The Senate lion is being laid to rest, but lesser political animals still roam. When not busy lying about healthcare reform and working to cripple Ted Kennedy's legislative legacy, Republican Senator Chuck "Aww-shucks-I'm-not-a-scientist" Grassley is skeptical of anthropogenic climate change, because climate has changed in the past:
[H]istorically, and you can go to the core drillings in the glaciers to get proof of this, that we’ve had decades and decades, and maybe even centuries of periods of time when there’s been a tremendous rise in temperature, and then a tremendous fall in temperature. And all you’ve got to do is look at the little ice age of the mid-last millennia as an example.
You know, natural temperature changes, like the Permian-Triassic extinction, which on the Grassley wingnut calender probably falls on the same warm, sunny day Noah started gathering animals two by two. It's so very tragic that the good senator from Iowa didn't stumble across this heartfelt scientific principle, along with his sudden fiscal responsibility, until years after the frenzied run up to the trillion dollar Iraq War. Afterall, Saddam's imaginary anthrax, like rabies, leprosy, or your friendly flesh-eating bacteria down the street, also occurs naturally. That stuff has been around for 'millennia'. So how could those frisky microbes or any manmade spin-offs possibly pose a threat? Stay with me now as we ride this right-wing logic roller-coaster to the screeching end: it then follows that if the earth is naturally warming, the oceans naturally acidifying, and the ice naturally melting, the only obvious rational solution a carnival barker like Mr. Grassley can deduce is to add to it without a care in the world.
- Sony reportedly plans to go head-to-head with Amazon's popular Kindle (DKos Kindle review here) with a similar device. The biggest drawback with both products in my view is the cost (Between 200 and 400 dollars). If someone gets their e-book reader down into the Ipod price range, say a hundred bucks or less, that might be a whole 'nother ball game.
- Creationist Evangelist Kent Hovind, ironically blogging from prison, gives a local principal legal advice on how to get the "religious belief" of evolution out of Florida schools.
- Biotech pioneer says synthetic life is closer than you think. Cue the dystopian sci-fi plots!
- Not exactly science, but Clifford Bryan is rapidly becoming one of my favorite daily reads on the Examiner. And as long as we're on the subject, one of our own, Raleigh Progressive Michael Tuck, is now writing some great stuff, click on over say howdy.
- Via the White Coat Underground, the good news is that congenital defects that were once a neonatal death sentence can be repaired and the once doomed infant can go grow up and lead a normal life. The bad news: just imagine the smorgasbord of preexisting excuses something like this offers a health insurance company.