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Impression

Ghost owl. Dustprint on glass of an Eastern screech-owl, Megascops asio. Photograph appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Dave Rintoul. Click image for larger view in its own window. Dave writes; The image is a dustprint that an Eastern Screech-owl left on a sliding glass door. The bird was pursuing a moth (the dustprint of which is actually visible in the image) and smacked into the door. I presume that the components of this image, like those of the Shroud of Turin, might be mysterious, but I hypothesize that it is dust, or feather dust. At any rate, the owl was…

iPod iChing - kHz pulsar?

Wet and windy friday, and we ask the Mighty One a sexy topical question: is XTE J1739-285 really spinning at 1122 Hz? Whoosh goes the randomizer. Whoosh. The Covering: Long Time Gone - Dixie Chick The Crossing: We Do What We Can - Sheryl Crowe The Crown: Catch - The Cure The Root: Litirnir - Edda Backman The Past: Knights of the Round Table - Monty Python The Future: Everyday I Write the Book - Elvis Costello The Questioner: Add It Up - Violent Femmes The House: Stína Og Brúðan Hennar - Helga Möller The Inside: Ghost Town - Specials The Outcome: Highway Patrolman - Dar Williams So that's…

Extreme Solar Systems IV: planetary snippets

Still at the Extreme Solar Systems conference in Santorini where it has cooled off a bit. One of the locals assures me this is the worst since the great heat wave of 1916 and that I should come back in october... must make the most of this once-per-century opportunity. So, more planet news... There are a couple of more transiting planets in the pipeline - sounds like there is another hot Neptune in the pipeline, and I hear the TrES group found another bloated (1.7 Jovian radii?!) hot Jupiter which was first announced at another meeting a week or two ago. The COROT people are being very coy…

How do I love thee SQL? Let me COUNT the ways. Number 1...

I love the way you show me secret things. All I do is type: Select * from name_of_a_table And you share everything with me. Without you, my vision is obscured, and all I see is the display on the page. In fact, this was the push that finally made me decide to learn SQL. In our bacterial metagenomics experiment, I realized that my students could use FinchTV to enter their blast results into our iFinch database. That was cool, but with the web interface, we could only view one result at a time. On the other hand, if we use the right SQL query in the iFinch query window, we can see…

cut off their goolies

apropos nothing - what sort of circumstances hypothetically trigger university disciplinary investigations? Universities have rules that are both an improper subset of and a superset of community laws. Generally, universities are subordinate to the laws of the jurisdiction they are in, although there are historical exemptions. Further, universities are not actually obliged to discipline their members, whether students or faculty, merely because of legal convictions, although in practise they often do. Issues of concern to the university include internal safety - conduct that threatens the…

seizure of assets

there was a legal case in Iceland a few years ago, it was an convoluted property rights case, can't remember the details, but it involved who had ownership when there was delivery but no payment nor explicit assumption of ownership and then a third party intercedes anyway, the interesting thing about the case, is that it was decided on precedent case law, from a case from about 1000 years earlier having a continuous constitutional and common law with an extended history can be quite enabling the Vikings were mostly traders, rather than raiders, and property rights were quite important,…

Mystery Bird: Pine Siskin, Carduelis pinus

tags: Pine Siskin, Carduelis pinus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Pine Siskin, Carduelis pinus, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2008 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2008:04:16 08:46:29 Exposure Time: 1/319 F-Number: 5.60 ISO: 320 Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Start at the back, start at the back! We see a short-tailed bird with a long wingtip, and both wing and tail show yellow: simple feather edgings in the wing, but a significant basal patch in the tail. Off the…

Insect Cells Can Grow Influenza Vaccine

One of the biggest challenges to producing flu vaccine lies in the fact that so far, scientists have had to grow it in hens' eggs. Not only is this process cumbersome and slow, but it is often difficult to get the vaccine to grow as one wishes, and further, each egg only yields enough of the flu virus to make a single dose of vaccine. Additionally, problems could potentially be encountered if the bird flu epidemic spreads to those very flocks that provide eggs that produce the vaccine. Clearly, an alternative to hens' eggs was necessary. "When you need hundreds of millions of fertilized eggs…

George Bush Is A Whore

This worthless jackass claims to be my president. George Bush; a hypocrite? Well, I am shocked, simply shocked, I tell you. Well, okay, all sarcasm aside, I am very surprised to hear that the politically conservative George Bush, who demands mindless and unquestioning loyalty from his minions, has shown his true colors by betraying all those people who supported him throughout his entire political career: political conservatives. Today, Bush denied California state's bid to regulate greenhouse gas emissions produced by all new automobiles that are sold there -- a move that flies in the…

My Parrot Has A Hobby

tags: Orpheus, hawk-headed parrot, red-fan parrot, Deroptyus accipitrinus accipitrinus, photography, parrots, pets Orpheus, a six-month-old red-fan (hawk-headed) parrot, Deroptyus a. accipitrinus, who lives with me. (flash, ISO, no zoom). Image: GrrlScientist 2008. I managed to capture a few pictures of Orpheus last night which I would have shared with you then, except that my wifi connection disappeared (boo!), so I had to wait until tonight. This picture, like all of the pics I captured last night, are not very good because my parrots have gotten wise to the ways of photography and have…

The consequences of the erosion of critical thinking

Colleen Leduc has an autistic child named Victoria who is enrolled in a public school. She recently got a terrifying phone call — her daughter was being sexually abused. We parents know well the fear and worry a threat to our children can cause, and Leduc was receiving an urgent, frantic phone call from school officials telling her that her daughter was being victimized in the worst way. So she rushes in to this little meeting. "The teacher looked and me and said: 'We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the…

TAM London, Sunday

I type this during the last act of TAM London, Alan Moore, who is being gnomic in a basso north English working-class accent. Interesting character, a little perversely irrational ("I worship a 2nd century snake goddess") while leaving no doubt that he's keen as a whip. The day began with a talk by Randi where I learned that he was friends with Richard Feynman! I knew that though my acquaintance with the Amazing One I'm only two steps from Alice Cooper, but Feynman as well - wow! Science writer Marcus Chown then gave us his ten most mind-boggling physics facts. Good stuff! He could have…

The Glossies Tell Me I'm Not A Man

I've felt largely like an outsider since I was a kid, but these days I rarely experience the full force of it except when I visit a news agent's and confront the glossy magazines. They carry hundreds of titles. And at a pinch I can maybe find one or two that might interest me mildly. I don't expect to find much of interest in the ladies section. The non-gendered mags are pretty few, and it doesn't really matter to me that I don't give a shit about interior decoration or design or antiques. What gets to me is the message the men's section broadcasts to me. "This is what interests men. If none…

TAM London, Sunday

I forgot to mention the variety show on Saturday night. It was headlined by comedian Robin Ince (you may have seen his MAGIC MAN DUNNIT clip) and offered a lot of funny and musical and skeptical and cynical acts of high standard. I was particularly impressed by high-brow rapper Baba Brinkman. Not only is he witty and knowledgeable, he also made me feel that hmm, rapping really can involve a lot of technical mastery. When I told him I like him not rapping about bitches and bling, he replied, "But I do, in other bits of my Darwin rhymes. I say that bling is peacock feathers evolved by sexual…

Bayesian stuff for the completely incompetent

Having had a couple of comments on this, I realise that some of the required background on Bayesian statistics is waaaay over some peoples heads. This is probably no fault of theirs. Let me make some faint attempt at explanation, and James can correct me as needed, and doubtless Lubos will leap in if I leave him an opening. The issue (at least in this context) is the updating of "prior" information in the light of new information. Prior information means (at least nominally) what you knew about, let us say, the climate sensitivity S before you tried to make any plausible estimates of it. If…

A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming

By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Paul K. Driessen, Esq., Ross McKitrick, Ph.D., and Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D. I've never heard of 1 & 2, but given 3 & 4 its not hard to guess what its going to be like. And indeed, it doesn't disappoint. Its yet another septic document which would be far better off saying less. Specifically, it wastes its time on the is-GW-anthro attribution question, and the is-there-a-consensus question, when it should be spending its time on the more interesting will-the-effects-be-bad. So, it starts by quibbling whether the TAR says that current warming is anthro. Since…

Science Is Tedious

There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard post over the last several days, and I've been trying to come up with something to say about them. In particular, Steinn points out that science is easier than digging ditches, while in comments, "revere" of Effect Measure says that science is tedious, just like digging ditches. Well, OK, that's flippant-- what he really said was: The dirty secret we don't teach our students is that most real research is tedious, time consuming and routine, just like any other kind of work. Whether you think it's hard or the ride of a lifetime is…

More trash from Watts

Well, so what's new with that, I hear you say? And indeed, not much is the answer. But its a saturday night so some knock-about fun is in order. So, Watts, along with most of the septic blogosphere, was all over An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula by Zunli Lua et al.. Not because they care about the science, but because the abstract says This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula. In septic-world, it is very important that the MWP and LIA be global, so that instantly…

Rowing and Rugby

In which I yet again abuse science blogs to discuss matters of little import to general readers. But it's my blog, so there. The rowing was the Head to Head, which involves rowing the 2 km form the Railway bridge to the Motorway bridge, spinning, and then rowing back. You get a rest of ~20 mins while the division comes through, or maybe more, I wasn't timing it. Our time turns out to be a bit rubbish but we weren't that bad. The first leg, which is downstream, was OK; the second, against the stream and therefore slower, we stuffed up somewhat with poor technique and a few mini-crabs; the…

Climatologists the next geologists?

Over the last decade or so, hard rock geologists have done rather poorly in science, because they have become unfashionable, and are overshadowed by the popularity of climate change. Some of them become bitter and twisted and prominent septics. Which brings me on to Copenhagen Congress: why the biased reporting? from Nurture, which reports on Mike Hulme's letter to Science complaining about the reporting of the Copenhagen conference: Hulme et al. point out that the dominant mode of media reporting after the event was of impending doom which is no great surprise, because that was what the…

Climate scientists: it's time for 'Plan B'?

So says the Independent. The substance seems to be Just over half - 54 per cent - of the 80 international specialists in climate science who took part in our survey agreed that the situation is now so dire that we need a backup plan that involves the artificial manipulation of the global climate to counter the effects of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. About 35 per cent of respondents disagreed with the need for a "plan B", arguing that it would distract from the main objective of cutting CO2 emissions, with the remaining 11 per cent saying that they did not know whether a…

193-197/366: March Meeting

I didn't take the DSLR to March Meeting with me, but I did throw a point-and-shoot in my bag. A few of these are still just cell-phone snapshots, because I didn't have the bag with me all the time. 193/366: Stadium View When I checked into the hotel, they told me I had a "stadium view" room on the sixth floor. I was in a hurry to get to a social event, so I didn't really look that night, but they were right: Football and baseball stadiums in downtown Baltimore, from my hotel room. 194/366: Convention hall The primary purpose of the trip was, of course, to attend the March Meeting, and that…

GPA's Are Idiotic

I was thinking about something only tangentially related to grading, when it struck me that the way we go about generating student grade point averages is the kind of mind-bogglingly stupid system that requires lots of smart people working together to produce. Two very different groups of smart people, with very different ways of looking at the world. As a scientist, the starting point for assigning grades is generally a set of scores on a bunch of individual assessments. These are generally combined to form some sort of weighted average, which can be expressed as something like a percentage…

Celebrities and Attention Police

While I'm running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder's thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss's defense of same) and Megan Garber's piece on "attention policing", spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet by storm. Like Sabine, I'm generally in favor of the idea of science celebrities, though as someone whose books are found on shelves between Lawrence Krauss's and Neil deGrasse Tyson's, there's no small amount of self-interest in that.…

Advent Calendar of Science Stories 8: The First GMO

This entry doesn't have a fictionalized story both because I'm on vacation, and because I don't think there's a single dramatic turning point in this particular story. It's probably one of the most impressive human accomplishments of the last umpteen thousand years, though, and definitely deserves a place in any rundown of wonders of science. I'm speaking, of course, of corn. To a modern American, of course, corn (or "maize" if you want to sound European) doesn't seem especially impressive or scientific, but it ranks as a great accomplishment because of where it came from. Which, as far as we…

Close Call: Amtrak Train May Have Nearly Hit Oil Train

Oil train derailments are becoming more common, mainly because of the very large number of oil trains, often with over 100 tank cars, taking oil out of the Bakken fields and bringing it to coastal refineries or storage facilities. You are certainly aware of the recent Amtrak derailment in Pennsylvania. From Reuters: An Amtrak train in Philadelphia was traveling at more than 100 miles per hour, over twice the speed limit, when it entered a curve in the tracks and derailed, killing seven people and injuring more than 200, federal investigators said on Wednesday. Now, Patrick Kerkstra at…

That asteroid did kinda hit the Earth after all! Maybe.

Remember that asteroid that was supposed to pass harmlessly by the Earth on Sunday? Well, things didn't go exactly as planned... Apparently, a meteor hit Nicaragua late Saturday night, forming a 12 meter wide crater. This would be a small chunk to make a crater that little. It has not been confirmed yet, but there is a strong possibility that this meteor was associated with 2014 RC. NPR quotes AP which quotes a Nicaraguan government official as saying the meteor "appears to have come off an asteroid that was passing close to Earth." NPR also quotes the BBC which quotes another astronomer…

The Wall Street Journal Is A Rag

But I'm sure you already knew that. The Wall Street Journal is so far behind the curve when it comes to the science of climate change, and so deep in the pockets of the oil industry, that the following is now true: If you are in business or industry, and want to keep track of important news about markets and other important things, don't bother with the Wall Street Journal. You no longer need it for the stock info (that's on your smart phone). The editorial and analysis, and I assume the reporting, from the WSJ is so badly tainted and decades behind the times that the newspaper as a whole has…

Climate Signals: Excellent new resource

Weather is climate here and now, and climate is weather over the long term. Climate is the large scale process of movement of air and water, and changes in the properties of air and water, on and near the surface of the Earth, the atmosphere, oceans, and ice fields respond to the imbalance of heat -- with more of it near the equator and less of it at the poles -- as the world literally turns. Weather is the local, temporal, and personally observable sign of that climate system. Climate is meaning and weather is the semiotic process by which we understand that meaning. OK, perhaps I've gone…

Why Bible Courses Can't Work

I'm one of those folks who thinks that courses in comparative religion, or about the bible as literature, can be a valuable thing. Unfortunately, they just don't work in the real world. There's really only two ways to teach such a course. You either teach that the Bible is absolutely true (in which case you violate the first amendment's establishment clause) or you teach about the Bible as you would any other book, by examining the historical context, the archaeological evidence concerning the events discussed, the accuracy of its descriptions, and so forth (and there you run into objections…

Watching Mel Gibson Movies

Several people have responded to my post about Mel Gibson by saying that they'll never see his movies again. I have to confess to being baffled by that. I don't get it when those on the right do it and I don't get it when the left does it either. When those on the right freaked out about the Dixie Chicks because they criticized the president ("on foreign soil", they always add, as though that is the least bit relevant - does the validity of a criticism change as it crosses a border?) and started burning their records and boycotting their concerts, I frankly thought they were acting like…

Michigan Next?

The Detroit Free Press has a report on the Dover decision that includes this tidbit: The next court test on whether public schoolchildren can be taught that some intelligent force set the universe in motion could move to Michigan now that a federal judge has barred a Pennsylvania district from teaching intelligent design... In Michigan, the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor has threatened to sue Gull Lake Community Schools in the community of Richland for refusing to allow two middle school science teachers to teach intelligent design. Representatives from the center have said they are also…

A Picture of Dorian Storm

Dorian is a tropical storm that formed in the eastern tropical Atlantic ago. Dorian is probably going to head almost straight west-northwest and menace the vicinity north of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. This is going to take some time. By the end of the weekend, Dorian will be encountering islands in the northeastern Caribbean as a topical storm, most likely. The chance of Dorian remaining as a storm (as opposed to regressing to a depression) or strengthening from storm to hurricane is not at all large. But, unlike some others storms we've seen lately, Dorian seems to gain a little…

Quebec Derailment Fire/Explosion Visible from Space

Nasa Earth Observatory has a photograph of the recent derailment of a train of Bakken Crude burning and/or exploding in a small town in Quebec. The image "was acquired at 6:59 GMT (2:59 a.m. local time) on July 6 by the instrument’s “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, auroras, fires, and reflected moonlight. The image on the left, shown for comparison, was acquired by the same instrument on July 4, before the derailment. Light sources are not as crisp in the July 6…

Climate Change Denialism

There are two very important posts out there that I'd like to make you aware of related to climate change denialism. Here's the teasers, please click through and read them. If you like them, tweet them! First, from The Scientist, an opinion piece by Michael Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines: Life as a Target: Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role. As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I…

At the end of his rope: The execution of William Williams

Minnesota has three things you may have heard about: Cold weather, “Minnesota Nice,” and a vigorous training program in Passive Aggressive Behavior (PAB). Unless you know about things, you probably didn’t know any of that.1 The part about the cold weather is neither here nor there with Global Warming causing it to go away. The latter two are interrelated and complex, and can only be understood through a great deal of analysis. And, since we don’t have time to put everyone in the state into Freudian therapy, I’ll just give an example. This week we celebrate Darwin’s Birthday, and Abe Lincoln’s…

Creationism means never having to admit you know nothing, but you still get to pretend to be an expert

The core value of creation science is dishonesty. I was reminded of this yet again by an account by Todd Feeley of a RATE conference. RATE means "Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth", and they are an excuse for creationist frauds to get together and spout off misleading pseudoscientific babble to a gullible audience. There's always trouble when someone who is not gullible and actually knows something about a subject attends, as in this case. Feeley asks the organizer a question: I asked why no recognized experts on radiometric dating were invited to participate in the conference, given…

Feral Cats as Invasive Species

The ranger stood on the dirt road, facing south, and the rest of us, scattered about the parked safari truck, facing north and paying close attention to what she was saying. The sun was slipping quickly below the red sand dunes to our west, and the day’s warm breeze was rapidly changing to a chill wind. She talked about what we might see after we remounted the safari truck, which we had just driven out of the campground at the southern end of Kgalgadi Transfrontier Park, where we were staying in the South African camp, just across from the Botswana camp. This would be a night drive, cold,…

Climate Change Things: Two items of interest

First, as I've mentioned before, there is a Reddit "As Me Anything" (AMA) going on right now with Stephan Lewandowsky, and if you are into Reddit AMA's and climate change related issues you should check it out. Lewandowsky is a co-author of the famous Frontiers Retracted paper, though the subjects being discussed at the AMA range far beyond that particular issue. Second, there is new paper out that looks very interesting. I'm still trying to absorb it and I've asked the author for some clarifications on some issues, but already the Global Warming Deialosphere is all over it, so it must have…

Ruh Roh. A crazy nutbag is saying scary things to me. Again.

Climate change denialism has it's Dave Mabus, and his name is Markus Fitzhenry. I just got this note slipped under my eDoor. You made a big mistake, lying about me. MEMBERS There is enlightenment coming, it will be a cleansing wind throughout academia. This is just the tip of an iceberg, that is going to sink, the titanic of AGW, and all those on board. They are of the dark ages. Ask David Evans, see his expose at Jo Nova science blog (au). Go to Tallbloke (uk). Go to Judith Curry (com). The greatest fear I have is polluted minds around me. What have we become, men, who give their minds to…

Time magazine on politics & science

This is obviously more Chris's area more than it is mine, but Time's cover story this week is on, essentially, the Republican war on science (the actual "war," not Chris's book of the same title). Boehlert [Republican chairman of the House Science Committee] does not see a larger problem of Administration meddling ... And he noted that politics and science have never had an easy, hands-off relationship in Washington. "This is a town where people like to say they're for science-based decision making, until the scientific consensus leads to a politically inconvenient conclusion. Then they…

Betting on climate change?

The betting on climate change thing seems to have gone rather quiet. This post is prompted by a comment posted to an old entry on my old blog Probably not betting on climate with Lubos Motl (that post is still worth reading, I think, for the attempt to calculate what are "fair odds". In some email discussion afterwards, I think I discovered that there isn't really a good answer to that question). But if you haven't seen the circuit before, look at James A's stuff and Brian Schmidt's. That last post offers a list of bets that GS is prepared to take. My anonymus commenter said: I have been…

Global warming and extremes

We had a talk at work today by a chap (eminent mathematician I think) about looking at the distribution of extremes in the temperature record and trying to say something about detection. The problem is that extremes are statistically rather unstable and all he could say was that he didn't detect GW; he didn't appear to understand that all that means is that his method isn't very powerful... [Update: JF points to http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0509088 which is the paper] And when I say global, actually he was looking at Philadelphia, daily data, last 125 years. He pretty well went out of his…

Potential new anti-HIV therapy: SEEK AND DESTROY!

Fun! I like this new idea! Targeted Cytotoxic Therapy Kills Persisting HIV Infected Cells During ART I havent talked about 'scFv' on ERV yet, but theyre very handy tools scientists are taking advantage of more and more these days. 'scFv's are single-chain variable fragments... not an overly useful name, but what they are are basically the recognition domain of an antibody. Normally the recognition portion of an antibody (what says 'stick to HIV!' or 'stick to influenza!') is made up of the variable regions of two parts of the antibody-- the Heavy and Light chain. An scFv turns that…

Current Archaeology 232

Current Archaeology's July issue offers a lot of good reading, of which I particularly like the stories on human origins (see below) and garden archaeology at Kenilworth Castle. But I have two complaints. First point of criticism. The editors of CA have this weird habit of doing "media tie-ins" without any clear indication of authorship. In the past three issues were excerpts from a forthcoming book by Barry Cunliffe. They weren't billed as written by Cunliffe. Instead you got the impression that a nameless writer had read his book manuscript and paraphrased it for the magazine. "Cunliffe…

Where Am I Supposed To Publish?

Another career whine. Applying for academic jobs that are invariably given to people who are much older than me, I've come across a frustrating conundrum. In Scandyland, it takes about seven months from the application deadline to decide who gets an academic job. This is because the selection process is guided by two or three external referees. The department doesn't get to choose the person they want, but they can pretty much choose the referees, and so influence whether they'll be likely to get e.g. an empiricist or a theoretician. Now, one of the most important assets an academic can…

Names of the Close Horizon

Looking at a map of Stockholm's suburbs, you find a swarm of place names denoting housing areas. The housing is almost entirely 20th century. But many of the names go back a thousand years or more. Today they're all just suburbs. But not so long ago, all of these names were part of a hierarchical nomenclature, a ladder of names. The names on the ladder's top rung denoted parishes and were used throughout the county. On the second rung down were the names of farmsteads, used among the surrounding few parishes, and among wayfarers in cases where a farmstead happened to be located on a major…

Comments elsewhere, part III

Like its illustrious forebears comments elsewhere and part II. However, rather differently like, in that I want to point to some positives before falling back into snarking. I've commented at wottsupwiththatblog and hotwhopper about Li et al.. It is, I think, a flawed paper but not as badly flawed as the denialists reporting of it which is, as you'd expect, very badly flawed. More of that anon. Also at wotts was a discussion of the "green surcharge" on UK energy bills. Some useful references and clarifications make their way into the comments; VB has some nice refs. Over at ScottishSceptic:…

Sandefur Reviews Barnett

Timothy Sandefur has published a review of Randy Barnett's book Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. The review is called The Normality of Freedom, and that is a good title. While he has some criticisms of what the book lacks, I think he captures the essence of the importance of Barnett's views here: [T]he presumption of liberty, he writes, flows necessarily from the existence of inalienable rights. If rights preexist the state, then the government must always bear the burden of proving the necessity of its acts which limit or abridge those rights; if the government…

The Real Idiot of the Month

I should have learned my lesson about naming an Idiot of the Month too early in the month. In America, just when you think you've found the bottom of the barrell, you discover that it's barrells all the way down. Joseph Swank, move over. You've been out-moroned by Rep. Gerald Allen, a state Congressman from Alabama. In a move that would make George Wallace smile, Allen has proposed a bill that would ban any and all books that have gay characters in them from public libraries, in order to protect children from "the homosexual agenda": Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay…