DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswamy says America generates fewer great engineers than other countries, so we have to import them from overseas using H1B visas. Not only is he opening a division on immigration within Trump World, he’s starting a conversation about American pop culture, which he claims elevates jocks over nerds. Should we bring in STEM workers from overseas even while many of our US citizens are unemployed? Is jock culture the main reason we are under-engineered? “The TMI Show” co-hosts Manila Chan and Ted Rall, the latter of whom spent three years as an Applied Physics and Nuclear Engineering major at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, have opinions.
Women Need the Right to Murder Unborn Babies
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Many activists in the pro-choice movement rely on the fiction that human beings aren’t really alive until they are fully viable, whatever that means based on the medical science at the time. They are not willing to commit, as I am, to the idea that women need to have the right to murder their unborn babies.
Follow Science or Your Weird Sky God
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Liberal Democrats urge vaccine resistant Americans, particularly Republicans, to follow science and get vaccinated against COVID-19. Solid advice. But the very same liberal Democrats are willing to grant religious exceptions to vaccine mandates even though religion runs entirely contrary to science.
I Know Why They Don’t Know
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To me getting vaccinated was a simple decision: whatever risk there is from a relatively new technology is erased by the near certainty of severe illness if you get COVID-19. But a lot of Americans have a good reason not to trust the government. And a lot of Americans haven’t benefited from a good science education. Yelling at them is not going to change their minds.
Magical Thinking, Democratic Style
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Republicans aren’t the only party that likes to indulge in magical thinking.
Paranoid but Fully Vaccinated
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Many people are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 yet continue to act as though they need to stay inside and socially distance. This behavior is every bit as irrational and unscientific as the red state conservatives who refused to wear masks last year.
Joe Biden’s Campaign Strategy
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Joe Biden has clear signs of dementia. But his handlers can’t let us see that. How will they get him to Election Day?
We Can Deprogram Racists
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A new study finds that it is possible to make people less racist in their sleep, by reinforcing conditioning via association programmed while awake. How will we apply this knowledge?
Militarize Climate Change!
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Since Americans don’t seem to care much about climate change, President Obama is trying to recast global warming as a threat to the one thing they DO care about: national security.
Babies With Three Parents: What UK Approval Really Means
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Originally published at ANewDomain.net:
Everyone knows how the political system works. Whenever there is a pressing need for legislative action, the politicians do nothing at all. Either that, or they wait until lots of people die, then enact laws that half-fix the problem, usually making things worse.
A case of the former in the United States: climate change. Not only has U.S. Congress failed to act, but the political party that controls both houses of Congress won’t even admit that the problem exists. An example of the latter is healthcare. Tens of thousands of Americans have been dying every year because they can’t afford to see a doctor, so finally the United States joined the rest of the world by passing a national healthcare system, a.k.a. Obamacare, which may mark the first time in history that the US government has charged poor people a fine for refusing to buy a service.
We know that this is not a good system.
But it is the system that America, like most other countries, has always had. In the same way that people who live near rhinos know that they may get stomped by one of the armored creatures on a rampage, Americans are accustomed to the dysfunction of their political system. While it might be too much to say that we like to pay a substantial share of our income in taxes to support a government that either ignores our needs and desires, or messes things up even worse when it pays attention to them, no one expects this to change anytime soon.
As with the sun rising in the east, this is our reality.
Which is why the latest news from Great Britain makes our selective heads hurt.
“Britain’s House of Commons gave preliminary approval Tuesday to permitting scientists to create babies from the DNA of three people, a technique that could protect some children from inheriting potentially fatal diseases from their mothers,” reports the Associated Press.
Whaaaaaaaa—?
Did you know it was possible to make kids out of three people’s DNA?
No. Bet you didn’t.
How do I know? Because I didn’t. And I’m a double nerd: I read all the news and I’m especially interested in science. If there’s a weird story about science, and anyone has heard about it, it’s me.
Pretty freaky stuff. But that’s not the point here. The point is, Britain’s political system – which is even older than ours – is legalizing something that most people haven’t even heard of, much less been able to form an opinion about.
So far along are the Brits with this whole three-parent thing that their ethicists are publicly expressing a concern that this will open the door to eugenics on a grand scale, so-called “designer babies” whose genetic makeup would be predetermined by parents taking off a checklist of yesses and nos.
“The technique involves removing the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother and inserting it into a donor egg from which the nucleus DNA has been removed. This can be done before or after fertilization. The resulting embryo would have the nucleus DNA from its parents but the mitochondrial DNA from the donor. Scientists say the DNA from the donor egg amounts to less than 1 percent of the resulting embryo’s genes,” says the AP.
Whoa.
If 50 percent of Americans can define the word “mitochondria,” I will eat a garden slug. Hell, if 50 percent of American Congressmen were aware of this technique before today’s news, I’ll eat two.
I find it deeply distressing that there is an actual nation, much less one which kind of speaks English as one of its major languages, whose elected representatives (a) know anything about science, (b) know something about science before I do, and (c) have absorbed that knowledge so thoroughly that they are ready to propose, debate and actually pass a law in response to their scientific knowledge.
Forget Sputnik.
America is over.
