tqa | December 10, 2008
But I really don't know who it could possibly be.
If the latest set of transition leaks are as accurate as the previous few have been, President-Elect Obama will announce the nomination of Steven Chu for Energy Secretary.
And. The. Crowd. Goes. Wild.
Chu's background is a bit light on the politics side - no DC job, no elected political office - but even if you consider that to be a down side, the rest of his resume more than makes up for the lack. He's a career scientist. He's a world-class physicist, one of the 1997 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and has been the director…
tqa | December 10, 2008
Like most people who pay attention to the news, I've been treated to several weeks of Republicans using the Detroit bailout as an excuse to bash unions. Like a broken record, it was easy to ignore for a while, but the repetitive droning of discredited canards (like $70/hr wages) is getting more and more and more annoying.
And it's particularly annoying because the vast bulk of the union-bashing is coming from the alleged free-market conservatives. What the hell is so conservative about beating up on unions, anyway. Unions are the quintessential model of a market based solution to a problem…
tqa | December 9, 2008
I've been dealing with creationists for a long time now, and I thought that I'd gotten over being surprised by dishonest behavior in their ranks. In fact, I thought I'd gotten over it even when I'm on the receiving end of the false witness, and when the person dishing it out is someone who really should know better. As it turns out, I might not have quite as far over it as I thought.
As regular readers know, Dr. Michael Egnor is one of the more impressively credentialed denizens of the Discovery Institute's media complaints blog. He has decades of experience as a neurosurgeon. He's on the…
tqa | December 8, 2008
You could call this a follow-up to the recent stories about CNN's spectacularly stupid decision to kill its science and technology unit, I suppose. I'm watching MSNBC right now, watching them cover the crash of a Marine FA-18 Hornet in a residential neighborhood in the Miramar, California area.
They're speculating right now - actually, speculating is almost too nice a term - about the number of pilots on board the aircraft. Apparently, the military at the Pentagon is not sure about how many pilots there were, and are a little too busy actually trying to find out what's happening to spoon…
tqa | December 2, 2008
Blame Henry. He just twisted an old meme a little bit, and it's hard for me to resist doing the same. There's a meme that's been wandering around facebook for a while now - take the first book you see, open it to page fifty-six, transcribe the fifth sentence, and pass the meme along. Henry did that one better. He transcribed the fifth sentence on page fifty-six from ten books, and challenged his readers to guess the books.
I like that, so let's turn it into a full blown meme. Take ten books, and transcribe the fifth sentence from page fifty six.
In keeping with the 5, 56 thing, Make sure…
tqa | November 29, 2008
(another own goal, of course.)
There he goes again. Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's latest post over at the Discovery Institute's Why's Everybody Always Picking On Me blog may have actually reached a new standard for missing the point. And, as both my loyal regular readers know, that's not an easy mark for Egnor to hit.
The current contender is his latest post in a back-and-forth that he's been having with PZ and Orac. Once again, Egnor is attempting to argue that evolutionary biology has not provided any useful insights to the field of medicine. That much is familiar ground.…
tqa | November 18, 2008
Every now and then, it feels like I'm living in a Bill Cosby skit.
I'm wandering around the house, talking on the phone, when our cat Pounce decides to make his need for attention and affection known by walking up and swatting me in the back of the leg.
Before I go any farther, I should probably take a second or two to explain Pounce. Right now, we have three cats. Two of them are named Pounce. They share a single body. One of the two is absolutely the sweetest, most affectionate kitten you'll ever meet. The other is a psychotic bundle of fur that dashes off in a random direction,…
tqa | November 18, 2008
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the role that the Community Reinvestment Act played (or, rather, did not play) in causing the current global financial meltdown. I was planning to get out of the issue there, but a really nice article by Devilstower over at Daily Kos sucked me back in. During the time when I wasn't paying any attention to the issue, the right wing noise machine added a new villain to their attempts to blame Wall Street's mess on the left: ACORN.
In 1977 Democratic President Jimmy Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act to provide housing to poor people. In the…
tqa | November 17, 2008
...or at least I should be.
I'm a white man, on the low side of the 30-44 age bracket, with very strong military ties. I'm not a movement conservative, but I don't consider myself to be a movement progressive or liberal either. I don't think government is always the problem, but I also don't think it's always the solution. I fall into the 44% of voters who classify themselves as moderates. Overall, I think my profile more closely matches that of a Republican voter than a Democratic one.
I usually, but not always, wind up voting for the Democrat.
If you're a Republican, and you want my…
tqa | November 6, 2008
It's been almost 36 hours since the networks called the election for Obama. That's enough of a honeymoon. There's work to be done.
There are widespread reports that President-elect Obama is seriously considering appointing Robert Kennedy Jr. as head of the EPA. The appointment does seem to have some benefits - including, as Politico points out, some political ones for Obama - but Orac is right. It's a bad idea.
Kennedy's active participation in the anti-vaccination movement is a threat to public health. It also demonstrates, quite clearly, that he is willing to actively promote positions…
tqa | October 31, 2008
I didn't get a chance to post about Rules for Radicals this week - the time that would have been spent on that went to knocking on doors and making phone calls for the Get Out The Vote effort here in the Florida Panhandle instead. It will happen next week, after the election. I promise.
I might not have time for in-depth writing on the topic, but that doesn't mean it's far from my mind. It certainly wasn't when I read the journal Nature's endorsement of Obama. (This appears to be the first time in it's 139 year history that Nature has made such an endorsement, by the way.) One paragraph…
tqa | October 29, 2008
I just watched the Obama "infomercial", and I was blown away. Never mind the production values that Chris Matthews is nattering on about. The real story is about the message: this campaign is about us. It's about what we need, and what we can do to get it.
The entire half hour was - well, it's hard to call it a positive ad. It was a hard look at the problems that we're facing, and need to address. This was not a "daybreak in America" kind of talk. But it wasn't negative, either. McCain was not belittled, he was ignored.
As I was writing that last paragraph, MSNBC went to the first…
tqa | October 28, 2008
In today's Atlanta Journal Constitution, Army spouse Elisabeth Kadlec writes:
When we married our spouses, I am sure that none of us were signing up to be single parents. But in essence that is what we become. Many people I know, like my husband, have already been deployed more than three times, and will go again. Most of these deployments are to Iraq or Afghanistan. It always amazes me when people ask me if my husband has to go back. I even laugh at this question!
I think it shows that the public has no idea how many troops make up the armed forces and how many are deployed at a time.…
tqa | October 21, 2008
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Saul Alinsky
Rules for Radicals
This is the beginning of a promised (and late) series of posts discussing Saul Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals. Alinsky started out in community organizing in the 1930s, working in Chicago's infamous "Back of the Yards" neighborhood. Rules for Radicals is a how-to guide for organizing, based on the…
tqa | October 20, 2008
I've got to admit that when I heard that Colin Powell was planning on endorsing a candidate for president yesterday, I was unimpressed. I figured that whichever candidate he chose would be on the receiving end of a lukewarm endorsement that would be easy to dismiss and would fade from the news rapidly. I didn't expect to see such a painfully honest assessment of the problems with the way the Republicans are campaigning, but I was even more surprised and impressed by Powell's simple, clear, and eloquent dismissal of the "he's a Muslim" argument:
I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain…
tqa | October 17, 2008
There's something truly amazing about Uncommon Descent's DaveScot. He misrepresents data in a stupid way, gets caught, gets embarrassed, and then he does it again. And again. And again. It's like he expects it to work this time - and never mind the fact that it hasn't in any of the last 37 attempts. It's entirely possible that he has the same ability to learn from experience as a badly concussed pigeon.
Today's shining example involves a post of his entitled "Voter Preference by Education Level". In this post, he provides a set of statistics involving education level and current choice of…
tqa | October 16, 2008
What a difference a day makes. Last night, the picture of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) we all had was the one John McCain painted for us: a hardworking plumber with serious plans to buy the plumbing business he's worked for for "all these years", who won't be able to do so if Obama wins because Obama will raise Joe's taxes. Today, after reality has had a chance to be heard, the picture is very, very different.
Let's start with the basics: Joe isn't going to see a tax increase under Obama's plan. He's going to see a tax cut. If he buys the business, he might see an…
tqa | October 15, 2008
A little spat that John McCain is having with YouTube has gotten a bit of press lately. Basically, he's not happy because YouTube has been taking his videos down whenever they get a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice from a copyright holder. Apparently, this has happened to McCain fairly often, possibly because his campaign has gotten into the habit of using other people's material without their permission.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an internet service provider (like YouTube) is only immune from copyright infringement suits if they promptly take down…
tqa | October 5, 2008...keep an eye on the left sidebar of this blog. There's a listing there of the times and dates when the prize announcements will be made. If all goes well, the list will be automatically updated with the names of the winners, as soon as the announcements are made.
The first announcement, for the winner or winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, will be made sometime after 09:30 GMT tomorrow. Feel free to use this thread as an open thread for discussing speculation on who it might be, and for commenting after the winner is announced.
tqa | September 30, 2008Just so you know, I haven't forgotten about this blog. My laptop suffered a major hard drive failure a few days ago, and my internet access has been limited by the need to share the desktop with my wife and my daughter, both of whom need to use the computer for educational purposes.
Things should be back to normal shortly.