It’s not about Christ, but at least Bing does Easter . . .

By , March 31, 2013 10:31 am

In contrast to that other search engine. What’s its name?

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Easter Music

By , March 31, 2013 10:23 am

Susan Morris introduced me to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. The professor who recommended it to her said it could represent Mary’s viewpoint as she watched from the sidelines as her son, the Savior of the World was whipped, spat upon, and ultimately crucified. That Gorecki’s symphony was played at one of the concerts in Poland that commemorated Hitler’s invasion of the country gives you some idea of its tone, especially the first movement, “Lento: Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile,”which I post here.

So if this is Easter Sunday, it must be Cesar Chavez’s 86th birthday?

By , March 31, 2013 8:52 am

I have no particular problem with Cesar. But I am beginning to wonder about Google.

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So You’re Anti-Science if You Don’t Accept Research Posing as Science?

By , March 17, 2013 9:00 am

Apparently, the NRA and all of us Right Wing Gun Nuts are anti-science, according to a post on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC site, which in turn references a 1993 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I guess that’s marginally better than being called racists, homophobes, fascists, deniers (oh wait, deniers by definition are anti-science), and such. But only marginally. Well, of course, there is another side to the story, and I’m simply preserving it here for future reference.

Herewith are links to two articles published on Reason.com. They shed additional–and much needed–light on Mr. Roth’s story (the one on O’Donnell’s site). The first one actually links to the latter one by the way. I recommend you read them. Here is the key quote from both in reference to that 1993 “scientific” study, among others:

Contrary to this picture of dispassionate scientists under assault by the Neanderthal NRA and its know-nothing allies in Congress, serious scholars have been criticizing the CDC’s “public health” approach to gun research for years. In a presentation at the American Society of Criminology’s 1994 meeting, for example, University of Illinois sociologist David Bordua and epidemiologist David Cowan called the public health literature on guns “advocacy based on political beliefs rather than scientific fact.” Bordua and Cowan noted that The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, the main outlets for CDC-funded studies of firearms, are consistent supporters of strict gun control. They found that “reports with findings not supporting the position of the journal are rarely cited,” “little is cited from the criminological or sociological field,” and the articles that are cited “are almost always by medical or public health researchers.”

Reasonable minds can differ. I recognize that. But in most cases all the reasonable minds aren’t standing on just one side of the issue. That’s especially true when one side is calling the other “anti-science,” “deniers,” “racists,” “homophobes,” “fascists,” and the like.

Edited: added clearer references/links in the first sentence of this post as well as to the sentence that leads into the block quote.

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