Science & Society

Summary: Legally the president makes the decision and everyone else then scurries around and follows his or her orders; in practice it's not going to be that simple in peace time especially. He or she doesn’t just have a button to press and the weapons fire; it’s a figurative expression. A president who gave that order in peacetime would surely be treated as temporarily deranged and ignored. They would need broad support, from their defense secretary especially. However, in the event of an imminent attack on the US they decided that the president has to be able to launch a response within…

The Jews. First they were perhaps just a little bit cleverer, perhaps by accident, but any process in natural selection is fundamentally describable as an accident. Or perhaps they started out just the same, but then by accident rather than choice at first, they started selectively breeding themselves, from rather arbitrary religious rules at first let those who could not read the scriptures leave, married the daughter of the richest to the cleverest rabbi, and so they multiplied just a little bit more advanced than is judged by the base measure of naïve bio-centic evolution theory, which is…

The Environmental Protection Agency appears to be punting a final decision on the safety of a controversial weedkiller into the next administration. Since 2009, the agency has been conducting a registration review of glyphosate - one of the world most widely-used herbicides - and its risk to human and environmental health, an assessment required every 15 years. The lengthy process has been fraught with delays, accusations of political maneuvering and even Congressional investigations. Under questioning by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee in June, EPA Administrator Gina…

Humanities scholars mostly focus on the bereavement customs of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) whereas Catholics, the overwhelming majority of Latinos, are overlooked in their unique funeral customs, which sometimes include overnight wakes and presenting food to the deceased. Candi K. Cann, Ph.D., a humanities assistant professor at Baylor University took a group of her students in 2015 to a Latino funeral home in a Central Texas city where nearly 30 percent of the total population identifies as Hispanic or Latino, according to U.S. Census statistics. Hispanics are the country's…

President Obama hasn't just ruined science, he has ruined hot dogs. [On] the long awaited premiere of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, President Obama piled more fuel on the fire: "Is ketchup on a hot dog ever acceptable?" Bourdain asked POTUS as they slurped noodles in Vietnam like old backpacking buddies. "No," Obama said. "I mean that ... that's one of those things like, well, let me put it this way, it's not acceptable past the age of 8."http://uproxx.com/life/ketchup/2/?source=acsh.org

Are we heading for a Grim New World?  It looks like it, from two short articles that I have recently read.  One, from today, is Why I am publishing all my texts, emails and messages to the internet in real time.  The author, Mark Farid, writes: In October 2015, in conjunction with my exhibition Data Shadow, I gave a talk at the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas, titled “Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed”. At the end of the talk, I shared all my login details with the audience. This included all my personal and professional email…

Jeremy Corbyn has recently been re-elected to leader of the labour party in the UK with an even stronger mandate than before of 62% of the vote, as many of you will know. This opens up the possibility of a future prime minister of the UK who has said that he will never authorize use of nuclear weapons to kill civilians. So is he right to say this? Well yes I’d say he is right. For my whole life ever since I understood what it meant, since the 1960s, I’ve been against the bomb and in favour of unilateral disarmament by the UK. The situation is more complex for the US and if I was in the US I…

The third non-browning Arctic apple variety - yes, using science - the Arctic Fuji, has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA APHIS). Science has shown they are the same as conventional apples, they just won't brown as much, so all of those organic food people will have a lot less food waste. Except organic food shoppers will never buy these, because they love food waste and environmental strain if it means getting to hate science again. The apples have been improved through a reduction of the enzyme polyphenol oxidase (PPO),…

Experts often advise even openly gay and lesbian candidates to downplay their sexual orientation or risk losing votes, but David Niven, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, claimed at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia that not only does a gay or lesbian candidate's sexual orientation no longer pose a political disadvantage, but that it may actually help them win office.   At one time, gay candidates were discouraged from running at all, and when it was found out later, it was downplayed. Yet as we have…

Usually the arXiv does time wasting nasty things like delay and then re-categorize articles with inconvenient truths into unsuitable categories where nobody of the target audience will find it and the usual audience is not interested. This however is 2016, the year where the liberal denial of reality has accumulated so much suffering, for example to the Black community, women, the Middle East ..., that people can no longer stand it. Everybody, males, females, Whites, non-Whites, ... is nowadays personally harmed by the established anti-scientific ideology of denying the differences between…