Donald Trump wrote, in response to statistics reported in a Washington Post article [1], that “I will defeat Hillary Clinton…”. But his claim is based on a total misreading of what the data used in the Post article, taken from Real Clear Politics (RCP) [2], actually say.
Politics
277 posts
On January 5 (yesterday), the President spoke to the nation about possible executive actions to address gun sales and safety. Memes began circulating immediately (see right), likely dusted off and reshared from previous second amendment “debates” but recycled for this moment. Do they accurately reflect the content and intent of […]
I am Stephen Sekula, an Assistant Professor of Physics at SMU conducting research on the ATLAS Experiment. These comments will be my own, and I will try to take a broad view. Let me begin by thanking the members of the Panel for this opportunity to speak, and let me […]
“[The creationists and the Discovery Institute] are not interested in science, and they are not interested in education. They are interested in political power. They are dangerous.” (Vincent Cassone, chair of the University of Kentucky Biology Department). [1] In an interesting interview with Vincent Cassone, chair of the University of […]
I’ve been engaged in a small conversation on a social network regarding the labeling of food as “genetically modified.” I’ve written specific thoughts about the scientific problems with that labeling recently in this blog [1]. I thought it might be useful to explain here how I got engaged in this […]
[Author’s Note: thanks to Ray and Luke for their excellent comments. I’d like to note that, while I leave this post up for now, I don’t agree any longer that gun licenses are a good proxy for gun ownership. There are other studies now available regarding things like “stand your […]
When Michael Pollan described in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” some of the impacts of industrial scale nitrogen-fertilizer farming, he wrote passionately about the Des Moines river in Iowa: But what happens to the one hundred pounds of synthetic nitrogen that Naylor’s corn plants don’t take up? Some of it evaporates into […]
You may or may not like Mitt Romney. You may or may not like Barack Obama. But these past two weeks, despite all the scripted speeches and propaganda sloganeering of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, one of these two demonstrated political courage and the other did not. The scientific […]
The Texas Republican Party platform document was amusing (and scary); as I discussed earlier, it implied that the party called for banning the teaching of critical thinking. This whetted my appetite for the National Republican Party platform, a document which was expected to take the whole party further to the […]
An article caught my attention today, written by Linda B. Blackford for Kentucky.com. The article, entitled, “GOP lawmakers question standards for teaching evolution in Kentucky,” [1] contained some choice quotes that exposed the bald motivations of legislators opposing the teaching of Natural Selection (the only established unifying principle of all […]
The recent flap over Chick-fil-a President Dan Cathy’s comments regarding the rights of homosexuals to marry is a useful petri dish in which to study the U.S. problem with equal rights for heterosexuals and homosexuals. This controversy has been littered with all kinds of contradictions, hypocrisies, and logical fallacies. Let’s […]
I can’t believe that I forgot to blog about this until now. About a month ago, the Texas Republican Party met for its state convention. Besides deciding whom they support for the Republican presidential bid, they also decided on their platform for the next two years. As expected, the Texas […]