……what? THERE IS NO FLAW IN MY LOGIC. YOU SIR ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO SPEAK. I HAVE SPOKENNNNNN!

Since he never comes here, unless its to stump for another Dem in his “corner” or a bunch of crackpots who listen to him and eat it up with a spoon, he doesn’t realize they don’t live here, except for the ones in the zoo in Memphis. Since he doesn’t see any here whenever he bothers to come here he thinks they are endangered. Or maybe that one in the zoo got sick and somehow he heard about it and that is why he says they are endangered.

When did science become so political?

I’d say science has ALWAYS been tainted. The ruling classes never get tired of dipping their fingers in the gravy.

Science in any period of time requires three things to flourish: an economy strong enough to maintain a scientific class, a society encouraging of innovation, and a government willing to let the process steer itself. Sometimes an era supports innovation, sometimes we sit in the dark for a while. It’s kinda like global climate and Al Gore’s jean size, everything is cyclical.

As an illustrator 200 years ago, you’d have found me digging up poor-house corpses in the middle of the night and selling my stuff from a dark alley. “Psssstttt, hey buddy… wanna buy an annotated drawing of the female reproductive system???” By contrast, in Republican Rome, folks would have happily dropped spare bodies off on my doorstep.

In the US today, we’ve moved past economic constraints, and have a relatively restrained government (note the dearth of innovation coming out of Islamabad today if you disagree with me on government interference).

What we’re wrestling with now is the societal aspects of science. How many babies before it’s a litter? When does fetal/natal medicine cross over into torture? Is suicide a medical treatment option? How many crops do we engineer? Is expensive space exploration ethical before solving starvation? Can or should we alter weather patterns?

Happily for us, the climate hasn’t yet rented An Inconveniant Truth from the Blockbuster bargain bin. We’re not going to decided this issue as a society because the climate’s gonna do what it’s gonna do, no matter how many squares of toilet paper you use today.

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Oh, and a better example would have been Galilei, Beige. Ol’ Copie sorta sat on his info in fear of persecution and never much came to blows with the Church. He waited until he was six feet under to publish the solar-centric porn. Gal-Gal on the otherhand couldn’t keep his big mouth shut long enough to leave the living room.

@Minnow – If (Al Gore) went around saying he was an emperor just because some carbonated bint lobbed a scimitar at him, they’d put him away. At least we can hope for that to happen sometime soon.