22 June 2007

President vetoes stem cell research bill, without even reading it; Meanwhile a lightbulb that will last forever is invented

Your boy Bush vetoed a bill last night to fund stem cell research. He then made a statement which is, to be blunt, a lie:

"If this legislation became law, it would compel American taxpayers for the first time in our history to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos."
This is 100% absolutely untrue and there is no way to interpret the bill to mean this. The bill would provide funding for additional research to use embryos which were going to be discarded anyway.

If the President were really trying to prevent what he thinks of as murder of humans, then he should block any attempts at in-vitro fertilization, which is what creates so many zygotes in the first place. Instead, he goes this route, which satisfies his far-right fundamentalist base without having to deal with actual, y’know, reality, in any way.

His statement is a lie. It is partisan pandering. It is putting ideology before science. It is distorting science. With evidently no sense of irony, the President also said:

"We want to encourage science."

If you can survive reading this statement without your head exploding...

This White House Administration has been the most openly hostile toward science that I can remember. Period.

Media Matters has quite a lot more information on the disinformation on this topic going around.

Meanwhile, a company called Ceravision has just announced that they have developed a lightbulb that is 50% efficient and will last... FOREVER?!

No, that can't be right, but a very very long time anyhow. They say they expect their new lamp to outlast whatever device they put it in, so apparently your lamp will break before the bulb does. Hmmmm.

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