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As the international scientific community adjusts its wig after the shockwave of the world’s first genetically altered babies, one thing is clear: self-regulation of research is always a pipe dream. He Jiankui is neither a “rogue scientist” nor “crazy.” He is not a Dr. Moreau. He carries all the credentials of his profession’s elite. History […] Long ago and far away, in an old collegetown in the land of prestidigital lakes, lived three damsels in a half-timber cottage. They had faces that could launch thousands of ships and the most handsome, strongest young men of the college gladly would have tried that and whatever else might possibly win even a single […] The stratospheric jackpot that poured into the lap of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen transformed him into the kind of American hero that will take generations of historical consideration to bring back down to earth. Part of the zeitgeist that will have to be conjured is the culture of 1970s engineering that placed a technological revolution […] The Congressional Research Service, which is supposed to help members of Congress understand the limitless arcana of American government, has issued an update on the B-21 Raider strategic bomber program. Although billions of dollars continue to pour into the project–one of the Air Force’s top 3 procurement priorities–since CRS’s last look, the research agency has […] With the release of Christine Blasey Ford’s lie detector test record comes the revelation that proprietary (that is, secret) software developed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, called PolyScore, was used to grade her performance as “No Deception Indicated—Probability of Deception is Less Than .02.” The gaping problem behind this sciencey statement, whether you […] News reports that Christine Blasey Ford took a polygraph or “lie-detector” test last month in order to bolster the credibility of her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh breathe new life into one of the oldest zombies in American legal and political culture. The belief that polygraph machines can reliably sort deception from truth lives for eternity […] Somewhere across this mighty land, four human beings are enrolled in a secret Department of Energy experiment code-named Moose Drool. They are numbered among 331 souls in a dozen classified research projects listed by a FOIA release to the Federation of American Scientists. Now secret science is not really science, of course, removed as it […] Vice President Pence’s speech today calling for a new military branch devoted to fighting wars in outer space helps solve at least one big problem at the Pentagon: how to spend all the money that the Trump Administration is sluicing its way. Sounding like Troy McClure, Pence might excite a few kids on summer […] It is a long, long, long road from the Berkeley City Council to the House Armed Services Committee. That Ron Dellums started at the former in 1967 and chaired the latter in 1993 must surely rank as one of the greatest leaps in American political history. The vast majority of prominent anti-war movement voices from […]
I’ve come back again to Bolinas. You might say that the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped. The once famous but massively forgotten Pied Piper trout freak of the Sixties who wrote that phrase blew his brains out in the house next door and lay unmissed for more […] |