A science committee that doesn’t get science

I think we agreed. It's clear that you didn't get your number from Planet Money since it's not there.

It is good to get the source though. So thanks for your reply.

For those who are interested, the sunlight foundation post is here: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/04/02/housecommittee...

According to that post, the numbers were calculated at Planet Money's request, so there you go.

Perhaps we should be encouraged that even the Republican House leadership views these clowns as deserving of exile?

Just trying to find some glimmer of hope in this sad story...

Off-topic: How do you remember your username?

That key bit of information puts the article in a completely different light. Without this information it is not unreasonable to interpret it as an anti-science stance from the Republicans. Ars Technica's reporting is usually excellent, but this is a serious omission.

> I can't agree with this line, but mainly because you're talking about the future. I agree that it probably couldn't be better than it is now, but we can certainly improve it.

Oh, I'm not saying you can't improve it, even in the present. What I mean is "better" in a fundamentally different way. E.g. within the constraints of our existing society, you're always going to have partisanship, etc.

Term limits simply put even more power in the hands of unelected legislative aides, because they become the only people with the tenure to understand the issues involved, let alone the particular wording of the bills.

It's already the case that effective members of Congress are the ones who attract the best legislative aides.[1] Those who don't have high-quality aides rarely impact any legislation. If we enact term limits, our legislators will have even less room to impact the laws themselves -- either they'll hand over the whole way their office is run to great legislative aides, or they'll be irrelevant back benchers whose only role is to vote yea or nay on laws other people wrote. Whichever route they choose, the power of the legislators -- the people actually accountable to voters -- will be decreased.

[1] Put the arrows of causation wherever you'd like in that sentence.

I'm sympathetic to much of your comment.

But I'm pretty skeptical that the solution to problems in American federal government is to make our federal government more similar to California's state government by adding term limits. That simply shifts power from individual legislators to unelected party apparatchiks.

Government may be broken in many ways, but when I hear political discourse, I'm amazed public policy isn't worse.

What about the notion that switching from Electoral College to popular vote just changes the focus of power from a few key states to another few key states, specifically the states with the highest populations and/or voter turnout?

Don't forget that Civics isn't a required course in school anymore.

Well, an obvious way to address this would be to become emotionally invested in acting rationally. It's a pity that so many people aren't.

/me snickers. I have my whole lifetime to finish writing it out and you want it now? Geez. Such a hurry.

Here's what I can give you. You'll see no lasting systemic change until people start growing up understanding the ins and outs of democracy by the age of 15. This does not even happen in the most affluent neighborhoods today. Education focuses on producing workers for the job market, rather than producing citizens for a democratic society. That's what needs to change. An adult graduating from high school needs to be capable of the highest offices of government immediately, even if they don't meet the age qualification. That capability gives them the tools to intelligently engage with their representatives and public servants as equals: as co-governors. Lobbying cannot be the job of an elite minority; it has to be that thing we all do from 4-6pm, after working from 8-4 and before enjoying dinner and leisure from 6-10.

Because the capacity to govern is properly distributed, you should see the end of the career politician. Instead, occupying offices should have a higher churn rate as more people run and more people qualify and more people have jobs to return to after their stint in office; the actual electoral result approaches random, negating any effective campaign strategy and thus any influence of money. Instead of campaigning for office, office-holders become facilitators for citizen discussion of policy. Their job is primarily to gather and synthesize, to properly weight authority, and to transparently explain how they determined which policy to adopt. The vote becomes a formality, rather than a nail-biting contest aired on national television.

That's what I have right now. It's not much, and it's pretty flimsy, but it's a skeleton to hang my coat on.

Enjoy.

> I don't see a reason you can't.

I've worked on campaigns professionally from 2002-2010 and I've run local and state races, including my own for borough council and school board.

Why can't we change the way campaigns are run?

Campaigns would be the easy part to change, but even then it depends what you want to change. Are you talking about new technology? The Romney campaign is doing a decent job of utilizing technology in how they're collecting voter contact results from phones and doors, organizing volunteers and managing fundraisers. Obama did an excellent job as well in 2008, especially compared to the CF that was the McCain campaign.

If you want to make changes to the way fundraising works and the influence of money in politics, it will need to be incremental. That isn't something you can just cut off overnight for several reasons, the two biggest being that (A) nothing happens overnight in Congress, and (B) Members of Congress would essentially be shutting down their means of securing re-election.

Why can't we change the way people vote?

For the same reason a PA court placed an injunction on that state's Voter ID law: you can't deprive an otherwise qualified individual of his or her constitutional right to vote.

You want to have internet voting? You better have a plan to give everyone in the country high speed internet access and be prepared for the unrelenting torrent of lawsuits when the server goes down.

I'd personally like to see internet voting someday, but you really need to have massive redundancy systems in place and plenty of checks to prevent fraud. What happens if the server is down all day? What about peak traffic? What if the database gets wiped 30 minutes before the end of voting? Anyone who knows about how government contracts are structured knows that would be an IBM and/or Diebold contract in the hundreds of billions. And it still wouldn't work.

> I believe mass media dominate campaigns because of the sheer amount of money thrown into them.

This statement makes it look like you think one is correlated to the other, which I'm not inclined to agree with. Because there's a lot of money in politics, that somehow means mass media "dominates" campaigns, whatever that means?

I'm not sure what your alternative would be aside from information directly from the campaigns themselves (which is almost guaranteed to be skewed, if not incorrect).

Oh good, the Daily Mail, this looks like a reliable source. I'll certainly believe what it has to say over the consensus of climate scientists.

You are correct only in the sense that atheists and science committees are completely dismissive of non scientific opinions.

But I take great issue with the rest of your post. This is not a case of two parties calling each other dumb, nor is it the case that positions of science and positions of opinion are equal. Science does not deal in opinions. There are very specific requirements that need to be met for an idea to be considered a scientific theory. Religious ideas by and large do not meet these criteria. There is no such thing as "non-pure science." This is by definition of the term and process.

Further, your use of the term "militant atheist" is offensive. You call an atheist "militant" merely because she dares to voice her thoughts? This is what religious individuals due daily in church and other places, yet never are they called militant for it. Worse, religious advertising routinely gets away with suggestions that non-believers will suffer eternally or are otherwise evil or immoral. Such rhetoric is a far cry from a logical discussion of what we actually know that you might find from a typical vocal atheist.

Slurs like "militant atheist" are so common you no longer ever recognize them for what they are: insults and a labels intended to marginalize.

"The 'Pure Science' people (similar grouping to the militant atheists) are, like it or not, pretty dismissive of any non scientific opinions and beliefs."

When applied to scientific fact, this is correct. The religious persons attempt to meddle in what would otherwise be "pure" science and inject pseudoscience.

It's been years since I've had a history class, so I'll just speak hypothetically. If I were running a country at risk of being divided, I might go to war to prevent secession if the rebelling territories had resources I needed. Examples include cotton, rivers/ports/shipping lanes, farmland, etc.

One should always be open to the possibility that a pet theory can be falsified, but doubting some form of evolution and the big bang theory is probably irrational at this point. Quite simply, there are no better explanations for the universe and the diversity of life on earth. If you doubt some form of evolution, then you will have your work cut out for you to find a better theory. An alternative theory will have to explain geological and biological data at least as well as evolution without falling prey to falsifying data. It'll also have to make non-trivial predictions about future geological and biological observations. If you're determined to doubt something you can certainly do better than doubting evolution and big bang theories.

People do question evolution and the Big Bang. They do it by developing alternate models that take into account all the evidence we already have available to us, and see if their alternate model has sufficient explanatory power.

If you're not doing this, you're not questioning the prevailing models. Making a public statement from a position of secular authority is not questioning evolution and Big Bang; it's a demonstration of your own ignorance and nothing more.

Pick one.

That's not really an accurate description of why the states were established. The initial states were the consequence of different centers of colonization and the limits of transportation and communication speeds. Their borders were mostly arbitrary geographical boundaries (hey, there's a river!). They developed unique economic and cultural traditions based on what could be grown, produced, or not, in their borders. That people didn't want to join them up into one stronger federal government has stronger ties to the general tribal nature of people and the significantly different economic and cultural needs. Movement between them was hardly the motivation.

That sounds fantastic, and it's a good thought---but at a certain point we are all interdependent on one-another. Relative to belief in science and global warming, what Arkansas does with its air certainly affects areas outside of Arkansas.

"the solution here would be to give the federal government less control and allow the states to have more control"

{{Citation needed}}

> The states were established so that U.S. citizens could move to the state with the laws that best suited them.

Citation needed.