It used to be that there were always a few good Republicans to be found, even though the party as a whole represents the oppressors and yahoos 99% of the time. That’s hardly ever true today, except of course in the state of Maine:

Maine Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, two of the Republican party’s only moderate voices left and who have broken with the party in the past on health related issues, voiced their support of President Obama’s compromise on contraception.

From Here

Mice with a certain laboratory variant of Alzheimer’s disease have been shown to get much better with the use of an existing pharmaceutical. This is only in mice, only with a certain model of the disease, and is only one study, so we must be very cautious, but the results are on the face rather dramatic.

Here’s the rundown.

Anti-science and creationist rhetoric, coming from organizations like the Discovery Institute, often paints Darwin as handmaiden to the Nazis and founder of racist biology. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century is uncritically melded with Darwin’s writings that touched on race, and the genetic determinism of certain aspects of modern biology is uncritically melded with Darwinian theories.

I’m giving a talk this weekend for the Minnesota Atheists that will address Darwin’s racism (or lack thereof) and explore the relationship between concepts of race and racism and evolutionary biology of Darwin’s day as well as that of the twenty-first century.

Darwin was a nineteenth century gentlemen who benefited greatly from his position in a world colonial empire, but it was his exploration of that world that led him away from religious dogma and soured him on certain racist concepts. He was the founder of much of the theory that was later to be used in rather nefarious ways, but those uses were never based on good biology. This talk will directly address the relationship between modern biology and modern race theory.

This will be at 2:00 at the Roseville Public Library on Hamline Avenue, following the Minnesota Atheists business meeting. After the meeting, we will dine at nearby Panda Garden Buffet. Please join us!

DETAILS HERE

Years ago, my friend Rick Bribiescas and I got into a friendly debate about the cause of muscle atrophy and bone loss during space flight. We both felt that a homeostatic mechanism was thrown out of whack by the circumstances of weightlessness. One of us suggested that zero gravity caused to lose their ability to regulate tissue mass because gravity would be part of the mechanism for measuring this variable. The other of us thought the body was reacting as though it was falling, and transforming ingested material into bodily tissue would be forestalled until some time after hitting the ground, but that never happened. I can’t remember which of us thought which.

But we were probably both wrong. It may be the case that gravity is an expected contextual feature of normal cellular activity, so when there is either not much gravity (as in zero-G of space flight) or even too much gravity, cellular processes to awry more or less randomly, which would ultimately translate into gene expression being up or down regulated, more or less randomly, across the genome.

A recent study placed fertile fruit fly eggs in three different environments: High magnetism and normal gravity, simulated zero G caused by a magnetic field, and double G caused by the same magnetic field but turned upside down.

The results are interesting.

Anti-science and creationist rhetoric, coming from organizations like the Discovery Institute, often paints Darwin as handmaiden to the Nazis and founder of racist biology. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century is uncritically melded with Darwin’s writings that touched on race, and the genetic determinism of certain aspects of modern biology is uncritically melded with Darwinian theories.

I’m giving a talk this weekend for the Minnesota Atheists that will address Darwin’s racism (or lack thereof) and explore the relationship between concepts of race and racism and evolutionary biology of Darwin’s day as well as that of the twenty-first century.

Darwin was a nineteenth century gentlemen who benefited greatly from his position in a world colonial empire, but it was his exploration of that world that led him away from religious dogma and soured him on certain racist concepts. He was the founder of much of the theory that was later to be used in rather nefarious ways, but those uses were never based on good biology. This talk will directly address the relationship between modern biology and modern race theory.

This will be at 2:00 at the Roseville Public Library on Hamline Avenue, following the Minnesota Atheists business meeting. After the meeting, we will dine at nearby Panda Garden Buffet. Please join us!

DETAILS HERE

You could read hundreds of pages of Darwin’s work and easily come to the conclusion that he was a geologist. But a different selection of readings would convince you he was a biologist. In truth, he was neither and both. I’m giving a talk this weekend for the Humanists of Minnesota that will explore what Darwin really was: An experimentalist, a part time anthropologist, a natural historian and most impressively, an integrative thinker of the likes rarely to be seen again for a century after he lived. My talk will draw heavily on Darwin’s own work and provide a sampling of some of his more interesting and compelling findings.

The talk will be at the Nokomis Community Center, on Saturday, February 18th, at 10:00 AM

More details here. See you there!

You could read hundreds of pages of Darwin’s work and easily come to the conclusion that he was a geologist. But a different selection of readings would convince you he was a biologist. In truth, he was neither and both. I’m giving a talk for the Humanists of Minnesota this weekend that will explore what Darwin really was: An experimentalist, a part time anthropologist, a natural historian and most impressively, an integrative thinker of the likes rarely to be seen again for a century after he lived. My talk will draw heavily on Darwin’s own work and provide a sampling of some of his more interesting and compelling findings.

The talk will be at the Nokomis Community Center, on Saturday, February 18th, at 10:00 AM

More details here. See you there!

It will take some time before the meaning of HeartlandGate is realized. The released confidential documents are not extensive, but they are current, mainly related to a meeting that happened less than a month before their release. They don’t tell us anything that we didn’t suspect, but they give details that people outside this science denialist “think” tank did not know. The most important thing about these documents is probably this: We can now say without equivocation that global warming denialism and other science denialism is, at the institutional level, funded by wealthy individuals and the petroleum industry, that it is an explicit anti-science strategy, and that it has nothing to do with differences in interpretation of scientific data. Also, this strategy of claiming that “Global Warming is a Hoax” is bought and paid for.

The other thing we might be able to say, but we’d want to see the corresponding documents from next year’s meeting, is that the climate science denialism industry is becoming less well funded over time. Presumably, even corporations, institutions, and individuals who have a self interested reason to deny climate change or damage science education can see, eventually, when it is time to hold off or even give up. Money is money and tossing good money after bad is not wise and the people who underwrite this anti-science effort know this. The crazies (see comment sections here and elsewhere) will be left twisting in the wind like so many Bigfoot hunters and Ghost busters.

Here is a current list of posts that I know of addressing HeartlandGate:

• HeartlandGate: Anti-Science Institute’s Insider Reveals Secrets
• Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine
• INTERNAL DOCUMENTS: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax
• Heartland Institute budget and strategy revealed
• How is Joe Bast Like Joe Camel? Looks Like We’re Going To Find Out..
• Is Turnabout Fair Play?
• Leaked insider docs from Heartland Institute goal: “dissuading teachers from teaching science” #climate #Heartland #ScholarlyKitchen
• Leaked Heartland Institute documents pull back curtain on climate scepticism
• Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science
• Heartland?
• The Heart(land) of the Denial Campaign
• Zachary Shanan, Fossil-Fuel-Funded Think Tank, Heartland Institute, Exposed (Deniergate? Heartlandgate? Pick a Name), Clean Technica
• Phil Plait, Breaking news: A look behind the curtain of the Heartland Institute’s climate change spin, Bad Astronomy
• Christian Hunt, Undermining the IPCC, keeping opposing voices out, dissuading the teaching of science – Heartland in its own words?, The Carbon Brief
• Canucks On Heartland Institute Payroll

Disclaimer: The Heartland Institute is now claiming that these documents have likely been altered or faked, and are threatening to pursue criminal and civil charges against all bloggers who posted comments on them or links to them.

I can not prove that these documents are real or fake. I will certainly pass on to you any information that comes along about this. Have a look at the documents and make up your own mind (before I am forced by guys in suits to take down the links).