gregladen | April 23, 2013Every disaster in the US has at least three Congressional representatives associated with it (2 Senators, one House rep). Those representatives have at least two roles: 1) Causing/avoiding the disaster or making it less/more bad, to begin with, by way of their efforts in congress; and 2) Helping or not helping once the disaster happens.
The three representatives for the West Texas disaster, in which scores (apparently) were killed, helped to make the disaster happen by, among them, failing to support OSHA or voting against OSHA funding. This is part of the reason that the plant has not been…
gregladen | April 23, 2013Andy Lee Robinson's latest visualo-info-graphico-depiction of the loss of Arctic Sea Ice:
gregladen | April 21, 2013Well, not everybody. First lets talk about some losers. Someday a brave journalist will ask the FBI why they had one of the suspects in sight a couple of years ago but this still happened. Chances are there is a very good answer and we should not be mad at the FBI for this, but at the moment, even asking the question will get people screaming at you. Someday a brave journalist will work out the details of how the State and Boston Police managed to miss the guy hiding in the boat a short distance form their dragnet. Chances are there is a very good reason for this, and we should not be mad…
gregladen | April 20, 2013All human hunter-gatherer groups that have been studied incorporate meat in their diets. Studies have shown that the total dietary contribution of meat varies a great deal, and seems to increase with latitude so that foragers in subarctic and arctic regions eat a lot of meat while those living near the equator eat less. It is probably true that tropical and subtropical foragers obtain more of their calories from plants than from meat over any reasonable amount of time. The meat consists primarily of mammals for most groups, but fish, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates can reach high…
gregladen | April 18, 2013One of these days I'll tell you the story of when I was almost killed permanently by sink hole. I'll probably have to package that story with the time I was buried alive in a trench (for symmetry). These things happen to archaeologists. Not as often as getting pinned down by gunfire, or running out of beer, or other things much more important than the earth sucking you into itself, but they do happen. As a matter of fact, after years of training and a number of highly educational on-trial-learning type events, I'm always noticing sink holes. They are way, way more common than you would think…
gregladen | April 18, 2013So ...
... If you aren't familiar with Jill Stanek, she's just an awful anti-choicer. She thinks if you murder a doctor who performs abortions, it's wrong, but not so wrong that you deserve to be sent to PRISON! That's for like, bad people, and stuff! ... 1. The man who murdered Dr. Tiller "[did] not get [his] fair day in court." 2. The death penalty is okay and should be applied to doctors who perform abortions.)...
My friend Sarah has some things to say about all of this. CLICK HERE NAO!
gregladen | April 18, 2013The FBI has released an electronic wanted poster for you to look at. Somebody knows these people. Do you? You know what to do:
Wanted by the FBI: Boston Marathon Suspects
(click on the picture of the FBI web site to go through to the FBI web site)
Here's an enhanced video of the scene:
One of the guys might be wearing THIS HAT.
gregladen | April 18, 2013Michele Bachmann may be in some serious trouble.
For starters, it seems she may have used presidential campaign staff to support her book tour during her unsuccessful bid for the presidency last year. The Star Tribune reported on April 17th that
Congressional ethics investigators are examining whether top staffers in Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign played an improper role in the 2011 tour to promote her personal memoir, two former Bachmann aides have told the Star Tribune.
Federal election rules, as well as House ethics rules, prohibit the use of campaign funds to promote or…
gregladen | April 18, 2013The following video shows remarks by various individuals including President Obama on the shameful behavior of the US Senate in relation to a bill increasing the scope of background checks on individuals who plan to purchase firearms in the United States.
Go HERE to pick up a nice Facebook Meme and engage in other social networking regarding this issue.
gregladen | April 17, 2013Hopkins High School is one of the top public schools in Minnesota, which prides itself, though not always with justification, as having excellent public schools. Hopkins is in an "outer ring" suburb of the Twin Cities. This is a set of bedroom communities developed over the last several decades as well-to-do city folk moved out of the urban core, and American immigrants from the coasts and elsewhere moved to the Twin Cities during periods of economic prosperity and growth. These suburbs and their schools are relatively white and relatively privileged. We see racist things in these places…
gregladen | April 16, 2013We watch these events unfold through a veil of tears. And over time, it only gets worse as we learn the identities of some of the victims, and learn of the horrors of this particular kind of bomb attack. We wonder if the bomber knew that few would die but many would lose their legs, or if families of living vibrant people, standing together to watch other family members finish their run for some worthy cause, would be turned into a collection of news stories about the dead and the maimed. We also wonder why this target was chosen. Timothy McVeigh attacked a Federal office building to…
gregladen | April 16, 2013"Denialism on a Large Scale" Greg Laden on Atheists Talk #214, April 14, 2013
I was interviewed on Minnesota Atheists Talk Radio about climate change and climate change denialism last Sunday AM. Since you were in church, I'm sure you missed it! But you can catch the podcast HERE.
gregladen | April 16, 2013Years ago it was pointed out by somebody, probably Tinbergen or Lack or Wynn-Edwards or one of the other great bird-savvy ethologists of the day, that young Pelicans would blackmail their parents by biting their own wings, a very self defeating activity for a bird with a huge and powerful beak. “If you don’t feed me right way, I’m taking off this wing and your reproductive success is done!” they seemed to be saying.
More recently a study of Babblers in South Africa may have demonstrated a similar kind of extortion....
Read the rest of my monthly contribution to 10,000 birds HERE.
The rest of…
gregladen | April 15, 2013The book Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories has a mention in Publisher's Weekly:
While Prometheus Books is the grandfather of publishing atheism books, there are two upstarts, another indication of the category’s strength. The newest is Freethought House, founded in 2011 and debuting last August with Atheist Voices of Minnesota edited by the press’s publisher, Bill Lehto. He says the house plans to publish up to four atheism titles a year, the next being Deliverance at Hand! by James Zimmerman (2013), a memoir by the former Jehovah’s Witness. Da Capo Press has…
gregladen | April 15, 2013Apparently, the women have jugs.
No, seriously. In a certain archaeological culture known from the vicinity of Prague, male and female burials are distinguished by the mode of burial and the artifacts. The males tend to be buried with their heads towards the west and along with various weapons. Females, on the other hand, tend to be buried with their heads towards the east and surrounded by domestic jugs.
This is interesting for many reasons (to an archaeologist, at least) but even more interesting is the possible discovery of a transgendered person's burial. This is a male skelton…
gregladen | April 15, 2013Why is it snowing so much in the Northern US States this Spring? Two words: Global Warming. Let me ‘splain.
Weather is all about air and moisture. The distribution of air is uneven, with some places having more air in big piles, other places having less air, into which the extra air from the big piles of air tends to spill. The big piles form because the surface beneath is relatively warm, causing the air to expand more than in adjoining areas. As air falls off these giant mounds of seeming nothingness, it forms low pressure systems that consist of swirling moving masses, made up of air of…
gregladen | April 15, 2013Once again, the winged monkeys of climate change denialim are writing fake, stupid, made up an absurd reviews of Michael Man's book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines on Amazon.com.
If you've read the book and like it and have not written a review of it on Amazon, please go do so! Help a scientist out.
Thank you very much.