3Dsound: Draggin' the Line
Authoritarianism, fundamentalism, popular music, Fort Collins and more
3Dsound: Draggin' the Line
Grand Ayatollah James Dobson calls down Republican Jesus against 3D and his daughter
Video
A hard rain's a-gonna fall: Steve Benen (16-
Yesterday afternoon, my daughter and I enjoyed lunch at Avogadro's Number (still famous for its tempeh in 2008) and then went down the street to Barack Obama's Campaign Office and picked up our Community Credentials to attend Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. I had applied for the credentials at the beginning of the month and only half-thought we'd be lucky enough to receive them. But we did – and we feel honored and excited about attending this moment of change in contemporary American history.
Unfortunately for us, it really irks Grand Ayatollah James Dobson that a small business entrepreneur and his ninth-grade daughter would want to witness our country's shift away from the Republican authoritarianism that the Grand Ayatollah blesses. In fact, the Grand Ayatollah is so threatened by us – and by a stadium – and a nation – filled with others like us – that he has beseeched Republican Jesus (à la Bob and Justin Schaffer) to – yes indeedy – "cause it to rain upon the earth [and] destroy from off the face of the earth" anyone attending Obama's speech at Mile High Stadium (i.e., Invesco Field). Watch the video, and hear for yourself.
The Carpetbagger Report (linked above) will fill you in on the details, but it seems that the Grand Ayatollah regretted the negative publicity generated by his partisan prayers. His video may have been intended for the eyes of the faithful only, but it leaked out to a wider audience. That forced the Grand Ayatollah to remove the video from the Focus On The Family website and to claim that the video was always intended as a "joke."
My daughter and I are certainly happy about the prospect of hearing Barack Obama accept the Democratic Party's nomination for President, but we are also proud that Obama's vision of America embraces something greater than the theology of rank self-interest preached by Grand Ayatollah James Dobson.
What's for dinner: Ajlouk qura’a (Tunisian mashed zucchini salad with feta and caraway)
10th in a food series
Draggin' the line
Earlier this month, my daughter and I attended my niece's wedding in Vermont. The wedding was held at one of the resorts at Killington – and it was a beautiful setting, but my niece was more beautiful.
One evening, we all went to the Countryman's Pleasure Restaurant, which serves German food. You can read the online reviews, which will tell you about the restaurant's converted farmhouse and engaging ambiance. The reviews don't lie. The restaurant was a perfect place to enjoy a dinner with family who I rarely see. I had the veal à la Holstein (breaded veal with fried egg, anchovies and capers), where the egg and anchovies complemented the veal in the satisfying way that I have to think they were supposed to.
Now my daughter's off with her mother visiting another set of relatives in Florida. They're coming back Thursday or Friday, and I was thinking of making this zucchini dish to celebrate. Why? Because it's tasty, and there's lots of zucchinis around now. Also, I've been making this dish for a long time – long enough for my daughter to have drawn the picture of it shown above. Around the time that she drew the picture, I overheard her emphatically reassure one of her friends, who was over to the house around dinnertime, that the dish was "really weird but delicious."
This recipe originally appeared in Cooking Light (Claudia Roden [October 2001], How to cook Middle Eastern, pages 138-139, 142-144, 146, 148,
Ingredients
1¼ pound small zucchini, cut into 1-inch thick slices
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon caraway seed
½ teaspoon ground coriander
½ teaspoon Tabasco brand Pepper Sauce
1 large garlic clove, crushed
¼-½ cup (2-4 ounces) crumbled feta cheese (domestic cow's milk feta at $6.99 per pound; do not use a pre-crumbled, flavored variety)
Procedure
Place zucchini in a saucepan, and cover with water. Bring to a boil, and cook 20 minutes or until zucchini is very tender. Drain. While zucchini is still in colander, coarsely mash zucchini with a fork. Allow to drain.
To make the dressing, combine the lemon juice and the next six ingredients (juice through garlic) in a bowl. Stir with a whisk. Add zucchini, and toss well. Sprinkle with cheese.
I serve this zucchini dish with long-grain brown rice (4 cups for $1.50, on sale).
What's for dinner? See the series.
Mary Winkler's lesson for the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
Curriculum (content and hyperlinks updated; bumped up from 21-Aug-07)
Right-wing wishful-thinking about women: Homemaking concentration [required courses], Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary [Fort Worth, Texas], online at college
I think we all remember Mary Winkler, the pastor's wife in Tennessee, who last year shot her husband in the back following an argument over home finances. According to Winkler's in-court testimony, for which she offered no corroborating evidence, her husband – the Pastor – had abused her throughout their marriage, including forcing her to wear white platform shoes and a black wig during sex. The case illustrates some of the difficulties that are found in some marriages. The case also illustrates how some spouses are ill-equipped to deal with those difficulties. Which makes me wonder: If the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary wants to train women in Godly homemaking skills, why doesn't the homemaking curriculum include courses in home finance and marriage and family, in addition to courses in the womanly arts of cooking and sewing?
UPDATE, Sunday, August 9, 2008: Mary Winkler is the Tennessee Pastor's wife who killed her husband Matt – the Pastor – and then served only 12 days in jail and 55 days in a mental health facility for the crime. Compounding that injustice, last week a court granted her full custody of the couple's three children, who have lived with their paternal grandparents since their father's death (Attorney: Winkler takes custody of 3 children [04-Aug-08]).
Does it look like Mary Winkler got away with murder?
News reports don't tell us the details of the court's reasoning for awarding Mary Winkler custody. But her attorney claimed, "It should be seen as a sign that the family is healing... It's a good thing for everyone."
I doubt it.
•Is it a good thing for Matt Winkler? who Mary Winkler "involuntarily" shot in the back while he slept in bed? After shooting Matt, Mary unplugged the phone, rather than give him aid or call 911.
•Is it a good thing for the children? who will always know their mother killed their Dad? News reports say the children have not expressed a desire to live with their mother again.
•Is it a good thing for us? to forgive a crime and then act like it never happened?
Here's what Mary Winkler teaches us:
•An accusation of abuse trumps the absence of corroborating evidence.
•A man's life means relatively little when it's taken by a woman.
•A mother's biological relationship with her children is all we need to know.
Those lessons are hard to accept. But they're no more difficult – I believe – than the homemaking curriculum that first led me to discuss Mary Winkler.
The homemaking curriculum at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) remains what it was a year ago, when it was first offered to students and became the recipient of universal incredulity in the greater world. I pointed out at the time that the Winkler tragedy shows the need for education in the emotional and financial aspects of marriage and family.
That the SWBTS continues to promote just the cookin' and sewin' dimensions of family-life constitutes a perverse repudiation – denial – of the lives we all live. I can't help but think that Mary Winkler (and her unfortunate custody victory) represents one consequence of the fundamentalist thinking that gave rise to the SWBTS homemaking curriculum.
Justin Schaffer's Facebook page: Profile of a young right-winger
Colorado
"The consciences of youth also require an education" (T.O. Moore): •Facebook | Justin Schaffer [mirror website of Justin Schaffer's now deleted Facebook page] online at schafferfamilyvalues
•T.O. Moore (summer 2007), Graduation address: The call to greatness [PDF file], The Conversation ["a journal for educational theory and practice published by Ridgeview Classical Schools"]
•mysteriousways (05-
Justin Schaffer is suddenly infamous for expressing a bunch of views that are commonplace among right-wingers.
And it's no mystery where Justin's views were incubated. His father Bob Schaffer is a self-righteously virulent conservative politician, whose fact-finding trip to the Mariana Islands found not a whit of evidence to indicate untoward labor practices among garment workers there. A creationist, Bob sent Justin to Ridgeview Classical School, which is one of the charter schools located in Fort Collins. Ridgeview's small population of students excels at taking standardized tests, but the school itself lurches from one controversy to another. Either the Principle is caught fabricating data for his columns in the Coloradoan; or former students accuse the school of forcing them out; or the school's administration is questioned for quashing dissent; or the school adopts aggressively adversarial positions in negotiating its re-chartering with Poudre School District. High CSAP scores don't paper over the school's authoritarian governance.
Still, Principle T.O. Moore offered a complementary profile of Justin at his commencement in 2007:
We have seen Justin Schaffer staying up all night not only to study for an AP Latin exam but also to finish a script to an unsanctioned dramatic production that did honor to the faculty and to the school. (I am told he even fit in some swing dancing and a couple of rugby games that same night.)
errrrr, "An unsanctioned dramatic production"? I guess that's right-wing-speak for saying the production was extracurricular.
And make no mistake. Justin's views and preferences – as documented on his Facebook page – are certifiably right-wing. Here's a description of what Justin published at Facebook (authored by a commentator at Daily Kos, with highlighting mine):
All of which makes Justin Schaffer's [Facebook] webpage extra-ordinary and even instructive. By clicking here, you can see Justin's webpage for yourself and wonder what sort of traditional family values were taught in Bob Schaffer's home.
Here are some questions that jumped out at me, for example: Is promoting slavery a traditional family value?
Is it a traditional family value to argue that democracy is bad, and to belong to a group saying so in its title – not to mention belonging to a group that calls itself "Pole Dancers for Jesus"? What about a group called "Affirmative Action Sucks"? Or "Bitch, please... I'm from Colorado"?
Is it a traditional family value to twist Biblical scripture to fit a political agenda? Is it a traditional family value to celebrate "diversity" by posting a picture of 18 kinds of handguns above the rainbow-colored word "diversity"? And is it a traditional family value to depict Jesus, in a televangelist suit and wearing a dollar-sign lapel pin, holding an Uzi against a Confederate flag background, and to ask, "What would Republican Jesus do?"
And is it a traditional family value in the Schaffer home to depict Barack Obama as Osama bin Laden, seven years after bin Laden's deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, during which time the present president has said loudly and clearly from the James S. Brady Briefing Room of the White House, "I truly am not that concerned about [bin Laden]?"
And that brief list of questions ignores the other offensive references depicted on the younger, but still adult, Schaffer's webpage: the references to women as "slutty," the illustration of fecal matter with halos, the suggestion that drivers can earn "1,000 points" for hitting "slow children" on a road sign.
I don't know if I'd put my thoughts exactly this way, but one person called "Republican 36" commenting on the younger Schaffer's work here wrote,
If anything it shows a young man who was raised in a political family who has a callous and repugnant attitude toward slavery. After four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crowe laws and racist attitudes you would think he would have the intelligence, and training at home, not to post something like this, especially when his father is running for a high profile public office. Apparently, he is proud of his attitudes, including the antithesis of the words in the Declaration of Independence that states "all men are created equal."
We should not deceive ourselves because this man is only 20 years old. This is another example of the dark underbelly of the Republican-religious right and their drive to make ugly, racist values part of the mainstream again.
But let's let Justin speak for himself. Reproduced below is a sample of the bumper stickers he included on his Facebook page:
Justin Schaffer speaks his mind (as if he'd done his learnin' at Dick Wadham's knee rather than at his father's)
Colorado
Bob Schaffer's circle: Schaffer's son apologizes for Web posts (06-
Over at Facebook, Bob Schaffer's son, Justin, yucked it up about Obama being gay and slavery being useful, views that he apparently didn't realize would embarrass his father, who's running for the U.S. Senate. But, why should Justin realize such a thing? His father's campaign Facebook page linked to his.
It was only after Justin's page went public – and Justin dutifully signed a sniveling apology – that Bob Schaffer announced that he and the wife would 'firmly punish' Justin, as if he was a rascally nine-year-old, rather than a 19-year-old college student whose smirky views reflect badly on Bob Schaffer and his family's values... Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that Bob Schaffer has yet to condemn the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and homophobic views broadcasted by his son. You can read about the affair below.
As I've written before, personality-based attacks (such as calling Obama gay) are par for the course in the world of Bob Schaffer. Schaffer is a 1990s Republican who likes playing dirty. That's why he hired the Rovian Dick Wadham to run his campaign. Wadham has previously applied his underhanded tactics to the benefit of the campaigns of George Macaca Allen in Virginia and Dick Thune in South Dakota.
This week, Wadham performed his job and announced that he and Bob are "going to shove a bunch of 30-second ads up his ass on this issue over the course of the campaign." That was in response to an energy vote that Schaffer's opponent Mark Udall missed last Wednesday. Should Udall have missed the vote? Probably not. Is that how Wadham should talk? You can decide, but the evidence tells us that Bob Schaffer and Justin Schaffer support Wadham 100%. After all, Wadham only expressed the hard sentiments that they all uphold. That is, when they're not pontificating to us on just the opposite.
Here's an example of the "softer" values that Bob Schaffer just can't manage to pass on to his son and campaign manager:
People who are worthy of our respect hold themselves to high moral standards in every area of their lives. When the camera is not rolling and they are behind closed doors, good people are faithful. Good people are kind to everyone, not just their friends. They know that wrong actions always hurt someone. They know that wrong deeds diminish the doer as well (Congressional Record, 14-Oct-98).
We can speculate on Schaffer's inability to pass on those values because he mouths them for show only.
Schaffer's Son Apologizes for Web Posts
The 19-year-old son of Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer of Colorado has apologized for an entry on his Facebook page that had the words "High Five ... Who's Gay" over a photo of a waving Barack Obama.
It also had a picture of the Pyramids with the words "Slavery Gets (expletive) Done."
Justin Schaffer, a student at the University of Dayton, issued an apology Monday, calling the entries "offensive" and saying he alone was responsible. The statement says the materials "directly contradict the values that my parents taught me and are forbidden in my parents' home."
Bob Schaffer has said he and his wife decided on "firm punishment" for their son but declined further comment.
Schaffer's campaign opponent, Democrat Mark Udall, had no comment.
Intimidation of scientists, a new creationist weapon in the war on science?
Peer-review science (updates published in reverse chronological order; bumped up from 01-Jul-08)
Conservative politics: •Z.D. Blount, C.Z. Borland, and R.E. Lenski (2008), Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli [full text available by subscription, or at Richard Lenski's website [PDF file] at Michigan State University (https:
•Conservapedia contributors, "Richard Lenski", Conservapedia, online at conservapedia
UPDATE, Sunday, August 3, 2008: Andrew Schlafly has ratcheted up his campaign of intimidation against Richard Lenski.
The Conservapedia now includes an entry entitled Letter to PNAS, where Schlafly and his followers are in the process of drafting a letter for submission to the PNAS journal, which originally published the Lenski paper that Schlafly takes issue with.
A draft of a letter might seem like an odd entry for including in an encyclopedia. However – notwithstanding the Conservapedia's claim to be a "clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth" – the Conservapedia functions less like an encyclopedia and more like Andrew Schlafly's blog (notably on the Main Page) and his all-purpose platform for publishing right-wing views – a context in which the PNAS letter makes complete sense.
I've reproduced, below, the current draft of Schlafly's letter. You'll note that someone at the Conservapedia (it wasn't Schlafly) has finally gotten around to articulating a set of supposed deficiencies in Lenski's research, which – according to the letter – "negate [the] claim that E. coli bacteria underwent an evolutionary beneficial mutation."
The letter's critique suffers from not being familiar with routine procedures for handling microbial cultures (the letter's "flaw" 4); a misunderstanding on the experiment's methods and their graphical representation ("flaw" 1); and a lack of knowledge of nonparametric statistics ("flaws" 2, 3 and 5). See the RationalWiki for a detailed rejoinder to the letter's critique (Conservapedia: Schlafly's alleged Flaws in Lenski's Study).
Schlafly has yet to grasp that Lenski's thoroughly vetted Long-Term Evolution Experiment and the Cit+ cultures, which resulted from it, verify the development of an evolutionarily beneficial mutation in E. coli.
Any advanced student in the biological sciences would be embarrassed to submit Schlafly's critique. Why? Because Schlafly ignores the very "problem" that he has hounded Lenski on and incessantly – publicly – claimed to be paramount. That is, the inability to perform a critical review of Lenski's experimental results because, supposedly, Lenski withholds data from public scrutiny.
The "flaws" that Schlafly outlines are not refuted by reference to the data (published or otherwise) but by reference to general information about microbiology, nonparametric statistics and the experiment itself. Schlafly's critique only shows he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
But, Schlafly's ignorance is hardly the issue, let alone Lenski's vindication.
Schlafly is sending copies of his letter to a Congressional Representative and to the conservative activist group Judicial Watch. Clearly, Schlafly hopes to escalate his intimidation of Lenski by fomenting a political response – with the threat of litigation hanging in the air, since litigation is what Judicial Watch is known for. This corresponds to the intimidation process I described in my original article (see highlighting below).
Identification of Flaws in the Following Paper Published in PNAS: Blount ZD, Borland CZ, andLenski RE, "Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli,"105 PNAS 23, pp.7899–7906 (June10, 2008)
The following flaws in this PNAS paper negate its claim that E. coli bacteria underwent an evolutionary beneficialmutation.[1]
1. Figure 3 depicts an "historical contingency" hypothesis around the 31,000th generation, but the abstract states that mutations "arose by 20,000 generations." The paper fails to admit that the Third Experiment disproved the hypothesis depicted in Figure 3.
2. Both hypotheses propose fixed mutation rates, but the failure of mutations to increase with sample size disproves this. If the authors claim that it is inappropriate to compare the Second and Third experiments to the First for scale, then it was an error to treat them similarly statistically.
3. The paper incorrectly applied a Monte Carlo resampling test to exclude the null hypothesis for rarely occurring events. The Third Experiment results are consistent with the null hypothesis.
4. It was error to include generations of the E. coli already known to contain trace Cit+ variants, and the otherwise highly improbable occurrence of four Cit+ variants from the 32,000 generation in the Second Experiment suggests an origin from undetected pre-existing Cit+ variants.
5. The Third Experiment was erroneously combined with the other two experiments based on outcome rather than sample size, thereby yielding a false claim of overall statistical significance.
The underlying data for this publicly (NSF) funded research have not been publicly released, despite requests to do so and despite NSF policy that "data collected with public funds belong in the publicdomain."[2]
Andrew Schlafly, B.S.E., J.D.
www.conservapedia.com, teacher of precollege students
cc: Randy Schekman, Editor-in-Chief, PNAS, University of California at Berkeley (by email and postal mail)
New Scientist (by fax - 0171 261 6464)
Rep. Brian Baird, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology (by postal mail)
Judicial Watch (by email)
References: 1. Detail is at http://www.conservapedia.com and its talk page./Flaws _in _Richard _Lenski _Study
2. http://www.nsf .gov /sbe /ses /common /archive .jsp
The foregoing letter is to be sent by postal mail, return receipt requested, to PNAS, 500 Fifth Street, NW,NAS 340, Washington,DC 20001, by email to pnas@nas .edu, and by posting it in its feedback form at http://www .pnas ..org /feedback
UPDATE, Tuesday, July 8, 2008: Schlafly's motivation in the Lenski affair appears to be focused on intimidating a leading scientist. I've described how I anticipate an escalation in the affair through the involvement of elected officials who are sympathetic to right-wing causes (see original article below, published 01-Jul-08). The effect of such intimidation on the scientist and his work (I believe Schlafly and his followers hope) will be to chill the pursuit of research and scientific inquiries that right-wingers find objectionable. It looks to me like only a short step between Schlafly's threatening a legal suit (see update below, published 05-Jul-08) and recruiting a sympathetic politician.
That's all well and good... but Martin writing at the Lay Scientist (The Lenski "debate": Missing Schlafly's point, published July 6, 2008) offers a more compelling interpretation of Schlafly's intent.
Martin points out something that we've all noticed: Schlafly is loath to articulate the ways in which Lenski's paper might be flawed and the ways in which accessing Lenski's unpublished data might address those flaws and permit new analyses to verify or refute the paper's conclusions. All of that represents a systematic accountability, Martin argues, that's beside the point, in Schlafly's motivation for pursuing the affair. Schlafly's not interested in the relationship between data and conclusions (else he'd talk about it!). Schlafly's intent, Martin implies, is to create an impression of impropriety where none exists.
Martin astutely explains Schlafly's bad-faith engagement with Lenski: "[W]hat Schlafly is trying to do is to create and spread the meme that scientists conceal data, and can't be trusted. He's not attacking science, but faith in science." It's a strategy we've seen right-wingers deploy many times.
Will Schlafly succeed? Of course he will.
The Dover verdict in Pennsylvania has not dissuaded right-wing politicians from attempting to introduce creationism into the classroom. Far from it; their efforts remain constantly in the news. The bad moviemaking in Exiled has not prevented it from becoming a touchstone among creationists who are now infatuated with Ben Stein as a champion of their cause. The historic remoteness of the hoax of the Piltdown Man did not prevent a Conservapedia contributor from citing it as a justification for doubting Lenski's integrity.
The Lenski affair has now entered the creationist battery of non-fact and irrelevancy, to be deployed as needed forevermore. Lenski's name will always be dirt among those who hold creationist belief.
UPDATE, Saturday, July 5, 2008: The intimidation of Richard Lenski continues.
On July 3, 2008 (according to the Conservapedia's wiki "history" page), Andrew Schlafly added the following news item to the Conservapedia's main page, where the item generates discussion, which you can read on the associated "talk" page:
"Conservapedia challenge: Who will be first to figure out a legal means for obtaining public disclosure of Lenski's underlying federally funded data?"
Thus far, Schlafly's bullying remains in stage 2 of the intimidation process that I outlined below.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE, Tuesday, July 1, 2008: A remarkable attack on science is unfolding at the Conservapedia.
On June 2nd, the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PANS) published a paper reporting on evolution in the bacterium Escherichia coli, which was authored by a group of microbiologists led by Richard Lenski at Michigan State University. I've cited the paper above. The importance of the paper is discussed by science writer Carl Zimmer at his blog The Loom (A new step in evolution, 02-
The paper peeved the creationist community (although I have yet to read a coherent summary authored by a creationist that identifies the deficiencies or problems in the paper [OK, I've now read the Amazon blog article authored by Michael Behe, where he interprets Lenski's paper in the discredited terms of irreducibility]).
The creationist founder and lead editor of the Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly, wrote to Richard Lenski on June 13 and said, "Please post the data supporting your remarkable claims so that we can review it, and note where in the data you find justification for your conclusions." Schlafly justified his request by referencing the PANS publication guidelines and the fact that the research was supported by publicly funded grants ("funded by taxpayers").
Schlafly admits that he hadn't read Lenski's paper before he demanded access to the raw data.
Overviews of the affair have been published in many places, including The Loom (Of bacteria and throw pillows, 24-
Meanwhile, the correspondence between Schlafly and Lenski continues... and has become more pointed. So far, there have been two exchanges between them, which are
Schlafly blithely contends that Lenski's findings are suspect and probably fraudulent. And that Lenski must comply with Schlafly's demands for data, so that the data can be reviewed by... "creationary" experts? Schlafly has never outlined how he and his colleagues at the Conservapedia plan to review Lenski's data, and there is scant reason to think that Schlafly and his colleagues possess the analytic tools or knowledge needed to perform a meaningful review. Lenski, for his part, is forced to defend the integrity of his research.
Furthermore, the Conservapedia now contains the following entry for Lenski (citation given above):
Lenski is best known for his questionable claim to have observed the theory of evolution in practice, saying that E. coli bacteria made minor changes in a long-term laboratory study, and insisting that it was not due to contamination. His 2008 paper asserting his claims was peer reviewed in a mere 14 days, sparking obvious questions about the thoroughness of the review. When challenged, Lenski displayed several examples of irrational behavior, thrice referring to the challenges as slander, yet has filed no lawsuit charging that (or libel). Truth offers total legal protection from accusations of libel. He has also displayed annoyance, arrogance, and elitism when asked to release the information. When Lenski received a public request for the data underlying for his published claims, he did not provide the actual data even though his study was taxpayer-funded. Undisclosed data from the central claims in Lenski's 2008 paper are noted below...
Science and the expansion of knowledge proceeds through the independent replication of experimental results, which is the reason for an open exchange of data and experimental materials. But Schlafly’s aim is not the expansion of knowledge. Schlafly is intimidating a leading scientist – one who has made a breakthrough discovery in evolution – a discovery that disproves creationist dogma and demonstrates, yet again, why creationism lacks standing in the classroom.
Do Schlafly's actions represent a new strategy in the right-wing war on science? It's not hard to imagine the following scenario:
1. Contact the author of a paper you don't like.
2. Demand the author's data.
3. When the author fails to kowtow to your every request, contact your local right-wing politician and demand an inquiry into how public funds are being abused.
Others have also recognized this potential for intimidation, and my friend Pam at Tales From The Microbial Laboratory gives a