I skimmed over the original paper. It presents an interesting hypothesis, but the evidence is correlational, the analysis is complicated and indirect, and the relationship they found is not simple (not that bell-shaped curves can't occur, but they offer a lot more freedom in fitting data than monotonic relationships). If anybody actually is basing policy recommendations on it, I'd question their motives. But the attack on it seems a bit over the top, and I get the impression that the authors of the attack don't even want these sorts of ideas discussed, so I'm suspicious of their motives as well.

In any case, it seems like a very minor tempest in a teapot over a very tentative hypothesis based on weak evidence. I don't see what it has to do with the "soul of science."

The graph you link to shows the same thing as Krugman's (a flat line on a semilog plot is still flat on a linear plot): a jump in 2009 due to the impact of the depression on automatic safety net programs such as unemployment and food stamps (which continues, since employment has not recovered), and then nearly flat thereafter. Here's another one of Krugman's FRED plots (on a linear scale, if it makes you happier) showing federal spending as a fraction of potential GDP.

Are you seriously rolling out the much-debunked myth that there was a scientific consensus in the 1970s that we were heading into an ice age? I was reading the scientific literature back then, and I can tell you that that is simply nonsense. This notion seems to date mostly from a sensationalistic article in Time magazine based on the views of a fringe scientist. All of that literature can be found in any major university library, and much of it is available online, so you can check for yourself. Even in the 1970s, scientists knew that there was the potential for CO2 from fossil fuels to cause warming. If you aren't industrious enough to read the literature for yourself, others have done it for you

The notion that climate is "complete chaos" is also wrong. Weather is chaotic over the short term, but over the long term there are indeed rules--climate is determined by the overall solar energy balance of the globe, in which CO2 plays a major role--in fact it is impossible to explain why the earth (or Mars, or Venus) is as warm as it is unless you accept the warming effect of CO2--and once you do that, global warming in response to fossil fuel releases of CO2 follows inexorably.

Actually, there have been numerous studies finding that minimum wage increases produce negligible or zero increase in unemployment. The Wikipedia entry provides a balanced discussion of the economic theory and data.

It doesn't prove anything except that on an increasing trend line the highest values are the more recent ones....

Yes, but many Republican politicians have denied the the reality of that trend. The year to year increasing trend in average temperature is small compared to the random fluctuations of weather, so it is possible to convince people who are unfamiliar with the actual science that it is some kind of "liberal scientist" fabrication. But people do notice extreme weather events. So while the strongest evidence of the upward trend is in the measurements of day-to-day temperatures, the increase in weather disasters is something that the average person can perceive and relate to.

Much of the deficit increase in 2009 was due to existing "safety net" programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance that kicked in in response to the depression, which was already underway when Obama took office. The rest was due to the financial bailout, in which Obama followed through on the bailout devised under the Bush administration. Obama brought an end to the growth in Federal spending

The anonymous ship sailed a long time ago for pretty much anybody who has ever done anything public under their own name. I could be easily googled well before FB came along. That doesn't particularly bother me; I don't have any mortal enemies that I'm hiding from, and I'd like any old friends to be able to find me if they want to do so. The rules haven't changed: if you really want to be private for some reason, don't do anything public (and anything on the internet is public) under your real name--for that matter, you might want to consider changing your name to something generic with 100,000 Google hits that aren't you.

So I have a couple of headless keyboard-less macs that I access by remote access (often from my iPhone or iPad). They run the same software, and do the same things as my desktop mac with keyboard, and they most certainly are personal. Are they really not "personal computers"?

So if we accept that tablets are computers, the only remaining question is whether they are personal.

Not only is it not true that -ND makes citations impossible (this is covered by fair use), but I've never yet had a scientific journal refuse me permission to reprint material from a published paper, which is done routinely in scientific review papers.

Most researchers like open-access, but they are more concerned about publishing in a widely-read journal with a long-standing reputation for rigorous peer-review, because that looks better on their CVs

Fortunately, in the area of biomedical research, virtually all publication is effectively ope-access, because most biomedical researchers receive at least some support from NIH, and NIH requires that all publications supported by NIH funds be available to the public within a year of publication

For every real number of somebody whose life or the life of a loved one was saved because a gun was in the house, there is another real number of somebody who died in an accidental shooting or shot a loved one by mistake.

Yes, it wouldn't surprise me if overall it turned out to be pretty much a wash. And I think that a person could make a rational choice that even if there is no net advantage, they would rather take the risk of accident if it enabled them to be more prepared to defend themselves or their family. Moreover, if the numbers are close to a wash overall, it is certain that there are some people--people who are meticulous, not inherently overexcitable, who do not have anger management problems, who take careful measures to keep the guns out of the hands of children, and who have invested the training time to learn how to handle a gun responsibly--for whom the risks work out in favor of keeping a gun in the house. This would certainly include the vast majority of police officers, and probably many combat-trained military veterans and quite a few private citizens.

I used to find this a more persuasive argument than I do today. Whereas when this amendment was written, civilian weapons were comparable to those carried by the military, this has long not been the case. Even under existing laws, civilians cannot possess fully automatic weapons or rocket-propelled grenades, not to mention high-caliber vehicle-mounted weapons, tanks, drones, etc., etc. So I don't think the legality of assault weapons with large clips would have much impact on the ability of the resistance to mount an armed insurrection against the government in the event of a military coup in the USA. Moreover, experience in the Middle East has shown that insurrections can pose a substantial challenge to heavily armed military using improvised weapons such as IEDs. And of course, there are weapons held by local police, at least some of whom would presumably fight on the side of the resistance in such a scenario. Moreover, while this worry may have had some validity in the early days of the union, I think that we now have enough history to fairly judge that a military takeover of the USA is not a rational fear. The kind of people who are crazy enough to believe that this is a real concern are not the sort that I care to have heavily armed.

How about from the whitehouse itself, research on guns was never banned, just advocacy. BOOM

This is hair-splitting. What if the results indicated that gun control reduces crime or deaths? How could such results even be reported without running afoul of the Congressional prohibition? So in effect, the restriction says, "You can do research on gun control so long as your findings do not favor gun control." Since the agency can't know what the outcome of the research will be in advance, the net effect is to make such research impossible. What Federal administrator is going to be willing to risk having his career ended by an accusation of misappropriation of Federal funds because the research came out the "wrong" way? The practical effect is clear: the research was shut down. From the JAMA article:

Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC's website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence.

The only thing 'blocked by the NRA' is a line item for budget from congress. This does not prevent or preclude any kind of research or overhead funding of such a research project by any agency. Please get your information straight.

j

Also false, as documented in the Journal of the American Medical Association article (which I gather that you still haven't bothered to read) which has links to the relevant appropriations acts for the agencies in question, which includes general restrictions on the use of the appropriated funds, not merely blocking a single line-item project.