mercury poisoning in children, women's health, birth control, safety standards for drinking water, forest management, air pollution and on and on.

"It's disturbing," Professor Lane told me. "This is the first time to the best of my knowledge through successive Republican and Democratic administrations, that the issue of scientific integrity has reared its head."

Of similar mind is Russell Train, an administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford. He says: "How radically we have moved away from regulation based on professional analysis of scientific data ...to regulation controlled by the White House and driven by political considerations."

The White House denies such accusations and says it makes decisions based on the best available science.

But these two speak for what is now a considerable body of alarmed and angry scientists. For more than a year, the nationally well-regarded Union of Concerned Scientists - a non-partisan body - has been receiving hundreds of signatures backing the Union's call for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to policy making. To date no fewer than 7,600 scientists have signed, including 49 Nobel Laureates.

Perhaps another voice should be added to the clamour. "Science relies on freedom of inquiry, and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity - government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance..." Those are the words of President Bush in 1990 - George Herbert Walker, the father - not the son.

and this

NY Times
http://www.nytimes.c...31religion.html

Teaching of Creationism Is Endorsed in New Survey

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: August 31, 2005

In a finding that is likely to intensify the debate over what to teach students about the origins of life, a poll released yesterday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.

The poll found that 42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time. But of those, 18 percent said that evolution was "guided by a supreme being," and 26 percent said that evolution occurred through natural selection. In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.

The poll was conducted July 7-17 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The questions about evolution were asked of 2,000 people. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points.

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism."

"It's like they're saying, 'Some people see it this way, some see it that way, so just teach it all and let the kids figure it out.' It seems like a nice compromise, but it infuriates both the creationists and the scientists," said Mr. Green, who is also a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Eugenie C. Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education and a prominent defender of evolution, said the findings were not surprising because "Americans react very positively to the fairness or equal time kind of argument."

"In fact, it's the strongest thing that creationists have got going for them because their science is dismal," Ms. Scott said. "But they do have American culture on their side."

This year, the National Center for Science Education has tracked 70 new controversies over evolution in 26 states, some in school districts, others in the state legislatures.

President Bush joined the debate on Aug. 2, telling reporters that both evolution and the theory of intelligent design should be taught in schools "so people can understand what the debate is about."

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, took the same position a few weeks later. Intelligent design, a descendant of creationism, is the belief that life is so intricate that only a supreme being could have designed it.

The poll showed 41 percent of respondents wanted parents to have the primary say over how evolution is taught, compared with 28 percent who said teachers and scientists should decide and 21 percent who said school boards should. Asked whether they believed creationism should be taught instead of evolution, 38 percent were in favor, and 49 percent were opposed.

More of those who believe in creationism said they were "very certain" of their views (63 percent), compared with those who believe in evolution (32 percent).

The poll also asked about religion and politics, government financing of religious charities, and gay men and lesbians in the military. Most of these questions were asked of a smaller pool of 1,000 respondents, and the margin of error was 2.5 percentage points, Pew researchers said.

The public's impression of the Democratic Party has changed in the last year, the survey found. Only 29 percent of respondents said they viewed Democrats as being "friendly toward religion," down from 40 percent in August of 2004. Meanwhile, 55 percent said the Republican Party was friendly toward religion.

Luis E. Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said: "I think this is a continuation of the Republican Party's very successful use of the values issue in the 2004 election, and the Democrats not being able up until now to answer that successfully. Some of the more visible leaders, such as Howard Dean and others, have reinforced that image of a secular party. Of course, if you look at the Democratic Party, there's a large religious constituency there."

Survey respondents agreed in nearly equal numbers that nonreligious liberals had "too much control" over the Democratic Party (44 percent), and that religious conservatives had too much control over the Republican Party (45 percent).

On religion-based charities, two-thirds of respondents favored allowing churches and houses of worship to apply for government financing to provide social services. But support for such financing declined from 75 percent in early 2001, when Mr. Bush rolled out his religion-based initiative.

On gay men and lesbians in the military, 58 percent of those polled said they should be allowed to serve openly, a modest increase from 1994, when 52 percent agreed. Strong opposition has fallen in that time, to 15 percent from 26 percent in 1994.

[DJS]

www.nytimes.com

Show Me the Science


By DANIEL C. DENNETT 
August 28, 2005

PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."

Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.

First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: "Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which certainly do work..."

Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don't have to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all reasonable doubt.

With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.

A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:

Test Two

Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]

If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:

Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.

Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.

Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end.

But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while.

We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.

All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin's insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with "Orgel's Second Rule": Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural selection to "discover" an "ingenious" solution to a design problem posed in the lab.

This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two. When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.

Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.

Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.
In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet:

About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.

If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued.

We'd still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.

But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report.

It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students.

SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.

For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."

Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?

Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is the author of "Freedom Evolves" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea."

[Lazarus Long]

Since he has been here at imminst and many of us know him from nanotech study (not to mention he stole my title ) ) as well as there appears to be an interest in the daily show among our membership, here is an interview that addresses this subject in a factual but lighthearted manner.


Chris Mooney -- Chris Mooney discusses his subtly titled book "The Republican War on Science."
http://www.comedycen...ml?itemId=18025

[wraith]

I was quite pleased to see Mooney on the Daily Show; is it just me, or does he seem really young?

I have to admit I've been hooked on the Daily Show ever since I watched it waiting for jaydfox's interview. I'd heard good things about it from a friend but I'd never bothered to stay up for it.
Last night, Jon Stewart's eschatology got me, "The last words heard on earth will be 'Hey, it worked!!!" Too plausible to be funny?

[DJS]

I had my first real encounter with a creationist the other day. It was a fascinating experience.

At some point when I have the time (and my connection is set up) I will have to come back to this thread and relive the encounter.

Just to wet your whistle, imagine a young 23 year old creationist majoring in microbiology and yours truly having a no holds barred meaning of life debate during a late night two hour car ride. Ohhh yes, it was very very...fun. )

[Lazarus Long]

Pew Report on what the public believes

http://pewforum.org/surveys/origins/

Public Divided on Origins of Life


Religion A Strength And Weakness For Both Parties
August 30, 2005

Download the complete report
http://pewforum.org/...politics-05.pdf

[

[Dream]

Did you make him cry, Don? [g:)]

[Lazarus Long]

In a remarkably insightful and detailed article Ker Than has written directly to the topic of this thread with a remarkable finding: among a study of 34 nations the only country that ranks lower than the US with to the general understanding of biology, genetics and evolution is Turkey.

Read it and weep.

http://www.livescien...0_evo_rank.html

U.S. Lags World in Grasp of Genetics and Acceptance of Evolution

By Ker Than LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 10 August 2006 02:01 pm ET

A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower.

Among the factors contributing to America's low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say.

“American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close,” said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University.

The researchers combined data from public surveys on evolution collected from 32 European countries, the United States and Japan between 1985 and 2005. Adults in each country were asked whether they thought the statement “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” was true, false, or if they were unsure.


The study found that over the past 20 years:

~The percentage of U.S. adults who accept evolution declined from 45 to 40 percent.
~The percentage overtly rejecting evolution declined from 48 to 39 percent, however.
And the percentage of adults who were unsure increased, from 7 to 21 percent.
Of the other countries surveyed, only Turkey ranked lower, with about 25 percent of the population accepting evolution and 75 percent rejecting it. In Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and France, 80 percent or more of adults accepted evolution; in Japan, 78 percent of adults did.

The findings are detailed in the Aug. 11 issue of the journal Science.


Religion belief and evolution

The researchers also compared 10 independent variables—including religious belief, political ideology and understanding of concepts from genetics, or “genetic literacy”—between adults in America and nine European countries to determine whether these factors could predict attitudes toward evolution.

The analysis found that Americans with fundamentalist religious beliefs—defined as belief in substantial divine control and frequent prayer—were more likely to reject evolution than Europeans with similar beliefs. The researchers attribute the discrepancy to differences in how American Christian fundamentalist and other forms of Christianity interpret the Bible.

While American fundamentalists tend to interpret the Bible literally and to view Genesis as a true and accurate account of creation, mainstream Protestants in both the United States and Europe instead treat Genesis as metaphorical, the researchers say.

“Whether it’s the Bible or the Koran, there are some people who think it’s everything you need to know,” Miller said. “Other people say these are very interesting metaphorical stories in that they give us guidance, but they’re not science books.”

This latter view is also shared by the Catholic Church.


Politics and the Flat Earth

Politics is also contributing to America's widespread confusion about evolution, the researchers say. Major political parties in the United States are more willing to make opposition to evolution a prominent part of their campaigns to garner conservative votes—something that does not happen in Europe or Japan.

Miller says that it makes about as much sense for politicians to oppose evolution in their campaigns as it is for them to advocate that the Earth is flat and promise to pass legislation saying so if elected to office.

"You can pass any law you want but it won't change the shape of the Earth," Miller told LiveScience.

Paul Meyers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study, says that what politicians should be doing is saying, 'We ought to defer these questions to qualified authorities and we should have committees of scientists and engineers who we will approach for the right answers."

The researchers also single out the poor grasp of biological concepts, especially genetics, by American adults as an important contributor to the country's low confidence in evolution.

“The more you understand about genetics, the more you understand about the unity of life and the relationship humans have to other forms of life,” Miller said.

The current study also analyzed the results from a 10-country survey in which adults were tested with 10 true or false statements about basic concepts from genetics. One of the statements was "All plants and animals have DNA." Americans had a median score of 4. (The correct answer is "yes.")


Science alone is not enough

But the problem is more than one of education—it goes deeper, and is a function of our country's culture and history, said study co-author Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education in California.

“The rejection of evolution is not something that will be solved by throwing science at it,” Scott said in a telephone interview.

Myers expressed a similar sentiment. About the recent trial in Dover, Pennsylvania which ruled against intelligent design, Myers said "it was a great victory for our side and it’s done a lot to help ensure that we keep religion out of the classroom for a while longer, but it doesn’t address the root causes. The creationists are still creationists—they're not going to change because of a court decision."

Scott says one thing that will help is to have Catholics and mainstream Protestants speak up about their theologies' acceptance of evolution.

"There needs to be more addressing of creationism from these more moderate theological perspectives," Scott said. “The professional clergy and theologians whom I know tend to be very reluctant to engage in that type of ‘my theology versus your theology’ discussion, but it matters because it’s having a negative effect on American scientific literacy."

The latest packaging of creationism is intelligent design, or ID, a conjecture which claims that certain features of the natural world are so complex that they could only be the work of a Supreme Being. ID proponents say they do not deny that evolution is true, only that scientists should not rule out the possibility of supernatural intervention.

But scientists do not share doubts over evolution. They argue it is one of the most well tested theories around, supported by countless tests done in many different scientific fields. Scott says promoting uncertainty about evolution is just as bad as denying it outright and that ID and traditional creationism both spread the same message.

“Both are saying that evolution is bad science, that evolution is weak and inadequate science, and that it can’t do the job so therefore God did it,” she said.


Another view

Bruce Chapman, the president of the Discovery Institute, the primary backer of ID, has a different view of the study.

"A better explanation for the high percentage of doubters of Darwinism in America may be that this country's citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field," Chapman said. "In particular, the growing doubts about Darwinism undoubtedly reflect growing doubts among scientists about Darwinian theory. Over 640 have now signed a public dissent and the number keeps growing."

Nick Matzke of the National Center for Science Education in California points out, however, that most of the scientists Chapman refers to do not do research in the field of evolution.

"If you look at the list, you can't find anybody who's really a significant contributor to the field or anyone who's done recognizable work on evolution," Matzke said.

Scott says the news is not all bad. The number of American adults unsure about the validity of evolution has increased in recent years, from 7 to 21 percent, but growth in this demographic comes at the expense of the other two groups. The percentage of Americans accepting evolution has declined, but so has the percentage of those who overtly reject it.

"I was very surprised to see that. To me that means the glass is half full,” Scott said. “That 21 percent we can educate." 

Yes Toto there really are still people 'round these parts that believe in a hollow flat Earth. [wis]

[Live Forever]

Here is a story on how evolution is accepted less in America than other western countries.

Look at the blue line, and look at some of the countries we are under!

[mikelorrey]

What time of day were the poll subjects polled?
Are the figures actually representing belief in atheistic evolution, or that and evolution with divine guidance? If it is the first, it is simply prejudicial against people who accept evolution but have religious beliefs as to why evolution happens, and not a true representation of actual belief in or against evolution.

For instance, Lazarus's reference to the Pew study shows that 48% believe in evolution in general, including evolution with divine guidance (and that 10% don't know, on top of that). So only 42% disbelieve in evolution, which is significant, but IMHO primarily indicative of how arrogant and condescending evolution proponents have been in refusing to even engage the creationists in debate to disprove their superstitions. Evolution proponents have ceded the public opinion battlefield to creationism while trying to use the gun of the state to shove evolution down peoples throats without proving their case, just like the Catholic Church once shoved creationism down people's throats.

[Live Forever]

Are the figures actually representing belief in atheistic evolution, or that and evolution with divine guidance?

Evolution period. No mention of God, as that was not the focus of the survey.

They did, however, find certain things correlated with one's rejection of evolution.

From the article:

The team found that individuals with anti-abortion, pro-life views associated with the conservative wing of the Republican Party were significantly more likely to reject evolution than people with pro-choice views.

IMHO primarily indicative of how arrogant and condescending evolution proponents have been in refusing to even engage the creationists in debate to disprove their superstitions. Evolution proponents have ceded the public opinion battlefield to creationism while trying to use the gun of the state to shove evolution down peoples throats without proving their case, just like the Catholic Church once shoved creationism down people's throats.

If by "shove down peoples throats", you mean "teach well proven science" then I completely agree. Just because someone has a religious belief that the earth is flat, or that the earth is the center of the universe, or that a big dragon barfed out the earth to create it, or anything else does not mean it should be taught in schools. Debates are fine (I have seen a few between creationists and real scientists), but when it comes to a consensus among the scientific community, there is no debate going on. The scientific community is very sure of what the evidence says, as it has been slowly proven more and more over time since Darwin. The fundies try to make it sound like there is a debate going on in the scientific community about which is actually right, when this is not the case at all.

[Lazarus Long]

The Pew Poll that Mike is referring to is this one I believe. The issue there is a cultural comparison of belief and still is not discussing ID versus evolutionary theory but as LF said basically they can believe whatever they want in their hearts but that doesn't mean it belongs in a science class.

Creationism certainly does not and the burden of proof is on ID'ers to demonstrate why the hypothesis should be treated as science and not wishful thinking, not the other way around. The debate that you suggest is denied is simply that they have offered no proof, only a suggestion of what they interpret as possible in accord with their hypothetical belief system. There is no tangible or hard evidence of a prime mover, only a *faith* that one exists, (or existed). So there really is no scientific debate until such evidence (proof positive, not proof of a negative) is provided and demonstrated.

[DJS]

I must say that there are some intriguing arguments made by IDers such as Behe. But all of these arguments are aimed at destroying the evolutionary framework, while none of them are based on creating their own (logically consistent) competing framework.

There is actually a reference (which I can't seem to find) where Dembski states, "I do not constrain myself with the Darwinist's doctrine of causality." How does one deal with a perspective that has an *illogicality escape clause* attached to it? Shall we chalk this preference up to an expression of will and simply agree to disagree? No, because this is exactly where politics comes into play. If an ID framework is to be accurately represented, then it must present its side of the story - not just an extensive criticism of evolutionary theory. And if that were the case, their presentation would get one page in high school biology text books which states in big bold 18 font letters *The intelligent design hypothesis - GOD DID IT*. Now that would be priceless. I would fully support that "equal opportunity" presentation of the "facts"! [lol]

The political angle is also why most prominent evolutionists refuse to debate IDers. Of course such intellectual heavy weights as Dawkins or Dennett can hold their own in an evolution-ID debate. The problem is that the second someone of such stature engages in an evolution-ID "debate" the news is broadcast around the world as "proof" that there is a controversy. So, being the logical people that they are, most evolutionary biologists quickly realized that "swatting at the flies" does not serve logic's best interest.

"Worthy of learned scientific debate" translated means "predictions which lend themselves to falsification". "God did it" does not lend itself to falsification. It is a metaphysical postulate instead of a physical one and is therefore outside of the purview of science. To view the issue differently demonstrates ignorance and/or purposeful aggression, both of which need to be put in check.