Bush and Science

As many of you know, I’m a strong supporter of our President on many issues, most especially on defense, foreign policy, and the war on terror. But there are also many areas of policy and ideology where I am not a Bush supporter — and one of them is in the area of science and technology.

One of my readers (Larry E. — thanks!) pointed me to this article (in the NY Times, sorry) that highlights some of the problems I have with Bush’s science and technology policy (in this case, with NASA).

This particular article describes a pattern of behavior and effects that, taken all together, are rather disturbing to anyone who thinks of themselves as a rationalist. The pattern implies that the administration believes in magical thinking, and doesn’t understand (or accept) findings made by the scientific process. This is, of course, a common phenomenon with people who are devoutly religious. I carefully said “common” there, because it is certainly not universal. Devoutly religious scientists are particularly interesting in this regard; many of them can simultaneously defend both the scientific process and their religion.

Unfortunately, the current administration does not seem to share this capability. Sometimes their missteps in science and technology policy can be traced back to this science-versus-magical-thinking issue (the Deutsch memo discussed in the article is a great example of this). Sometimes it can be traced back to politics, such as the administration’s support for expanded manned space flight, including a return to the moon and an objective of a manned mission to Mars. In general, I find the Bush administration’s science and technology policies (and the resulting budget requests) very disappointing.

In the recent State of the Union speech, Bush outlined an energy plan that reflects muddled thinking and (I suspect) a belief in magic. Really only one element is something I can find some hope in: builing nuclear power plants. As an example of the problems with the rest, consider his ethanol initiative: he’d like to see us use ethanol to help displace foreign oil. The ethanol would be made not only from corn, but also from other bio-material, such as wood chips. Sounds great, makes all the greenies happy, but … the underlying science says there are lots of problems with this approach. The biggest problem is that it takes almost a gallon of oil to produce the ethanol that would replace a gallon of oil. And that’s the most optimistic assessment I could find — most scientists believe that ethanol will take even more oil! Now we can hope for a scientific breakthrough, or we can believe in magic — but it strikes me as sheer folly to start a major program, spending billions of dollars, on that basis. I could support a program to search for that breakthrough, but that’s not what’s on the table…

Well, this is a sort of rambly post, isn’t it? I really just wanted to make the point about where President Bush and I part company: science and technology policies is one of the main ones.

Some other day I’ll dig into another one: immigration and border control.

Blog Problems

Final update: (I hope!) The filters I’ve installed in my router seem to be doing the trick, though I am still occasionally having a minor problem. My site is being attacked (for sure) by the usual suspects, especially the Sasser worm and variants at the moment. But it also appears that my site is getting some DoS (denial of service) attacks that are out of the ordinary, and I suspect related to the cartoon posts. I’m taking this off “sticky” for the moment…

Update 2: Just had a server crash shortly after a new blast of a gazillion bad packets. I will keep this post at the top until the problems/attacks subside…

Update: I put filters in my firewall to block the offending traffic, and for the past hour everything has been working just fine. This is a little bit short of proof of an attack, but it’s darned close to it, and I’m now operating under the assumption that my site is being attacked. Of course I can only speculate that the motivation was the post mentioned below, but I think it’s a reasonable speculation: the links from Michelle Malkin and Captain’s Quarters have greatly increased by my site’s traffic and its exposure. Also the number of visitors to my site from the Middle East has gone up by a factor of 10.

Original post: For the past couple of hours I’ve been having intermittent problems with my blog server. Investigation so far shows heavy traffic from my earlier cartoons post, and a whole lot of bad requests. The heavy traffic is due to links from Michelle Malkin and Captain’s Quarter blogs (and a big thank you for that!). The bad requests may — emphasize may — be an attack of some sort. And the only reason I can think of for that is that same cartoons post…

Ouch!

Don’t you dare call them unpatriotic, but … to many libertarians and Conservatives that’s exactly what some liberals appear to be. In particular, some liberals appear to support positions that are exactly the same positions that Al Qaeda would like us to support: they oppose the NSA wiretaps, they want to arbitrarily end the fight in Iraq and “bring the troops home” (instead of waiting for victory), etc.

Strata-Sphere came up with an interesting notion, fueled by an idea heard on the Rush Limbaugh show. He figures that the Democrats needs a unifying concept as powerful as the Republicans had in the 90s with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America…

From Strata-Sphere: Contract With Al Qaeda

As Democrat Members of the House of Representatives, and as citizens seeking to join that body, we propose not just to change current policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print. We call this our Contract With Al Qaeda”

This year’s election offers the chance, after 4 years of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the Nation’s policies towards Al Qaeda. That historic change would be the end of government that is too focused in Iraq, too intrusive, and too obsessed with possible terrorist attacks. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the privacy of all peoples, including members of Al Qaeda here in the US.

Read the whole thing (as someone once said). It goes on to propose eight specific legislative objectives, each of them a clear articulation of recent liberal/Democratic posturings and rants. For example:

SEVENTH, in an effort to demonstrate our sincere apologies for the actions of President Bush towards Al Qaeda, we plan to return the State of Iraq to the despot dictator of Al Qaeda’s choice by calling for the immediate withdrawal of our military forces to the safety of European soil. We encourage Al Qaeda to do what they please with the Iraqi people.

Strata-Sphere is now on my daily read list!