Tuesday, October 28, 2008

This Will All Be Over Soon

Sorry, but just ignore that last post of mine and read this one instead. If I had a brain I would have written this (follow the link below for the supporting links within his piece). Then go out and vote for Obama. Please.

From Slate.com:



In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

No it won't be over soon. We will continue to laugh at how much you are wrong, wrong and wrong.

She was dishing on earmarks that didn't meet guidelines. Or are you advocating for a corrupt political process in your country?

Next thing you know you'll tell us about Bush and his plastic turkey.

And in the meantime you'll be selling your country down the toilet for a man who palls around with terrorists, anti-semites and America haters.

D@B

wstachour said...

I wish it didn't bring me such pleasure to see you guys in frantic melt-down mode. But it's hard to imagine a more thorough repudiation by intelligent people of this mish-mash of mean-spirited, selfish white man's morsels that are meant to represent a political philosophy.

I wish it didn't bring me pleasure.

But it does.

Malaise Inc said...

Aww, how cute. You've got your very own troll. And he blog whore's too. You need to love him and pet him and name him George.

wstachour said...

Yeah, isn't it neat? I'm calling him Neander. My very own troll!

Except I fear he isn't. He heard his god's revelation that Palin's scientific oblivion extended to more than one kind of fruit fly, and he went Googling for "Palin fruit flies" to look for places to spread his paté de moron with sauce white supremique.

Oh, Neander. I hardly knew ye.

wstachour said...

Just to finish slaying the troll: An article here tells exactly what the research in France is all about.

The amount of the "pork" is $211,509, the French laboratory in question is run by the USDA, and the research is aimed at stemming the inflood of invasive species, specifically a type of fruit fly that is harming California's olive industry (and which is found in France).

Like much of science, the information gained here may have widespread application, and will in any case contribute to our broader understanding of Earth's biota.

And no, Palin didn't know SHIT about this research, any more than she understands any other kind of scientific research. The world is right to scorn and ridicule her. Her educational pedigree is exceedingly thin. She may have the capacity to be smart, but in practice she's an ignoramus.

Amen.

dbackdad said...

Usually those right wing wack-a-doodles congregate to Cyberkitten. Glad to seen you've got one of your own. I agree with Malaise that we should adopt him (or her) and call him George.

shrimplate said...

Your own troll, you lucky duckie!

Good on Christopher Hitchens. He's absolutely right on. The awful disdain, abuse, and manipulation that science suffered during the Bush administration will soon end, I surely hope.

It really would mean a lot for all Americans if we could lead the world in scientific research, especially the kind that doesn't just lead to the creation of more efficient weapons.