gregladen | September 15, 2009These are pretty mainstream voices.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | September 15, 2009This is a bit long but very much worth the watch. Rachel and Jonathan Alter discuss the racialized rhetoric, the Republican strategy, and the political pattern that the current wave of unhinged and uncooth behavior is part of.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | September 15, 2009What does UnitedHealthcare CEO Stephen Hemsley have to lose if Congress passes real healthcare reform this year? Well, for starters, his nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in unexercised stock options might lose a few pennies on the dollar.
What does Isabella, a four year-old girl in Winsconsin who is physically incapable of eating and has had to be tube fed her entire life, have to gain from healthcare reform? The treatment she needs to live a normal life.
Brave New Films is launching a major new campaign to reveal the truth about the health insurance industry, and we need your help…
gregladen | September 15, 2009In an interview with NBC's Brian Williams, former Democratic President Jimmy Carter attributed much of the conservative opposition that President Obama is receiving to the issue of race.
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said.
Read the rest here
gregladen | September 15, 2009But when Conservatives for Patients Rights, an anti-health care organization, made a commercial designed to scare Americans into opposing heath care reform, they lied to various Canadians and tricked them into making the Canadian system look bad. The same organization did the same thing earlier with the British health care system.
Heres the ad:
YOU LIE!!!!!
Here's the truth.
gregladen | September 15, 2009Just reported in PLoS ONE is a new dinosaur.
Spinophorosaurus nigerensis
Here are the salient facts:
Species name: Spinophorosaurus nigerensis
Who found it: Scientists with the State Museum of Natural History Braunschweig, Germany, and the Paldes Project (led by the Paleontological Museum of Elche, Spain)
Kind of dinosaur: Basal sauropod
Time period: Early and Middle Jurassic (about 200 to 170 million years ago)
What the finders say about it:
"There are very few complete skeletons of basal sauropods," Remes explains. However, complete finds are crucial for the scientists in order to…
gregladen | September 15, 2009Dusty Trice will tell you ...
Dusty's commentary and additional sordid details can be found HERE. Not for the kids, it gets kinda steamy.
gregladen | September 15, 2009Premiering October 6th, the two-hour drama will coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of his seminal work On the Origin of the Species.
In 1858 Charles Darwin received a letter from naturalist Alfred Wallace, explaining his own theory of evolution. This was the trigger event that led to the publication of Darwin's seminal theory on the origin of species.
Nova/NGS trailer:
gregladen | September 15, 2009If you were in the Twin Cities last Saturday and wanted to do something political, you had two choices. Tool over to St. Cloud and visit Michele Bachmann's Town Hall meeting, which she rudely scheduled on the same day as a visit to Minneapolis by President Obama. Or, you could go to see President Obama.
Rep. Michele Bachmann was in St. Cloud on Saturday for a town hall meeting. Apparently quite a few people in her district just don't care about her anymore. Her event at the St. Cloud Technical High School was attended by only 60 people!
In contrast, 18,000 people were at the Target Center…
gregladen | September 15, 2009... than it was. Because it's got these dohickeys on the bottom now that will make it easier for you, dear reader, and I do love you all, to tweet, stumbleon, digg, whatever, the posts that you like. So please do that!!!!
I thank the Scinceblogs Dot Com overlords for this wonderful gift.
gregladen | September 15, 2009Rebuke. v. Call on the carpet: censure severely or angrily; "The mother scolded the child for entering a stranger's car"; "The deputy ragged the Prime Minister"; "The customer dressed down the waiter for bringing cold soup"
The house rebuked Wilson. It was almost a party line vote, but not completely. The wisdom on the street is that the Democrats will pay a small cost for this, as Wilson, the snotty face whinging Republican from South Carolina will play the victim. But, the wisdom on the street is also that this was the right thing to do.
That is the difference between Republicans and…
gregladen | September 15, 2009The film is a powerful "docudrama" set in the year 2055, after global warming has done massive damage to humanity. Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite stars as a historian who "looks back" on real footage from 2008 to try to answer the question, "why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance?"
gregladen | September 15, 2009Culture Dish has been sterile for a while, but now it's back in the swing of things! Rebecca Skloot indicates that she'll be blogging the later phases of the publication of her book.
I can't wait to read this book. Years ago, I found out about Henrietta Lacks and I thought it was one of the most interesting science stories I'd ever heard. It was so interesting that I kept telling people about it, but the tale is so strange that few would believe me. So finally, I stopped telling people. Now, with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks coming on line in a few months, this will all…
gregladen | September 15, 2009There is no racism in America. People are not excluded from jobs or not allowed admission to a school because of the color of the skin. The whole racism thing is over, solved, kaput, no longer an issue. You'all can go home now. Especially if you live in Texas and/or are concerned with Social Studies curriculum. ...
Peter Morrison is on a Texas State Board of Education panel set up to help revise state standards in Social Studies And he's trying to do a lot of work in this position. He's trying to edumicate us all on how racism is pretty much passe, and at the same time, he's trying to…
gregladen | September 15, 2009Most Americans are seriously pissed at Joe Wilson's "YOU LIE" blather.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans interviewed in the Sept. 11-13 USA Today/Gallup poll say they oppose what Wilson did, while 21% say they support it.
Over half of those asked claimed to follow the story somewhat to very closely.
Not surprisingly, there were party differences in people's opinion, but not to the degree one might expect. (Remember, these are people being asked in a poll, not showing up at a rally and being featured on TV).
For Republicans, the break down was 39:52 support:oppose
For Democrats, the break…
gregladen | September 15, 2009Can we be done with questioning if there is racism, done with respecting the religion, done with worshiping the firearms, and can we start calling out the ignorance?
On 9.12.2009, we went to Washington DC to document the Tea Party protests against, well, a lot of things, including health insurance reform, the IRS, abortion, global warming, and our "socialist/communist/fascist/Nazi/Muslim " president, Barack Obama. Some of them called for a return to McCarthyism, while others called for Glenn Beck to run for office--indeed, it seemed the only thing that everyone agreed on was Fox News.
gregladen | September 14, 2009You all know who Kanye West is. Personally, I had never heard of the man until yesterday afternoon. But then, until yesterday afternoon I thought MTV was a cable television network that played music videos, so what do I know. But never mind that. We're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about Kanye West...
In 2006, West appeared on the front cover of Rolling Stone as Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. I'm sure a lot of Christians thought he was an asshole for doing that. But just as his very in-your-face efforts to speak out against homophobia in hip hop, he was not afraid to…
gregladen | September 14, 200926 years ago, more or less, I was a graduate student and beginning a teaching career, but short of cash. I remember an opportunity arose for me to make some money programming. I thought, "OK, I can make some money in this computer biz, and use that to cover doing what I really want to do, research and teaching."
[A repost: Check out the comments on last year's post.]
Just around that time, as I remember, I saw a long haired bearded guy from MIT being interviewed on TV, talking about free software, and how coding software was his art, his love, is vocation, and that he did things like…