Democracy and science - hand in hand

Here's a link to a very interesting article; TPP has been thinking along similar lines for some time, but this article is pretty well written and makes many of the points TPP would cover.  With the GnOPe in charge there is a strong anti-science and anti-democratic flavor to many of the issues and positions they take.  Clearly public higher education is not so valued because thinking tends to mess with many conservative positions.  The snuggier government is with fundamentalist religion, the worse things are for science, and for public education.  Read it and see what you think. 
TPP's blue collar, rural family back ground saw public higher education as a means of changing your relative position in society; and some of the manufacturing jobs (GM, Kodak) that were in the offing, while looking pretty good from the perspective of 1970, have not even lasted for one academic career's amount of time.  Presently "choice" really means damaging public education to favor people who can already afford private education; for TPP public schools were a real choice and a path to a very different type of career. The funding of higher education says it all; politicians do not support that which they do not value, and state support has been declining for TPP's whole career.  And now many politicians argue against the value of higher education because they can point to one or two success stories who were entrepreneurial, ignoring all the rest.  
 

Naked truth about sex, gardening, religion, and politics in American government

In this day of binging and googling, buzzwords in a title can greatly affect the number of hits upon your blog or published article, but who would stoop to such a low and deceptive device? Since botany is in one of the little traveled back waters of biology, and most of biology isn’t trendy enough to matter to the media, it would appear that the Phactor has never used one of these academically trendy buzz words in any title of any published article. He did publish ‘the best pun ever used as a title” (according to one reviewer) and it attracted a great deal of attention to a small, but quite clever, bit of research, so buzzwords appears to work, but by now you should have realized that you are a data point in an experiment. We’ll report back to see if the traffic on this article is affected by the gratuitous use of buzzwords in the title. Which buzz word do you think will have the greatest impact? Take the poll; you're part of the experiment anyways.