Here's a question. Who downmodded me; a Creationist or an AGW pseudo-skeptic? Or perhaps someone whose both.

There are plenty of places for morons and lunatics to spout their stupidity. Maybe Popular Science just doesn't want to be one of those places.

I remember in Ye Olde Days, when the sci.* Usenet groups started trying to push all the whackos to the talk.* and alt.* hierarchies, where researchers, if they were feeling particularly bored, could go and beat on netkooks. Coupled with moderation, it did return the sci groups back to some modicum of reason.

It can take years to do research on HIV and how it leads to AIDS, and it can take some maniac or holistic medicine astroturfer roughly twenty seconds to post an absurd and false claim against your research.

When it comes to AGW or evolution, the two topics I've paid the most attention to so far as comments from non-scientists, the bulk of the "skeptics" information seems to come from a very small number of organizations whose sole purpose is to spread anti-science FUD. Whether it's the Koch Brothers and their various shills or Answers in Genesis, it's all the same strategy; muddy the waters by making it look as if there is still huge debate on the scientific theory they're attacking. Throw in a bit of "consensus is evil, only believe dissenters" nonsense, they can give the appearance of a theory being total dreck, without ever having to bother actually publishing a single article in a journal to support the claim. Of course, it helps they have nasty little shills like Michael Behe and Roy Spencer who happily cash the cheques and publish anti-science material with their PhDs prominently displayed, but when you look at their actual publishing history in the journals, never publish anything to support the claims they so eagerly make on blogs, editorial sections or comment sections.

Fine by me. I long ago stopped reading anything by science journalists, who, save for an exceedingly small number of them, deserve neither the title "science" or "journalist".

It's one thing for people of near equal knowledge and ability to have a debate, even a heated one, but when we're talking about every one from credentialed experts to netkooks to astroturfers all posting in a format that seems to give equal weight to everyone, the results are anything but productive or useful.

One of my favorite blogs is by Professor Matt Strassler, a physicist at CERN, and also a damned fine writer, but frankly I ignore the comments to his blog entries because for every legitimate question or observation, there's some bloody nutjob who thinks because they use the word "quantum" in a sentence, that somehow makes what they're saying a legitimate critique.

So we can translate this as "We've abandoned using a cell phone's geolocation functionality, which is garbage, and now tie into all cell towers and get up to the minute accurate cell phone information, which we grab constantly and archive forever."

Yes, this strikes me as more of a "We don't like red apples, so we've abandoned it... Now introducing green apples!"

They made some pretty good movies out of his books, but I confess the few that I read I really struggled through.

And how does the 14th Amendment play into this?

Um, I think the budget has now become a political nuclear weapon. Until the Tea Party can be excised from the GOP and forced to run its own merits (or, to put it another way, disappears into oblivion), this will continue. When maniacs like Cruz have sufficient clout to fuck up budget negotiations, you know the lunatics truly have taken over the asylum.

And, of course, sick people being fucked over by the current system.

I do love tea part 'yards like you. What does amaze me is how they teach people with babboon-sized brains to type, let alone vote.

And if you had any sense of decency, you would feel that bankrupting people or dooming they to die because of pre-existing conditions was morally wrong.