Without the state

A war on science?

It really seems so.

Suppression of research into gun violence

Quote of the day - no - the decade!

[Biodiversity] is a SCAM! Designed to lead inevitably to a world Govt.

Yes - that is indeed what the man said.

Unicorns in the Garden

An elegant and viciously polite smack down of an whining, whingeing and ignorant proponent of so-called 'Intelligent Design' (Not much intelligence in its proponents from this exchange...)

An example of the brilliance that is Professor Lenski:

It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then - as some of your acolytes have suggested - you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren't very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it's not that we claim to have glimpsed "a unicorn in the garden" - we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]

Another, slightly less entertaining, but equally stupid example here, in which the particular lawyer (that explains a lot) failed to understand a particular scientific paper because, apparently, "he thought ‘eponymous’ was the name of a particular class of bones."

[Via Crooked Timber and the comments]