Mad rantings about politics, evolution, and microbiology
Mad rantings about politics, evolution, and microbiology. Comment policy: say what you want, but back it up with an email address. I don't like anonymous trolls.
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May 31, 2007
Matt Stoller makes a very interesting observation about Senator Obama, although I think it could apply to most of the presidential candidates in both parties.
Posted by Mike at 5:17 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
MarkH notes that Luskin is upset about what they perceive as academic discrimination against the proponents of intelligent design creationism. So he asks Luskin a question.
Posted by Mike at 11:15 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 30, 2007
I've said before that when you watch ignoramuses and authoritarians trash your country, anger is the appropriate response. driftglass explains why.
Posted by Mike at 5:40 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Libraries
Would you pay $728 more a year to keep schools and libraries fully funded? I would, but the voters of Northbridge, MA wouldn't.
Posted by Mike at 10:50 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 29, 2007
No, that's not an inappropriate joke. The conservative Polish government is worried that the Teletubbies might turn Polish youth into TEH GAY.
Posted by Mike at 10:06 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 28, 2007
Let's contrast Thomas Friedman with Mark Twain this Memorial Day.
Posted by Mike at 1:16 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 27, 2007
I was away this week, and it's a holiday, so the links are kinda light. Here's some science stuff.
Posted by Mike at 9:17 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From Monday to Friday, I attended the American Society for Microbiology meeting held in Toronto. Before I get to some of the interesting science, my apologies to all of the people who suggested we meet up. Unfortunately, I never look at the blog (or almost never) while I'm on the road, so I missed your messages (it's best to email me directly). Anyway, here's the list of random things.
Posted by Mike at 11:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 26, 2007
I go away for a meeting, and Congress goes and holds a vote about the Iraq War. Like some, I'm disgusted by the outcome, but I think many are blaming the wrong people. To paraphrase Pogo, the enemy is us. Or least part of us.
Posted by Mike at 1:16 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 25, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, after I posted about a very serious emerging bacterial threat, KPC, I received an email from a reader with an elderly relative in the hospital with a very serious case of pneumonia caused by KPC. What he told me is shocking.
Posted by Mike at 9:57 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 24, 2007
Ordinarily, I would dismiss someone who thinks that the K-12 educational system is the U.S. is good as a lunatic because 'everyone knows' that our primary educational sucks. Then I think about the conventional wisdom that Social Security is DOOMED, and I realize that maybe the conventional wisdom about education is wrong. Gerald Bracey has an interesting post about U.S. education.
Posted by Mike at 10:08 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 22, 2007
I'm giving a presentation today while I'm at ASM, and I'm using a picture of a wombat (one of the topics in the talk is E. coli from Australian mammals). So I have a question for you.
Posted by Mike at 11:20 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 21, 2007
Actually, I'm not just mad at the pundit, but at Senator Obama: he knows his position is intellectually dishonest. If there is a general budget (and debt) problem, why focus exclusively on one successful program, and not other parts of the budget? Shame on them both.
Posted by Mike at 11:58 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 20, 2007
Here's a list o'links for you. Science first.
Posted by Mike at 8:15 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 19, 2007
In all the recounting of Jerry Falwell's life, almost all of the focus has been on Falwell's 'religiously' motivated positions. But this ignores Falwell's first political activity: to defend the system of American apartheid known as segregation. Racism, not abortion or other 'religious' issues, was what gave rise to the 'religious' right. The embrace of racism is the Christian Right's original sin.
Posted by Mike at 12:16 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So asks Oliver Willis about the Republican base. The Mad Biologist answers: anti-Latino hatred.
Posted by Mike at 10:23 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 18, 2007
So Lou Dobbs has been making ludicrous statements about leprosy and illegal immigrants, claiming that 7,000 cases have happened in the last few years as a result of illegal immigration. Actually, we have had 7,000 cases of leprosy--over a thirty year period.
Posted by Mike at 9:05 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Or at least know what magical brownies can do to you.
Posted by Mike at 10:20 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 17, 2007
Biologists have studied the fly Drosophila melanogaster for decades. Given its status as a model organism (perhaps the model organism), one would think figuring out what its microbial fauna is would be a high priority. Yet remarkably little is known about its microbial fauna. Until now.
Posted by Mike at 5:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bloggity Blog
Researchers at the University of Tennessee have an online survey about blogging and political information. Help these good people out and take the survey.
Posted by Mike at 10:53 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Biologist Lewis Wolpert talks about memes.
Posted by Mike at 10:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 16, 2007
The Republican presidential candidates were asked what they would do in a "24" situation. This very well could be the 'flag-burning' of 2008
Posted by Mike at 7:09 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Let's leave aside decency and morality and try to forget that Romney eliminated funding for a gay teen suicide hotline to curry favor with the theopolitical Right. Let's not plumb the dark, foul abyss that is Mitt Romney's soul. Let's not ask how morally decrepit one would have to be to attempt to gain political office through the suicide of a child. Let's talk about evolution: Romney's not half bad.
Posted by Mike at 11:05 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The last thing most people in the Coalition of the Sane want when they are being treated for a serious illness in the hospital to have the staff try to convert you to another religion. And when you force a sick patient to choose between following the dictates of his religion or not eating, that is not 'godly', that is an abomination. It's also par for the course when dealing with Christopathic Uruk-hai.
Posted by Mike at 10:41 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 15, 2007
As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not particularly fond of the 'progressive' netroots, largely because I don't know what they stand for, and what little I do know doesn't strike me as particularly compelling. Over at MaxSpeak, there's an excellent take on the netroots, which includes some points I hadn't considered.
Posted by Mike at 6:24 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has posted of all of the articles from In the light of evolution I: Adaptation and complex design .
Posted by Mike at 4:54 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
And by "it", I don't mean the good stuff. Harvard dean Theda Skocpol has announced a new initiative to improve undergraduate teaching at Harvard. I'll believe it when I see it--which means it will never happen.
Posted by Mike at 10:23 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 14, 2007
Category: Movies
By way of Oliver Willis, I stumbled across these outtakes from the movie Flock of Dodos. I will never stop being amazed by the disingenuousness of the ID movement.
Posted by Mike at 6:11 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Well, that isn't what Ezra Klein titled his post about blogospheric venom, but he should have.
Posted by Mike at 10:06 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 13, 2007
A special edition of Sunday links. Last week, I asked non-science bloggers to post five links that had something to do with science. So, I'll start by returning the linky love
Posted by Mike at 8:09 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The mainstream media has a double standard for Democratic candidates. INCONCEIVABLE!
Posted by Mike at 1:13 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 12, 2007
One of the odd ideas to have arisen is that one can have a good idea, but not express it well. With rare exceptions, in my experience, that isn't the case: poorly communicated ideas are usually a result of poor ideas. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to revisit one of former Secretary of War Defense Donald Rumsfeld's utterances.
Posted by Mike at 3:01 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bloggity Blog
Do you think one time zone has an advantage in blogging over another?
Posted by Mike at 10:22 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Well, that got your attention, didn't it? Actually, I'm referring to a post by PZ where he discusses his objections to religion. In reading them, they really didn't seem to describe my religion, so I thought it would be interesting to go through them.
Posted by Mike at 10:12 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 11, 2007
and a symphony broke out? Who starts a fight at the Boston Pops?
Posted by Mike at 8:54 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 10, 2007
More scary food news from China: Chinese catfish have been found to contain fluoroquinolone residues. Fluoroquinolones are medically important antibiotics and include ciprofloxacin ("Cipro") and enrofloxacin (which has been banned from agricultural use in the U.S.). Not only can fluoroquinolones be toxic and cause allergic reactions, but this means that China is probably still misusing these vital antibiotics.
Posted by Mike at 6:05 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Authoritarianism
Regarding the cruelty of the penal system, it's too bad that it took Hovind's own incarceration to reach his epiphany. Maybe when he gets out of jail he could do something useful like advocate for prisoners' rights, as opposed to building creationist theme parks.
Posted by Mike at 9:41 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 9, 2007
Tristero makes an excellent point about Republican rhetoric, and I think it partially explains why so many scientists are opposed to the Bush Administration.
Posted by Mike at 4:29 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Tragically, Massachusetts is having a hepatitis C outbreak, and it's entirely due to surging heroin use.
Posted by Mike at 11:08 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 8, 2007
Senator Obama earned a lot of points in my book today because he took the leadership of the U.S. auto companies to task for being such retrograde, anti-progress morons.
Posted by Mike at 5:25 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Or socialist. Or maybe just Swedish. If you consume mainstream media, let alone the 'finanical' news (i.e., corporate propaganda), you would never in a million years realize just how economically liberal the majority of Americans are.
Posted by Mike at 10:21 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 7, 2007
When rightwing CNN host Glenn Beck went Full Metal Godwin on Al Gore, I figured this was just garden-variety rightwing agitprop. But this post at Slacktivist about the "Left Behind" apocalyptic book series, by way of ScienceBlogling Josh, convinces me that Beck is just a flat out nutjob.
Posted by Mike at 6:08 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When you use the National Guard as a backdoor draft, instead of civil defense and disaster relief, people suffer.
Posted by Mike at 12:12 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I read that George Gilder calls biologists "Darwinian stormtroopers." John West claims we want have exclusive control over embryonic stem cell research. While Gilder and West don't realize it, they have stumbled across our Evil Darwinist Plot.
Posted by Mike at 9:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 6, 2007
Lots of links clogging up the internet tubes this weekend.
Posted by Mike at 8:11 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
At the recent Republican debate, three out of ten Republican candidates stated that they did not believe in evolution. This reflects a larger ignorance of science. I have a very simple idea to combat the Stoopid for bloggers who don't think of themselves as 'science' bloggers:
Posted by Mike at 2:23 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Another disgusting turn in Attorneygate: only politically correct--that is right wing--federal prosecutors who are murdered are worth the Department of Justice's time and effort.
Posted by Mike at 10:06 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 5, 2007
I'm working my through Lewis Lapham's Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration. Here's what he has to say about the culture wars:
Posted by Mike at 2:50 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but something Huntington Willard said in that blogging article in Cell about how senior scientists have been trained to communicate science got me thinking.
Posted by Mike at 10:23 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 4, 2007
Category: KPC
No, KPC isn't a new fast food restaurant. It's short for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase. The bad news: it's very hard to treat. The good news: it's very rare...for now.
Posted by Mike at 10:32 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 3, 2007
Category: Bloggity Blog
The Blog Reader Project Survey is conducting an online survey. It doesn't take much time, and it's oriented towards smaller blogs.
Posted by Mike at 6:20 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 2, 2007
Tristero has an interesting multiple choice exam for everyone. I have a minor problem with one answer, however.
Posted by Mike at 7:40 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about using vaccination to eliminate or greatly reduce E. coli O157:H7 infections. Unfortunately, I don't think vaccination is going to work.
Posted by Mike at 10:26 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 1, 2007
...that it kills a great punchline. You see, companies are actually trying to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. That's what Business Week says, anyway.
Posted by Mike at 9:38 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks