Anyone following the McCain campaign has heard mention of his time in a Vietnam POW camp once or twice. So many times that Jared Rea mused, “You’d almost think this is Mario Bros the way McCain is hammering away on that POW block.” And by “mused” I mean created a YouTube video:

By the way, for anyone in the Steel City, the cut-off quote about Pittsburgh comes from a KDKA interview in which McCain might have been a little disingenuous about some specifics.

Steven Pinker has an article in The New Republic on the recently released Human Dignity and Bioethics report by the President’s Council on Bioethics on the role of dignity in medicine.

The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.

The problem, Pinker says, is the strong and obvious religious slant in many of the report’s essayists.

Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.

The fix is indeed in. A number of the chapters openly address Judeo-Christian beliefs or literature, at times explicitly referencing biblical arguments. Most unfortunate is that these arguments go unexamined. Nowhere, except for a small commentary by Daniel Dennett, are any religious claims criticized.

Pinker admits most of the chapters in the report do not address Catholicism, but the scene does not become sunnier as his gaze is cast more broadly to the entire report. For a 555-page report written to elucidate the role of dignity in bioethics, the Council does a piss-poor job.

How well do the essayists clarify the concept of dignity? By their own admission, not very well. … In fact, it spawns outright contradictions at every turn. … We read that dignity reflects excellence, striving, and conscience, so that only some people achieve it by dint of effort and character. We also read that everyone, no matter how lazy, evil, or mentally impaired, has dignity in full measure.

Given the slipperiness of “dignity” as a concept, it is difficult to pin it down in a useful way. Pinker grants it a modicum of moral significance, but I think Ruth Macklin’s 2003 editorial “Dignity is a Useless Concept” provides a straightforward argument against ever worrying about dignity.

Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy–the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele’s sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, “dignity” adds nothing.

Review boards already exist to ensure no study imposes undue emotional or physical strain on its participants. Beyond that, all we can reasonably ask for is that every participant acts of their own volition. Informing a participant of the risks and benefits of their participation allows them to choose for themselves whether the study will rob them of their dignity. This system gives an appropriate amount of scientific freedom while protecting all involved. Any further restrictions by the government would be constricting and antithetical to scientific progress.

Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.

(P.S. This report is even more disquieting after having just seen the Jesus Camp documentary.)

With reverence to the great activists of the 1960s, Belgian “politician” Tania Derveaux wants to steal the cherry of any net-neutrality supporter. “In history, man has always waged war for freedom,” she says. “Now it’s time to obtain our freedom with love.”

So….if you are an able-bodied defender of internet freedom looking for love in the least likely of places, click “get laid” to arrange a private intimate meeting.

The terms of service are pretty lenient, with a small emphasis on safety and hardly a stringent policy on corroborating the applicant’s virginity or opinion on net neutrality. (Also, it is pretty optimistic: “due to time limitations each performance can last no longer than 30 minutes.” Derveaux has such hope for her virgin audience.)

Of course, the whole thing is a farce. Some of you should remember her from last year’s promise to hand out 400,000 blowjobs. The same promise that ended with a virtual blowjob by her “Asian assistant” via YouTube. I imagine this charade will end similarly.

Surprisingly, the Don’t Stay A Virgin website is entirely lacking in any information on net neutrality. After going through the trouble of flashing some sex in your face to grab your attention, one would hope that attention would be put to good use. Alas not.

So as it stands, this is a publicity gimmick (which I apologize for perpetuating) with no substance behind it. A few links or articles would go a long way in pulling Derveaux out of the realm of internet skank grasping for page views.

A recent Hillary Clinton ad drew on images of Pearl Harbor, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and Osama Bin Laden (among others) to (effectively) illicit fear among Pennsylvania voters:

Is it fear mongering? Yes. But also, it is official word that Hillary’s place is in the kitchen. Where she belongs.

More seriously, even Bill is staunchly against any fear tactics, saying on October 25, 2004:

One of Clinton’s laws of politics is, if one candidate is trying to scare you, and the other one is trying to make you think, if one candidate’s appealing to your fears, and the other one’s appealing to your hopes. You better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.

Of course, the hopeful candidate could just be “Happy Man Lemming leading you to the cliff, but you will be smiling along the way.”

Chez Pazienza: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career:

As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions. Although the big networks recognize the need to appeal to bloggers, they don’t fear them — and that means that they don’t respect them. Corporate-think dictates that the mainstream television press as a monstrous multi-headed hydra is the ultimate news authority and therefore is in possession of the one and only hotline to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid. Sure those bloggers are entertaining, but in the end they’re really just insects who either feed off the carcasses of news items vetted through various networks or, when they do break stories, want nothing more than to see themselves granted an audience by the kingmakers on television.

This, of course, is horseshit.

Two weeks ago, CNN fired Chez Pazienza for his blogging under his real name. The atrociously antiquated employee handbook states “any writing done for a ‘non-CNN outlet’ must be run through the network’s standards and practices department,” and CNN seems to have a history of exercising the rule without discretion. More than evidence of the company’s ridiculous bureaucracy, the story and ones like it illuminate the company’s unfortunate hypocrisy.

CNN’s willingness to fire someone like Jacki tells you everything you need to know about how backward the network’s thinking is when it comes to new media. It pays more lip-service to bloggers and their internet realm than any other mainstream media outlet, but in the end that’s really all it is — lip-service.

Sadly, the criticisms of conventional news media cannot be confined to its dealings with the internet and New Media. The problems are more fundamental, stemming from the overwhelming focus on profit margins that permeates every major corporation. It would be impossible to underestimate the effect this has on network news reporting. When news is seen as a necessary evil — barely profitable but wanted by all the target demographics — strict objectivity is thrown out the window. What stories are reported, and how they are reported, instantly changes.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what’s worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, “What can we do to not lead with Iraq?” — the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn’t always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I’d “increased shareholder value.” (For the record, if you’re a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word “shareholders,” let alone be reminded that you’re beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public — to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up — and that’s not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

Pazienza’s lengthy diatribe is largely depressing, as any bitterly honest look at network news is likely to be. But it ends on an uplifting note. As more and more households gain access to the internet, conventional news media will become increasingly irrelevant. Until the fateful day, though, when we can cast off the entrenched Old Guard, people need to constantly call them on their shit.

Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: “All it takes is one person to stand up and say ‘fuck this.’”

I truly hope so, because I’m finally doing just that.

And I should’ve done it a long time ago.

Amen.

In January 2006, President Bush introduced the American Competitiveness Initiative, an initiative designed to help fund research in science research and education. This August, Bush signed legislation (the America COMPETES Act) toward this end, further cementing his goals of increasing research in basic science in the United States, and maintaining the country’s competitive (get it?) level of innovation. The COMPETES Act covers a lot of ground, but a clear focus was on enabling current and future researchers to tackle the fundamental questions of science.

So when the omnibus spending bill for Fiscal Year 2008 finally passed Congress last week, there were not likely to be any surprises. Given the previous commitment of Congress and the various reports contributing to the COMPETES Act, the spending bill was likely to simply put money behind the mouths of all those politicians. Unfortunately, what Congress signed was far from expected.

• Plans to double funding at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy Office of Science have dissolved
• 1% increase for the NSF
• 0.5% increase for the National Institutes of Health, which is effectively nothing
• Zero funding for the US contribution to ITER, the international fusion reactor in France
• Zero funding for NOvA, a neutrino facility under construction at Fermilab, placing it in limbo until at least next year
• $15 million ($45 million less than requested) for the ILC, the International Linear Collider, which (being three months into FY08) has already been spent, so the bill grants effectively no money for the ILC
• 10% slashing of funds for Fermilab, $65 million less than FY07 and $94 million less than requested

All of which comes soon after the news that the UK will be withdrawing a massive amount of investment in large physics projects (see also: saveastronomy.co.uk).

I would be remiss in not mentioning the increases in funding for applied sciences (for instance, increasing R&D money for renewables, energy efficiency and nuclear energy by 30%, to nearly $1.3 billion). And it is almost certainly tunnel-vision to focus on a single area of science, but it is difficult to see the silver lining past the dark clouds, especially when so many promises had been made. Furthermore, Dr. Leon Lederman, former director of Fermilab, writes in NY Times letter to the editor:

After a string of lean years, the 2008 cuts will result in a major contraction of our country’s basic research ability. The intimate connections among biology, chemistry, technology and fundamental physics make the penalties unpredictable and hurtful in the long term.

This is a big blow to fusion and high energy physics, both on a national and international level. As JoAnne at Cosmic Variance points out, pulling out of ITER is not without its consequences:

Let me remind you that ITER is the large international fusion reactor that is currently being constructed in France and is funded by international treaty. The US has signed that treaty and was set to contribute roughly $160 M this year. Apparently Congress just doesn’t understand that there are serious ramifications in backing out of an international treaty. Even one dedicated solely to science projects. This jeopardizes future international projects and provides yet further proof that the US is not a reliable partner.

The Fermilab cut means that 200 of the laboratory’s 1900 staff members will have to be laid off, and the remaining staff will be forced to take unpead leave twice a month. Notably, Senators Brack Obama and Dick Durbin, and Representative Judy Biggert are trying to get more funding for the High Energy Physics program, which supports research at Fermilab.

As Sean at (again) Cosmic Variance notes:

Lurking behind the debate over the high energy physics budget is a meta question that rarely gets addressed head-on: in a world with many things that we would like to do, but limited resources to do them, how do we decide what questions are interesting enough to warrant our attention?

There are a number of issues that get tied up in such considerations. One is that certain activities simply require certain resources, so if we judge them sufficiently interesting to be pursued then we need to be prepared to devote the appropriate resources their way. A colleague of mine in condensed-matter physics was fond of complaining about all the great small-scale physics that his community could do if they only had half of Fermilab’s budget. Which is undoubtedly true, but with half of Fermilab’s budget you wouldn’t get half the science out of Fermilab — you wouldn’t get anything at all. If that kind of particle physics is worth doing at all (which is a completely fair question), there is an entry fee you can’t avoid paying.

Obviously, $344 million (half of Fermilab’s budget) is a lot, but that big of a loss would be devastating to pure science. Hopefully we will never have to put Sean’s statement to the test and find out what slashing 50% of funds really would do to Fermilab. But unless Obama and company have some magic up their sleeves, this coming year we could be getting a taste of that potential devastation.

Hillary’s campaign, after her Tuesday night “gang bang” (Wonkette), is claiming that she has come out on top. After a night of stonewalling, contradicting, and avoiding any (let alone direct) answers to tough questions, Clinton now seems, well, taken aback at her opponents negative disposition. She and her staff are disappointed, if you will, that her fellow candidates have “abandoned the Politics of Hope,” that they had all unknowingly signed on to before the debate. Or, rather, it would be more honestly told that Hillary spiked her losing the debate with this clever slogan so that people had no room to bad-mouth her after she again failed to tell voters what it is exactly that she means. Anyway, Clinton has come out on top. While everyone else is “piling on” to her for lying and hiding and dodging, at least she remains hopeful.

Of course, she should really probably just remain in the kitchen.

I really can’t stand Hillary. She was shady as a First Lady and I think that she’s even shadier as a candidate for the presidency. I couldn’t tell you what the woman wants for the country. I think that her response to her opponents’ demands for a more solidly attackable (and a much less flighty, slippery, or tricky) Hillary (who works a little harder to make full document disclosure from her days as Bill’s number two readily available), is pathetic. They’re only attacking you because you’re in the lead? Get a grip. They’re attacking you because if anybody knows anything about anything, they know there is one thing Democrats don’t need in 2008 and it’s another flip-flop, another scandal, or another secretive politician.

I wish Hillary would own up to her beliefs and have a little more faith in the intellect of the common-American. I for one am unconvinced of her sincerity, to say the least.

I mean, all I really wanna do is have sex with John Edwards. Wait, was that too much?