I can't stand this man claiming he could prevented WWII by taking Hitler out early.

Forget that America was in the middle of the Great Depression and could barely afford to feed her own population.

Forget that Stalin and Hitler were still deciding whether to be friends or enemies.

Forget that most of Europe was anti-Semitic and borderline fascist to begin with.

No - Magic McCain could have changed the whole outcome, because he's more brilliant and special than anyone who was alive and old enough to make decisions back then.

You see, we should have elected him President in 1936 and he would have taken our unprepared starving military and gotten them bogged down in Europe fighting Germany all by themselves, while Stalin sat in the Kremlin and laughed about the big fat Hitler-shaped bullet the Communists just dodged.

Imagine trying to fight the Japanese after we'd been bogged down in Europe for five years fighting all the Nazis who would have been killed by the Red Army if we'd only waited for Stalin and Hitler to break up.

And by the way -- why would anyone second-guess a war we WON?

Let's deal with the wars we're losing, and stop trying to second-guess the war we won.

Wolfram is a smart guy but he doesn't do science and nothing he's done will ever be considered science.

These are all technologists, inventors, not scientists, you're talking about.

Oh gee maybe postmodernism really is the end of human civilization.

People must be pretty confused about science when they start claiming that Stephen Wolfram does it.

If you want to interview Venter then go ahead.

But quit shoveling this postmodern manure about demolishing traditional science.

You people don't cover science at all. You cover celebrities and flashy ideas. You cover political fads and you cover outrageous personalities.

But you don't really cover real science and you never will.

All Salon ever has to say about science is GEE WHIZ LOOK AT THIS EXCEPTIONAL PERSONALITY AND ALL THE POLITICALLY TITILLATING THINGS HE HAS TO SAY.

That's not covering science.

That's just playing tourist in some far off exotic colonial land.

It's done by real scientists, so you don't believe it's true.

What kind of science advisor is the next President going to have if progressives actually believe that Stephen Wolfram does science?

This really scares me, honestly.

I know Clinton's science advisor. He was not a very happy man, because Clinton kept choosing to pander to the right wing instead of siding with science when it came to things like HIV and drug policy.

What kind of hellish anti-science nightmare is the next administration going to give us?

Maybe America has flown permanently off the rails when it comes to science.

Before I got hooked on physics, my gateway drug was engineering. Most of my professors had worked in private industry. Some of them came to academia for greater job security. But a lot of them made the transition because they were disillusioned by working on the battlefront between truth and $$$$$$$$$$$$.

I remember one professor who taught thermodynamics and fluid mechanics had worked in the defense industry testing jet engines for a major manufacturer.

He said he was forced to redefine the concept of "failure" so that engines that failed his test could be counted as successes.

That was why he left private industry for academia. And he wasn't the only one in the department with that kind of resume.

You see fraud in academia too but academia is open. Academic science is examined openly by other academics so it's easier to detect fraud.

And in academia, people are shamed and ostracized for fraud, instead of getting promotions and raises.

She always used to yell "Why do you have to play that [n-word] music?"

Miles Davis and Marvin Gaye won that contest. I mean there was no contest, even, not in my mind.

I think cultural and religious forces come into play as the child's brain develops the capacity to do more than just look to mom and dad for signals.

I mean look at the sixties -- people didn't solve all the race problems then but you did see a younger generation whose ideas about race differed very starkly from those of their parents.

I don't think that could have been foreseen by examining the racial attitudes of the kids when they were still too young to listen to Jimi Hendrix.

Maybe what he meant is that people who are politically free still need some kind of moral structure to guide them and that moral structure has turned out to be religion.

An evolutionary biologist might say that people will invent the rules that help them co-exist and make those rules into their religion.

Look I'm a Democrat so there's zero chance I'm ever throwing my vote in Romney's direction.

But I'm also a nerd and I have a particular affection for ideas and meanings and I don't think what he's saying is that ominous.

That statement is historically ludicrous, unless Romney somehow considers the non-monotheistic Zeus-and-Jupiter belief systems that flourished in fifth century Athens and under the Roman republic to be part of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That was not a "belief system" in ancient Athens -- that was THEIR RELIGION.

So his statement is not ludicrous, because he said freedom requires religion -- he didn't say freedom requires Judeo-Christian religion. At least not in the quote you've dissected for us.

Athenian democracy was based on Athenian religion, which is why the free people of Athens freely and democratically condemned Socrates to die for mocking the Eleusinian mysteries.

That's also why they attacked his protege Alcibiades, and why Alcibiades defected to the Spartans and ended up kicking Athens' ass.

Oh well. Freedom requires religion but religion can really screw over freedom. When Alcibiades defected to the Spartans, Athenian democracy was all but finished.

So he's right but he's wrong. Athenian democracy was based on religion but religious zeal also turned out to be its undoing.