True, you can slow down and even disable internet access by setting up a firewall which could block a search query, or even access to certain sites. But you determine access rights by IP addresses, more specifically, IP address ranges associated with a particular country. Anyone see the weakness in this strategy already? Let me to give you a hint. The data exchange protocols we collectively know as the internet and the web were built on networks originally designed to coordinate military commands. They’re built with redundancy in mind and a blocked range of IP addresses isn’t actually that big of a problem. By manipulating your IP address through a proxy, you could circumvent even a national firewall. Even if all those immense, $500 billion undersea cables traveling to and from your country were cut, you could get still get satellite-based web access and use a proxy to get on the web. In other words, it’s utterly impossible to shut down the internet for those who have a clue as to how computers and computer networks actually work. Any action to slow down or shut off web access is a problem only for casual users rather than the people from whom you’d actually want to protect your assets.

We’ve already discussed how unrealistic it is to militarize the web as we know it to track down a squad of foreign hackers before they strike despite the rosy picture being painted by some defense contractors, and Lieberman’s proposal seems firmly stuck in the territory of misconceptions and ignorance. Maybe if he had a chat with someone with a working knowledge of the networks used by the internet rather than someone like Michael McConnell, he wouldn’t have produced something this ridiculous. Or maybe he would anyway since it seems that while we’re appointing charismatic and talkative know-nothings to leadership positions, they start convincing themselves that they’re actually experts, as shown by studies into the subject, and don’t need the advice of those who actually do understand the technical concepts in question. So now, his bill is being used by an Australian media outlet to justify its government’s own growing interest in internet filters, and being trotted across right wing blogs where the narrative is warped from an example of Lieberman’s, Rockefeller’s and Showe’s collective ineptitude and as another disturbing sign of dangerous ignorance in Congress, into a story of how Obama supposedly wants to censor the web to silence Tea Party activists. I’d say to expect a full on paranoid rant from Glenn Beck on the subject any day now…

My guess is that this bill will die a horrible death without even being considered to be worthy of a vote, but just the fact that it was even conceived to give fodder to conspiracy theorists and took a dip into the territory on par with the rationale behind the Great Firewall of China, should be disturbing. We have a senator who hasn’t a clue what he’s doing writing legislation that could profoundly affect one of the most tech-dependent nations in the world and chairing the Homeland Security committee, and we expect the nation to be safe and adequately deal with real threats? For some reason, I really don’t feel any safer with “experts” like this in charge…

To really understand what’s going on at NASA, we need to start with what’s probably the most important thing about the agency: its history. Rather than a civilian group coming together to explore space, NASA is a spawn of a military R&D lab which was tasked with the singular goal of landing on the Moon. This is why JFK was so forceful in his famous speech challenging the United States to land on the Moon by 1969 and the agency’s goals were a top priority for the government, meaning that whenever NASA needed cash, it got cash. When the space race was won and it became clear that Soviet astronauts simply couldn’t match the Apollo program, the agency’s goals became more nebulous and less committed. Instead of going forward with ambitious military projects and high brow civilian concepts, the agency saw its budget drained in both real and relative terms, became saddled with a risk and innovation averse bureaucracy, and managed to start moving backwards in its technologies for what amounted to a very transparent effort to recapture the glory of its heyday.

Now, it may seem like great goal setting to tell an agency to land on asteroids in 2025, but where’s the rush or the challenge? Where’s the pressure from the media and the public? These ingredients just aren’t there. Over the next 15 years, another administration would have plenty of time to refocus the agency yet again, pointing it back at the Moon (where it should really be going). The same applies with the notion of a mission to Mars. We saw what happened to some three decades of similar plans and challenges and suffice it to say, we’re not on the Red Planet yet. Instead, if we really want to rev up NASA, we need to set a short term goal of going back to the Moon with technology to be provided by the small, nimble aerospace startups mentioned above. And not in a decade or two. No, let’s challenge NASA to do it within eight years with the plan to start setting up a base on the lunar surface. Rather than repeat the heyday of Apollo, have the agency go all out and push the envelope from a technical and scientific standpoint.

But of course, this won’t happen until we give NASA some serious monetary support. Sure, Obama promised a $6 billion addition over the next ten years which sounds impressive at first, but it actually averages just $600 million more per year for an agency with an existing budget of nearly $19 billion. That’s just over a 3% raise. It might keep up with inflation, but it certainly won’t help NASA go farther into space. And while half of American voters support this sad state of affairs, it seems that the government’s hands are tied. Even if Congress had a revelation and finally understood that heavy investments in science generate jobs and spur innovation, as well as contribute to higher literacy and education in such demand by military labs, lawmakers just wouldn’t be willing to do it in a fit of faux frugality. The offer of more money for new, far reaching programs in the coming decades coming from Obama was really the promise of a pittance to pursue rather vague goals outlined in a pep talk unlikely to be followed by any serious action from the government at large. How unfortunate that those who once explored the outer limits of human technology are now just an afterthought by politicians who care much more about partisan mudslinging than leading their nation and unwilling to commit to a real scientific challenge which could contribute decades worth of new technologies and jobs to the economy…

[ illustration by Kenn Brown and Chris Wren ]

As our primary education should tell us, our planet is actually just a tad over 4.5 billion years old. It’s not just a random number scientists like to throw around for no good reason. The age of the Earth was actually a pretty big problem in geology and it took hundreds of years to refine exactly how old our world really is. Between the fact that asteroids from which all planets formed are almost all between 4.5 and 4.8 billion years old and how the proportions of radioactive elements in samples of the oldest terrestrial rocks indicate an age of 4.4 billion, it’s highly unlikely our planet formed just thousands of years ago. In fact, when we confirm the ages in a lunar sample and astronomical observations, it seems pretty clear that our planet has been around for a lot longer than a few millennia. The same uranium ore Sen. Allen wants to mine shows it very clearly with its 4.5 billion year half-life and its radioactive byproducts.

By contrast, the figure of 6,000 years comes from loose interpretations of certain Biblical commentary through the mid 1600s which places the start of the world on October 23rd, 4004 BCE. Since most religious scholars rejected the idea of the Old Testament being a literal timeline of Earth’s creation since ancient times, taking a more philosophical and metaphorical approach to reading its text, I’m sure you can see the problem in nailing down the day of creation based on random passages. Mainly, there’s not even a theological basis for a rough estimate of the planet’s age but it’s been mentioned enough and comes with enough vague quotes to feel like an authoritative figure to those who really want to believe in Biblical literalism for a validation of their views. To add insult to injury, not even Ken Ham’s Young Earth geologist believes the Earth is less than billions of years old which is why he writes about multi-billion year old rock formations when the boss isn’t looking.

And let’s not forget the really scary thing about a senator casually discarding about a century worth of science and intensive research, and using a number based on nothing more than murky theological musings as the backbone of her environmental policy. We pay her to do this. Not only that, but we pay her six figures a year as well as give her an office, a staff and healthcare for her family and aides. And instead of demanding that those who are supposed to lead our nation actually use evidence for their reasoning, we reelect them and keep the paychecks coming. As odd as it might seem, I would’ve had a lot more respect for Allen if she said that some of our environmental laws are a waste of effort because the Earth has been doing just fine for the last 4.5 GYA and will be fine after we’re gone. I might disagree on the technicalities, but at least her argument would’ve had a little tinge of actual science to it.

Where to begin? Well, first and foremost, Pence’s recitation of teaching all controversial theories in a science class and letting the students decide only applies if you have a controversy to begin with. You’re more likely to run into historians who deny the Holocaust than scientists who reject evolution. Something backed by 99% of experts is far from a controversy and more to the point, since evolution is based on facts, it’s only appropriate to teach it as a fact. I mean how else would you teach a collection of various facts from the biological world? Do we really have to plan our education around rants from proselytizers who seldom know anything about the theory they try so hard to deride while dragging down physics, astronomy and cosmology as well? Science is not an indoctrination opportunity and just disagreeing with facts doesn’t make them vanish into thin air.

Next, he says that a growing scientific consensus against the idea of anthropomorphic climate change gets a cold shoulder. According to the GOP, there’s been a growing consensus against the idea of global warming since the current focus on the environment began, driven in no small part by the issue of climate change. And where are all those skeptical climate experts hiding? Why is the idea that our pollution is altering the make-up of the atmosphere still accepted by mainstream science? So far, the vast majority of critics have used political arguments or tried to start heated debates about what the level of sea ice looks like based on one probe or its counterpart, or even equate weather with climate. Where is a group of skeptical PhDs in meteorology or the experts in climatology publishing papers which show that global warming either isn’t happening or overblown for no good reason? Journals publish controversial or contrarian views all the time so let’s see some papers. If there’s such a growing dissent, there should be dozens and dozens of them.

Funny enough, some on the far right allege that the whole issue of climate change is a sinister conspiracy by the UN and evil socialists who want to tax most of the American economy into submission just for kicks. And that brings us to the tax portion of Pence’s argument for giving money to something called “clean coal,” which is a nice PR word for technology that tries to sequester greenhouse gases. Ok, that’s all well and good but if you’re as serious about the environment as you say you are, what about green technology like solar or wave and tide power? Rather than help new tech, Pence and the GOP want to give away money and tax credits to a group of reliable donors and call that being responsible about the environment while acting bewildered that we see through this transparent facade and trying to convince us otherwise.

To try and bolster his green credentials, Pence says he’s in the “party of Teddy Roosevelt” and that Roosevelt created the first national parks. While Roosevelt was indeed a Republican, at the turn of the century, the GOP was a liberal party. Rather than look out for business interests and advocate low taxes, Roosevelt was a trust-busting environmentalist who built up many layers of regulation in the business world, the exact same things which make Democrats anti-business socialists according to today’s Republicans. It’s an important historical point. The political parties we know today weren’t always ascribing to the same positions and have changed their place on the political spectrum multiple times.

Finally, Pence decided to take a swipe at stem cell research by declaring that scientists ignored a number of advances that allow for the extraction of stem cells without “having to kill the embryo.” Really? Which scientists ignored it? The ones who developed a way to pinch off stem cells and start new lines, rushed to present it as a new way of working with embryonic stem cells and were completely ignored by the Bush administration? Oh and since we’re talking about science, we should note that the actual source of stem cells in question isn’t an actual embryo per se, but a ball of undifferentiated cells called a blastocyst used for fertility treatments. And if it fails inspection for IVF treatments or never gets used, it’s destroyed. So not only is Pence’s accusation dead wrong, it’s also very hypocritical because his party seemed perfectly fine with letting blastocysts be destroyed as long as none of those evil science types got to use it for stem cell research.

Matthews has a point when he says that the Republican party seems to have a problem with science. Instead of trying to learn the issues, the mouthpieces of the GOP insist on repeating the same, tired talking points that got them nowhere last time. Really, it’s time to pick up some real literature about science and history because the stream of ideological talking points just isn’t working anymore.

Michele, if you’re not trying to blame anything on the Democrats, why do you bring this up out of the blue? What possesses you to say such things? Usually, I try to hold myself back from polemics and rants on this blog. In this case, I’m aghast that there’s a lawmaker so incredibly paranoid, uninformed and desperate to sling mud on the other party, it doesn’t seem to enter her mind to think about what’s coming out of her mouth before she tries to defer to them during an influenza outbreak researchers have been expecting for decades.

Oh and as Talking Points Memo kindly points out, in her rush to say something negative, Bachmann gets her facts wrong. The last flu outbreak was in 1976 during the reign of Republican Gerald Ford and if she wanted to really impress us, she would’ve mentioned that Woodrow Wilson was president during the 1918 pandemic. Could someone remind me how exactly did she get into office, even when we consider party loyalty?

Exhibit A is the now infamous incident in which Texas Rep. Joe Barton asked the Secretary of Energy Steven Chu about the origins of oil and how it got to Alaska, implying that hundreds of millions of years ago, Alaska must’ve been warm for oil to form. An incredulous Chu cautiously explained that the landmass that is now the state of Alaska was indeed warm at one time but eventually drifted with its oil deposits to its current location, something that most of us learned by age 11 and really shouldn’t be asking during an important hearing with smug smirks on our faces. To make matters worse, Barton then bragged about “stumping” Chu and had the official GOP live blog call the answer he received “perplexing.”

So to sum this up, Barton was asking questions every middle school student should know before passing a basic science class test and his GOP colleagues are “perplexed” by seventh grade science. And Rep. Barton is bragging about this, telling the world via his Twitter feed that he confused a distinguished scientist who was floored that an elected official couldn’t grasp the concept of continental drift! This is one of the lawmakers who will define our energy policy over the coming years and not only does he lack some of the basic knowledge he needs to make informed decisions about it, he’s proudly putting his ignorance on parade to an audience of millions and thinking he’s just outsmarted a Nobel laureate in physics.

Then, as if to compete with this appalling incident, House Minority Leader John Boehner decided to challenge the scientific consensus on excessive concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by saying that “the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.” Which it is. Especially when we consider that carbon dioxide is not a carcinogen. It’s a greenhouse gas. Having a very low concentration of it in our atmosphere is the difference between a moderate range of global temperatures and our planet being a mostly frozen slush ball due to our distance form the Sun. So if just a tiny splash of carbon dioxide is what’s keeping us warm, what happens when we start adding on to that with wild abandon? And if the planet gets too hot as it did during the Permian extinction which killed the vast majority of life on Earth 250 million years ago? That wouldn’t be harmful to the environment?

That goes double for Michele “The Government Will Put Young People In Brainwashing Camps” Bachmann, who in a recent speech to Congress declared that carbon dioxide is a natural gas and that it makes up 3% of our atmosphere. Here’s another byproduct of natural processes. Gamma rays. They don’t just come from an exploding nuclear warhead and they’re perfectly natural. But they’re lethal to all known life in powerful enough bursts. Bachmann sounds like a homeopath telling us that anything natural must be good for us even though nature can just as easily kill you as nurture you. The other problem with her lecture is the fact that if we really had a 3% concentration of carbon dioxide in the air, Earth would be an arid desert where complex life would have to evolve very differently to survive. Instead, that concentration is just 0.03% and as mentioned above, it’s potent enough to give us our moderate climates rather than keep us in a permanent ice age.

What’s really sad is that Barton, Boehner and Bachmann are just using the latest iteration of arguments given by other lawmakers who sincerely believe that the discussion about global warming is some sort of nefarious socialist conspiracy to either defang American industry or start a UN led New World Order. These are people being paid with money taken out of every paycheck we receive and rather than help us make decisions which will help us in the long run, they choose to spend their time arguing about things they clearly don’t have any real grasp of and are too self-assured to ask an adviser or a staffer to do a simple, two minute fact check.

Once upon a time, the United States created a culture in which science was going to create the kind of future we still only dream about. Those learned men and women in lab coats would be deciphering our genomes, defeating diseases left and right, building fusion reactors for cheap, safe electricity and outfit the military with weapons so devastating, wars would last just days. Scientists used to be part heroes and part celebrities, working behind the front lines of making the future of our wildest dreams a reality. But that was long ago. That was before a major shift in culture. Government went from being seen as an enabler to an incompetent mess unable to perform or oversee the simplest task without waste, corruption and total incompetence.

Ronald Reagan summarized this culture best during his speeches when he said that there were no smart people in government and anyone who was actually competent was working for huge corporations. Over the last 30 years, that’s been the prevailing worldview. If you want to make real money, if you want to be of real use, if you want to be smart, you go work for a company or on Wall Street with the yuppies. They were the golden boys and girls. They were the future with their financial and management savvy. Government? A pack of used up old geezers. Practically rejects if you will. Discarded refuse from companies where they no longer could do anything even remotely useful. Yes, to a certain extent this is a hyperbole, but it does shine a light on the cultural subtext which is still going strong today. Why then should we bemoan our leaders for doing a bad job when we elect them with the expectation that they’re borderline useless? We’ve set them and ourselves up for failure by electing them on this premise.

This undercurrent also creates double standards. When the stock market suffered a blow from the credit crunch and the resulting recession, the government made up of the people born and educated into the culture in which business was all-important to the nation’s survival, rushed to give a $700 billion bailout to banks that caused the mess in the first place. As I was writing a pair of essays on the subject for BusinessWeek.com, I couldn’t help mentioning that this is not the first time banks that made bad or careless bets were rescued from their own mistakes via a government intervention and a large corporate welfare program. In the 1980s, bankers vowed that never again will they play fast and loose with money and cause taxpayers billions. But hey, if they mess up, it hurts the economy and we can’t allow major campaign contributors, err… I mean pillars of industry to falter, can we? Besides, it’s taxpayer money, the taxpayers will make it back as soon as these wounded giants start hiring with their corporate welfare checks, right?

Compare that to what happens when scientists use tax money for a complex project designed to help us understand the elemental basics of biology that could lead to new treatments in the future? They’re lambasted for wasting taxpayer money or used as poster children for how the stupid government is so wasteful that it lets biologists get away with hundreds of thousands of dollars on researching fruit flies. Never mind it’s to understand how developmental diseases manifest themselves during embryo development. How dare they use taxpayer money? Don’t they know we need that to underwrite bad debts for Wall Street? Or worse yet, when this money is used on extremely difficult and complex projects like nuclear fusion. That’s decades away! Come back to us when you figure it out, you money gouging ivory towered academics!

And what about the candidates for public office mentioned in the beginning, raised on the idea that science is a wasteful pursuit for dreamers and a life worth living is spent in a cubicle of a corporation? What message does he send to little Johnny or Suzy, lambasting someone for his or her education? Don’t try too hard, math and science are for suckers who couldn’t survive in the real world? It’s all right to be a C student as long as you have the street smarts to go with it and can watch the movie Office Space without feeling bad about your dull office routine?

I will readily concede that practical experience is important and will teach you things that you’ll never learn in any classroom or lab. I’ve been there myself. But having your degree and doing well in your science and math classes will help you deal with whatever life throws at you. Being knowledgeable is not a handicap. It won’t turn you into an evil genius or a socially inept nerd of a 1980s teenage movie. And dammit, it’s important to understand the world around you.