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The Last Eight Years of Governance in a Diplomatic Nutshell

I think this description by a former ambassador of hiring practices in the State Department during the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain explains so much about the last eight years (italics mine): "YOU know you have arrived when you get interviewed by the 29-year-old instead of the 22-year-old," the 57-year-old foreign service officer said to me with a laugh. It was late 2005, and this three-time ambassador had just been interviewed for a top post at the Department of State. Her interviewer was part of a large corps of 20-somethings -- some were in their early 30s -- who ran the Office of…

ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 2: Swag, Science comedy and #ihuggedbora

A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the programming of the recent ScienceOnline 2011 conference. In this post I like to do some quick takes on some of the more pleasurable aspects of the conference. Some random observations: Amazing organization. What more can be said about Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker and all the rest of the great people they've attracted to the ScienceOnline cause? Not much. They all did an amazing job. Bravo! And yes, #ihuggedbora! My Librarian Superpower. The highlight of the Book Fair on Friday night was getting to pick one of the wrapped books from one of…

Holiday fun: peer reviewing

Did you not finish all your papers and grants before the holidays? Do you still have papers to review? Dont be discouraged, Twisted Bacteria has posted humorous quotes to cheer you up. Every December, the journal Environmental Microbiology publishes a collection of quotes made by peer reviewers while assessing manuscripts submitted to the journal. Some of them are hilarious! I am extracting a few of them from the last two years, but I recommend reading them all! Here you go: Desperate referees: This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author's email ID so…

Montgomery College Chemistry Professor Selected for USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty Program

Shout out to Montgomery College online for the article on Nifty Fifty Speaker Susan Bontems. Thanks for helping get the word out about the USA Science and Engineering Festival. The USA Science and Engineering Festival selected Montgomery College Professor Susan Bontems and 49 other scientists to visit Washington, D.C.-area middle and high schools, October 10-24, 2010, to ignite a passion for science and engineering in students. Professor Bontems was named the 2009 Maryland Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and…

YouTube and pandemic flu

An influenza pandemic will have many casualties, but truthfully, it never occurred to me YouTube might be one of them: Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly run aground as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic. Such a surge would almost certainly prompt calls to restrict or prioritize traffic, such as blocking video transmissions wherever possible,…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bats Prey On Nocturnally Migrating Songbirds: It was until now believed that nocturnally migrating songbirds, while venturing into the unfamiliar night sky for accomplishing their long, challenging trans-continental migrations, could at least release anti-predator vigilance thanks to the concealment of darkness. A new study by Spanish and Swiss scientists -- published this week in PLoS ONE -- shows that migration at night is not without predation risk for passerines. New DNA Method Helps Explain Extinction Of Woolly Mammoth, Other Ice Age Mammals: What caused the extinction of the woolly…

Things Forthcoming!

I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now (I'm always doing a bunch of stuff, actually) that I thought I'd mention here. First, on Monday March 21, at 5:30 I'll be at the first Unitarian Universalist Society in Albany talking to Congressman Paul Tonko about peak oil, climate change and regional preparedness in an event put on by Capital District Transition. It ought to be interesting! Drop me an email if you have suggestions for questions you'd like me to put to Congressman Tonko. Second, on April 9 at 7pm, I'll be at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY, talking about food, energy…

Lindau Nobel conference - Tuesday afternoon and dinner

Today was a busy day. I was somewhat surprised at how shy people are of the little Flip camera - so much worry about the future career prospects if one does something seemingly 'unprofessional' like say a couple of words about one's research for the Lindau YouTube channel and my blog. But see the two interviews below, and I got a few more promise to do it tomorrow. I bet Nobel Laureates will be easier to persuade than the young researchers! In the afternoon, although it was very hot, I put on my shirt and tie (instead of my 'Ida' t-shirt) for the Open Access panel which I shared with Sir…

Comments on the Edwards interview go here...

In a few minutes, I will post the interview with Sen. John Edwards on this blog. All the questions are related to science (and yes, it was not easy to cut down the number of questions and the length of each question - there is so much to ask) so they should be of interest to the readers of this blog. As I am not a journalist or an analyst who needs to preserve an appearance of 'balance', I have always been unabashedly open about my support for John Edwards, first in 1998 when he ran for the Senate (that was the first election I could vote in after becoming a US citizen), then in 2003/04 when…

Bicycling in China, the Twin Cities, and the Senate

Bicycling has been in the news a lot this week. E&E News reports that China is trying to get people back onto bicycles in an attempt to address traffic problems. The city of Zhongshan has launched a bike-sharing system with 4,000 bikes; Hangzhou and Shanghai have systems with 50,000 and 19,000 bikes, respectively. Reporter Coco Liu contrasts these figures to the US's largest bike-sharing program: DC's, with 1,100 bikes. (Read my earlier post on Capital Bikeshare here.) Even with such relatively large systems, though, demand can quickly outstrip supply, as when a train full of homeward-…

How To Plot A Coordinate Dataset In Google Maps

As an archaeologist I often need to plot coordinates on maps and plans. At every scale, really: from individual finds on the plan of an excavation trench to the distribution of something across Europe. Just dots of varying shapes and colours on various background maps. Most often, it's GPS data from field walking and metal detecting. My colleagues in contract archaeology and academe use ArcInfo for these things, but I've never had incentive or opportunity to learn to use it. Also, once you know the software, you still need a map to plot stuff on, and those are expensive. So I've been…

Go On Till You Come to the End; Then Stop

ScienceBlogs is coming to an end. I don't know that there was ever a really official announcement of this, but the bloggers got email a while back letting us know that the site will be closing down. I've been absolutely getting crushed between work and the book-in-progress and getting Charlie the pupper, but I did manage to export and re-import the content to an archive site back on steelypips.org. (The theme there is an awful default WordPress one, but I'm too slammed with work to make it look better; the point is just to have an online archive for the temporary redirects to work with.) I'm…

Links for 2010-06-05

IPN announces Ninth Annual Bastiat Prize Competition | International Policy Network "For the ninth year, International Policy Network (IPN) is accepting submissions for its annual Bastiat Prize for Journalism. The Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world whose published articles eloquently and wittily explain, promote and defend the principles and institutions of the free society. Submissions must be received on or before 30 June 2010. In addition to the Bastiat Prize for Journalism (First - $10,000; Second - $4,000; Third - $1,000), we are again awarding the Bastiat Prize for Online…

Academic Poll: To Grade, or Not to Grade?

Over at Dot Physics, Rhett wonders about the role of homework in a world that includes cramster: Then what is the problem? The problem is with my jobs. Yes, jobs. I have two jobs. My first job is to help students learn. I am a learning-faciliator if you like. I do this in many different ways. One way is to assign homework. Oh, my other job is to evaluate how well students understand the material. I have to give them some grade at the end of the semester. One obvious way to do this is with an exam or feats of strength. Here is the question: Do you grade homework? Oh, I know what everyone says…

Isis does SciWo's summer wardrobe

Two months ago, at the beginning of the summer, I asked Dr. Isis, the goddess of all things domestic and laboratory, for some fashion advice. My problem was one of hot outside-cold inside - which is pretty unappealing when referring to undercooked microwaved food - but also pretty obnoxious when you are talking about frigid offices in sizzling summer weather. Here's part of what I asked Dr. Isis: Please, oh goddess of style, recommend a blazer or sweater that will be versatile enough to see me through summer work sessions in a frigid office and impromptu meetings across campus. Ideally this…

Things I've learned from my semester

My students tell me that there are only 20 days of class left this semester. I've been too busy to count. Unfortunately, it's been too-busy-with-things-that-don't-make-a-compelling-tenure-case. But, maybe, just maybe, I can salvage this mess of a semester by learning some lessons for how now to conduct future semesters. So in RBOC-fashion here's what I've discovered. Loading up my teaching on Mondays and Wednesdays did not actually produce "free" days for research. First Tuesday got filled up with student meetings and class prep for my marathon Wednesdays. Then Thursday got filled up with…

Undeclared drugs in herbal and non-botanical dietary supplements

An interesting question arose the other day when we discussed the Key West acupuncturist who was diverting prescription drugs for personal use as well as in her practice. While we are not certain that the defendant put the cited muscle relaxants and anxiolytics in remedies doled out at her practice, we doubt that the demographic she targeted would be too impressed if she were to hand out prescription drugs. This scenario led our scientific and blogging colleague, DrugMonkey, to ask how common it might be for alternative practitioners to dope their herbs with prescription drugs exhibiting…

DonorsChoose 2009: Giving What We're Abel

I can't believe October's here already and it's time again for our annual social media challenge to raise money for US science teachers. Last year, eight generous, erudite, and good-looking Terra Sig readers donated at total of $1,972 to impact the lives of 1,865 students. I've got started a little late but three of you already hunted me down and have donated a total of $1,737 - due primarily to our perennial megadonor, Diana, who shares the good fortune in her life with kids to combat the anti-science nonsense she sees around this country. DonorsChoose.org is "an online charity connecting…

Upstream Issues

Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don't care. A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in public engagement. So what? I hear you ask. This is old stuff. But what is new here is that it is the scientists who start the debates, before the public has a chance to react and set up the framing issues, to ensure that a reasonable and informed debate is had. It is called upstream public engagement. I think this might be a useful modus operandi for other public intellectual domains;…

Good Golly from Bali

I'm preparing for a KPFA radio interview this morning, and so have had to brush up on precisely what went down in Bali over the past week. In essence: Everything, and nothing. Global delegates agreed to a plan that (we hope) will eventually lead to a successor to the weak tea and expiring Kyoto Protocol. That successor treaty will be negotiated in late 2009 in Copenhagen--two years from now. In Bali the U.S. was essentially browbeaten by the rest of the world--global moral suasion proved powerful enough to get State Department negotiator Paula Dobriansky to stop blocking the development of…

Implicit Understanding and Inference in Language

The following is a guest post by Joshua Hartshorne at the Cognition and Language Lab. The first scientific paper I wrote states, in the second paragraph, that "language depends on two mental capacities with distinct neurocognitive underpinnings": vocabulary and grammar. To understand cats are mammals, all you need to know are the definitions of CATS, ARE and MAMMALS, plus the grammar involved. This was how I was trained to think about language. I knew that there were probably some other aspects of language (like phonology), but they seemed peripheral. That worked well enough until I came…

Women-in-geoscience and blogs presentation: the blog version

I've been reading both geoblogs and women-in-science blogs for a while, and watching the support networks grow around them. So when I looked through the Geological Society of America's list of session topics for the 2009 annual meeting and saw one about "Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention, and Promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences," I asked Anne Jefferson (who blogs with Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous) whether she would be interested in submitting an abstract with me. We didn't know whether blogs were really useful or not, though, so (with the help…

National Parks Failing African Wildlife

Tim Caro from UC Davis and Paul Scholte from Leiden University wrote a "policy piece" , a sort of editorial in the September issue of the African Journal of Ecology, bringing up some surprising trends regarding the decline of antelope populations within national parks. We hear enough about poaching outside of the parks certainly, but this is news to me. Conservation efforts may need some tweaking. Of late, antelope have been doggedly tracked - by air, through scat sampling, etc. - due to insufficient data in the past and their reduced numbers are revealing three anthropogenic, "proximate"…

More on the science writing and the internet

Over at the Cambridge Science Festival blog, there's a great write-up of the science journalism event that Heather and I attended last week. Author Jordan Calmes* has good summary and a lot of praise for the panel discussion, but also notes some potential shortcomings: The panel convinced me that social media is helping both journalists and scientists. And yet, I never felt like they delivered on the second half of the title. How is the Internet changing science writing? What is it really accomplishing in terms of reaching out to a wider public. The panel mentioned that social media is often…

The digital revolution and the mainstreaming of arthropods

[This is a repost from the Myrmecos Blog, originally published February 2008] In 1934, a diminutive book by an unknown author seeded the largest conservation movement in history. The book, Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds, pioneered the modern field guide format with crisp illustrations of diagnostic characters, all in a pocket-sized read. The Guide sold out in a week, but the book's effects are ongoing. To understand the magnitude of Peterson's impact, consider how naturalists traditionally identified birds. They'd take a shotgun into the field, and if they saw something…

Elsevier's New Open Access Policy...

...apparently involves reposting others' blog posts without permission or proper attribution. I'm being facetious here, of course, but it is quite ironic that Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority just caught anti-open-access warrior Elsevier copying the majority of one of his blog posts and posting it on a freely available site without attribution to him (although there is a link to his original post) or his permission. Click here to see his original post and here to see Elsevier's reposting (Mike also saved it as a pdf). Although it is common practice within the blogosphere to quote…

Big Open Lab Announcements!

First, the first couple of reviews of the 2010 anthology are now out: by Dr. Alistair Dove at Deep Sea News and by Ariel Carpenter at USC News. Check them out. If you have read the book and have a place to publish a review, we'll appreciate it - just send us the link. Second, I am very excited to join Bora in announcing the Guest Editor for the 2011 edition: Jennifer Ouellette (blog, Twitter). I am sure that Jennifer will do a fantastic job putting together the sixth edition of the anthology! I couldn't be more thrilled. Third, after five years of self-publishing the anthology through Lulu.…

Superbug 2.0: An introduction

So, hi, Scienceblogs. I'm thrilled to be joining the conversation here. By way of introduction, I'm Maryn McKenna, journalist and author and sole proprietor of Superbug, which has been running for 3+ years at Blogger but moves over here today, thanks to an invitation from the Sb staff and some extremely kind support from friends and colleagues who are already here. Superbug began as online notes and digital whiteboard for my new book, SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), which is a narrative investigation of the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph.…

The Scent of a Man...or a Monkey.

I previously confessed that I subscribe to that glossy hardcopy glut of advertising called Vanity Fair. Invariably, the mag contains photo spreads of ripple-ab'ed dudes hawking various men's cologne. All this to mask delicious or stinky or neutral 5alpha-androst-16-en-3-one (androstenone); based on one's genetic variation in the olfactory receptor that binds this steroid, it will smell sweet or icky or not at all. Razib at Gene Expression already covered the recent article in Nature - please see a world of sensory difference. The Nature article addressed genetic polymorphisms of the…

Experimental Philosophy

No, it's not an oxymoron: philosophers have discovered the virtue of experimentation. Now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement ("x-phi" to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of…

How Can a Boycott Actually Work? The Failure of Consumer Activism

Admittedly, some boycotts have worked: Glenn Beck seems to have been seriously harmed by the boycotts against his advertisers. But what happens when the corporations you want to boycott have massive market share? The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a corporate-backed lobbying group that has essentially written many laws at the state level, including Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan. One-third of all state legislators (overwhelmingly Republican) are members of ALEC, and ALEC has pushed some really awful legislation, including limiting consumer rights, environmental…

We Are Worrying About the Wrong Deficit

We should be worrying about the employment deficit. Instead, we are worried about the budget deficit. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Nate Silver has a very good post detailing how the Republicans in Congress have positioned themselves to the right of....everybody. But what struck me is that nowhere in the poll would one have even been given the option of responding that the budget deficit is not a serious problem (really, look it up. You can't answer that). I want to nip one common complaint in the bud: if our GDP-debt ratio soars, no one will buy our debt (T-bills). This is…

Congress Refuses to Make Credit Available to Most Americans

Admittedly, you won't hear credit card companies call Congress' failure to cap credit card interest at 15% annually (which is what credit unions are forced to do) that, but, as Ian Welsh notes, that is exactly what Congress' inability to enact a cap means: The Senate just stopped limits on credit card rates. Sometimes it takes a socialist to say the obvious: "When banks are charging 30 percent interest rates, they are not making credit available," said Mr. Sanders, who noted credit unions are limited to 15 percent. "They are engaged in loan-sharking." The banks have been given, loaned and…

Stretching stockpiled H5N1

A few weeks ago an FDA advisory committee recommended approval of Sanofi-Aventis's prepandemic H5N1 vaccine, despite data that it required very large amounts of viral antigen (90 mcg) in two doses. At the time it seemed there were far better vaccines available or about to be available. What set this vaccine apart was that Sanofi had been making it to fill an order placed by the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and there was enough for 3.75 million people in the US stockpile, although because of elapsed shelf life that was down to about 3 million. Ninety micrograms is a lot…

Poultry company priorities: Vegetarian meals for the chickens, but their workers still can’t use the bathroom

This week’s announcement by Allen Harim Foods offers another upsetting example of a poultry company that cares more about its chickens than its employees. The Delaware-based company broadcasted that it “…is one of the first companies in the nation that has moved to a 100 percent vegetarian feed for its chickens.” The firm says the move responds to “…what our customers are telling us” about wanting to buy healthy chicken products. I can’t help but wonder how their customers would respond if Allen Harim posed this question to consumers: “Should the employees who skin, debone and package our…

Low Hanging Fruit: A Very Healthy Diet for The Planet Earth

Michael Mann has an editorial on Scientific American's site putting the well known 2.0C limit in perspective for the upcoming climate talks in Paris. Mann makes a number of important points in his essay (read it here: Meeting a Global Carbon Limit Is Cheaper Than Avoiding One) but there is one point that I want to underscore. The key factor is that there are technological innovations and economies of scale that emerge only in the course of actually doing something. Here's the thing. Let's say you were suddenly in charge of one trillion dollars of money that could be used to address climate…

Desecration: it's a fun hobby!

I am appalled. A man in New York was arrested for throwing a copy of the Quran in a public toilet. He deserved arrest—everyone knows it is vandalism and criminal mischief to clog a public toilet with debris. Oh, hang on — the guy was arrested for a hate crime? Are toilets now on the list of victims targeted by fringe fanatics? What's their slogan: "Bring Back the Open Trench!"? It is a shame to see innocent and useful toilets persecuted in this ghastly way … Wait, never mind. He was arrested for being mean to Muslims, which also makes no sense. He destroyed a book and clogged a toilet. If…

The All-Important "House Band" Question

Ben over at the World's Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre-- you can't be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands-- Devo, They Might Be Giants, Weezer-- before ending up with Wilco. Which I also don't really understand, unless it's because Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is about as much fun as vector calculus. If you want to suggest a "house band" for this mob, the obvious direction to go would for people like They Might Be Giants,…

Happy New Year!

Real-life physics can be a pain. New Year's Eve I went with an old high school friend of mine to meet some people and shoot fireworks. This concluded at a little before one in the morning, and after that we left. We wanted to catch up on what had been happening some more and so we drove around town for a few minutes before heading to our respective homes. Unfortunately we hit an unfamiliar gravel road (this is kind of a rural area) and in the process of turning around we got stuck in the mud. Well, I say "we". Both of us were stuck by virtue of being in the same vehicle, but he was…

Ghosts in the E. coli machine

In today's New York Times I have an article about the quest to create a virtual organisma sort of digital Frankenstein accurate down to every molecular detail. The creature that the scientists I write about want to reproduce is that familiar denizen of our gut, Escherichia coli. There are two things about this enterprise I find particularly delicious. One is that this little microbe is just too complex for today's computers to handle. For now scientists are just laying the groundwork for a day that might come in 10 or 20 years when they have enough processing power to handle E. coli. Another…

Mothership over Montana: Surreal Supercell Stormcloud

APOD got some attention yesterday with this stunning photo of a supercell thunderstorm several kilometers wide, brooding over a Montana field: Mothership Sean Heavey, 2010 I'm not sure it's possible for a work of art or photography to more effectively convey the grandeur of nature and the awesome power of physics. The image is simply unreal (which is why the title "Mothership" works so well). But Montana photographer Sean Heavey has a whole gallery of these stunning storm photos. I'm especially nuts about the ominous, Tesla-esque drama of "Base Reflectivity": And for all you would-be storm-…

The Ballad of Greg Laden

So, the other day, I was trying to find some links to podcasts that I'd done to put on my media page, so I did something that I would never otherwise had thought to do; I entered my own name in the search box at Apple's iTunes store. Everybody has entered their own name in the Google Search box, right? But who thinks of searching for themselves on iTunes unless you are a musician. Or, looking for your podcasts. Which I found, by the way, so that was good. But there was also a thing called The Ballad of Greg Laden. So my brain started ticking away and it pretty much figured out that…

Why does Tim Blair hate America?

American student Kunthea Ker wrote how she was verbally abused at Sydney's New Year fireworks because of who she was. Tim Blair's response? He accuses her of lying. Her story: We [her family] are American but we are also Asian, and the crowd seemed full of people making racist, disparaging comments about Asians - not only within our hearing but to our faces. When we found a spot to sit, one woman remarked loudly that she didn't want to sit next to Asians. Another man shouted at us "I hate Chinese!" We are not Chinese. ... Finally, as the fireworks began, a young man tried to push past us to…

Canadian Cancer Care Update

Ever wonder what happens when you live in a parsimonious country that isn't willing to spend any money on new treatments against cancer? "Cancer patients having to dig deep for new drugs" TORONTO -- Whether patients survive cancer increasingly depends on where they live and how much of their own money they can afford to spend on the latest drugs, an advocacy group reported Monday. "Essentially, we will continue to ration life-saving cancer treatment, and some Canadians will live and some will die simply because of where they live," said the Cancer Advocacy Coalition of Canada report. Ever…

Where Scientist Meets Spiderman...

As I chug along on my thesis and manuscript-writing, I'm often reminded what it means to "see your name in print." There's something about that feeling of being responsible, in front of the world, for your words and thoughts. However, not all first publications are of strictly scientific merit, as a friend of mine recently relayed to me: As a neuroscientist in grad school finishing up my dissertation, my mind drifted recently one night to thinking of the first time my name was in print. Circa 1992, I was pretty nerdy as a youth (still nerdy now but proud of it), and I was "that kid" who…

The Personal is Political, Earth Day Edition

Happy Earth Day, everyone. Or, if you're on campus here, Happy Earth Week, complete with live bands at noon every day and a really weird papier-mâché tree ball thing oh, apparently that was a pomegranate to commemorate the Armenian genocide. Earth Week means I've got three more days to write about the relationship of geology, as a science and a profession, to environmental politics... which is good, 'cause I'm distracted today by larger-scale theoretical considerations: In the end, the root of the problem lies with culture. If we can change the culture, then we may win. If we cannot, then…

Obama and McCain Highlight Health Care Plans in NEJM

I was excited when I saw that The New England Journal of Medicine had today published summaries by Obama and McCain of their health care plans, expecting something quite detailed to appeal to a highly critical expert audience. However, their summaries were still as general and vague as ever. Regardless, these new write-ups are still a nice resource for people interested in the two candidates' plans. You can read Obama's plan here, McCain's here, or see a pdf of both side-by-side here. On many aspects, both plans--at least as they're presented here--are quite similar. Both stress…

Books of the Ocean, One Accurate and One Not

Proper preparation for deep-sea research requires a great deal of equipment, which can cost hundreds of thousands of money. Happily, due to government ignorance and the treachery of accountants worldwide, most equipment can be written off at tax time..." As April approaches and I prep my taxes, I am thankful for this information. Those things deductible? Sombreros, crutches, massages, air tanks, wire cutters, gas to get to the ocean, etc. Those things not deductible? Robes, sunscreen, plastic ficus, bolo tie, etc. The humor continues is Volume 3 (No. 164 of 307) of Haggis-On-Whey's World…

Credit

Tyler Cowen weighs in on the latest twist in the bailout plan, which involves funneling money to credit card companies. Tyler asks if the Feds should really be in the business of encouraging more credit card borrowing. (I've actually been enjoying getting fewer credit card offers in the mail.) His answer: No, and especially not with federal dollars. We're talking about credit card debt as a means of financing consumption expenditures. I am not sure what is the going credit card interest rate for the marginal borrowers who will be aided by this new change in the Paulson plan, but I believe it…

McCain and the Straight Bullshit Express

Snuggles McCain demonstrating his vaunted 'independence' It seems more and more people are finally paying close attention to Mitt Romney and John McCain. While I've talked about Romney's idiocy before, The Boston Phoenix did a great job of skewering McCain, so I'll turn it over to them: Arizona senator John McCain appears to be the nation's most popular Republican. That, at least, is what most polls show. It's not entirely clear why. He has authored little noteworthy legislation during his 20 years in the Senate and, in fact, has accomplished almost nothing beyond co-sponsoring the McCain-…