The universe is not unfolding as it should. It is merely unfolding as it always has.<\/p>\n
It was a nice dream while it lasted: a grass-roots campaign<\/a>, launched and promoted by the scientific community, supported by Nobel Laureates, endorsed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, pimped on science blogs far and wide: a debate among the three presidential candidates on science policy. Because word has it that science and technology might have some small amount of impact on, you know, the future of our fucking species. Just maybe.<\/p>\n And all three candidates have declined<\/a> the invitation. Oh, Clinton and Obama tripped all over themselves signing up for a televised debate on “Faith and Values<\/a>“, of course, but then, faith is pretty much what you want it to be. You can make any statement you want, with no fear that some uppity chick with too many letters after her name is going to jump up and say Actually, we got the data on that, we did a multilinear regression and it got an radj.<\/sub>2<\/sup> of 0.82 with P<0.0001,and according to those numbers God actually <\/i>doesn’t<\/b> want you to put retarded children in the electric chair.<\/i> That’s the main reason faith sucks, actually.<\/p>\n Science is a whole different ball game. You shoot from the lip on climate change or El Nino and some guy who’s spent his whole life studying the subject is liable to set you straight. And that’s the thing about politicians. They don’t like it much when it\u2019s obvious that they’re not the smartest ones in the room. (I rather suspect this is why Stephen Harper is such an intensely private man.) <\/p>\n I didn’t expect McCain to go for it. He’d probably lose<\/i> support if any of his base thought he had any respect for science. Clinton, well, we all knew she’d avoid it if she could, but there was hope she’d be shamed into it just to keep up with Obama. And Obama? The dude throws out enough curves (and catches enough of those aimed at his head) that he might have just gone for it.<\/p>\n But no. Once again, the status quo reigns supreme.<\/p>\n Fuck all of them. May drug-resistant syphilis saturate their bloodlines, may their genitals wither and drop off. You especially, Obama. You alone offered hope for real change, you alone made the unrepentant realists among us think Hell, if <\/i>that guy is making it work, maybe we can turn this thing around after all<\/i>. You actually made an optimist out of me, for a little while. And because of that, you suck harder than all the rest.<\/p>\n You’re still way better than the alternatives, granted. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The universe is not unfolding as it should. It is merely unfolding as it always has. It was a nice dream while it lasted: a grass-roots campaign, launched and promoted by the scientific community, supported by Nobel Laureates, endorsed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, pimped on science blogs far and wide: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}