Category: Public Policy and Politics

Oh, my: in a leader published just prior to the most recent bad news about the Environmental Protecton Agency ignoring good science (splitting the difference on ozone standards), a leader for Nature makes a modest proposal:

In a rational world, [Administator Stephen] Johnson would resign in favour of someone who could at least feign an interest in the environment. Alas, it seems that he will probably stay on until January 2009, refusing waivers, fighting lawsuits and further depressing employees’ morale. In the meantime, we can only offer those employees a fantasy: the White House doesn’t want the agency to do anything, so shut it down until next January. Take some fully paid sabbatical time to relax, and prepare for a return to the old-fashioned protecting of the environment that so many of you joined the agency for.

Taking as his text the Preamble to the Constitution, and quoting the Gospels and William Faulkner, Barack Obama delivers a moving, thoughtful, and genuinely inspiring speech on race relations.

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

Via kottke.org: Sometimes they just write themselves. As blogged by Scott Horton, George Bush’s favored painting, which to him looks like a Methodist evangelist riding into country to spread the good word, was originally made by W.H.D. Koerner to illustrate a Saturday Evening Post short story about a smooth-talking horse thief.

Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case, it couldn’t be more precious. The president of the United States has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. But in fact he’s a wily criminal one step out in front of justice.

A new administration will be sworn in on 20 January 2009.

The world is a really, really complicated contraption, replete with moving parts that can malfunction at any time. You can make a pretty good case that the United States President, along with his science and technology advisers, is in a position of trust, responsible in part for keeping that contraption going. That’s why I support this week’s call for a debate among presidential candidates on technology and science issues. The open letter to the candidates has been signed by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve, Steven Pinker of Harvard, and other notables. I don’t begrudge the candidates their sniping at one another over minor points of religious doctrine, as for instance, the Romney-Huckabee flap about Satan’s paternity (link via Wired). But people, please, let’s have a forum for the issues that affect our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, living right here on earth.