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Please, Sarah Palin, go away

She's as funny as a clown's pratfall, but she's also as fascinating as a head wound. I hope she'll vanish from the public discourse, but here I am, at the same time gawking over her latest inanities. Remember how she was caught looking at really trivial notes written on her hand? She's got a new excuse. God does it, too, and if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for Sarah. It's in the Bible, in Isaiah 49: 15Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. 16Behold, I have graven thee…

The perils of Wikipedia

In an entry below I offer that the citation of a Wikipedia reference is not reliable, and I can't take responsibility if someone changes the entry between my link and your click. I am not totally kidding, I "Wikipediaed" a semi-famous individual recently and the entry described him as a serial rapist. In broken English. Someone was obviously bored, or had a bad experience with this small time celeb. I quickly reedited it, but it sure brought home to me the problem with Wikipedia. But then I thought: could you, as a blogger, just reedit or write your own Wikipedia entries and then link to…

'Asians' prefer own kind

Stumbled upon this survey from Britain which shows that 'Asians' are the most averse to interracial relationships. I put Asian in quotes because that means something different on the other side of the pond then in the USA; here Asian is a catchall group with East Asians as the most representative perception and South Asians as outliers. In the UK Asian is almost totally synonymous with South Asian, and Chinese have their own classification. The survey results are not particularly surprising, British Asians are the most reluctant to admit the possibility of interracial relationships.…

Climate change denialists = climate change liars

The denialists are at it again in the comments, parroting the latest lie. UEA CRU's Dr Phil Jones agrees there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995. Wow. You'd think they'd realize that twisting the words of a scientist around 180° from what they actually said is a very bad strategy — it would be like trying to claim that I'd decided evolution was false. This is no exception. Deltoid has a wonderfully clear quote: This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995."…

Cladistics & culture - Wilkins responds, etc.

Update: Make sure to read the comments, some of them are worthy of posts. John Wilkins has a long response to my post Cultural Cladistics. Now, John knows several orders of magnitude more about systematics than I do...so he emphasized the cladistics aspect and traced out the misimpressions, fallacies and problems. He begins: He repeats the usual [redacted] canard that culture isn't like biology in terms of its evolution. I think it is exactly like it, and that the "analogy" between cultural traditions and species is quite exact. All that differs is the frequency of the various kinds of…

Why Political Corruption Matters: Dianne Wilkerson

I've been meaning to post about the corruption case involving former MA State Senator Dianne Wilkerson because it really lays out the most corrosive effect of corruption--a loss of trust: What is the real deal with Columbus Center? Why did Wilkerson throw herself behind the controversial and now-stalled project with such passion? Why did she go to the mat again and again to get support and public subsidies for the $800 million hotel, residential, and retail complex over the Massachusetts Turnpike when many of her constituents opposed the project? What was her relationship with Columbus Center…

Change Needed at the CDC: Gerberding

In light of all the executive branch changes people are hoping for, I wonder how much longer CDC Director Julie Gerberding has. I'm guessing she's there until late January.... I don't claim to speak for CDC employees, but, in some divisions, morale is incredibly low--people are considering leaving as soon as they can*. This doesn't sound like a well run organization to me. As far as I can tell, Gerberding has never stood up to Congress, which means when everything becomes a priority, or at least the priority du jour, then nothing is a priority. I've also heard her prattle on about the need…

Arbeit Macht ein Douchebag

At least if you work for the National Review's The Corner. Because the Peace Corps is as horrific as the mass murder of European Jewry. By way of Spencer Ackermann: Oh good, for a moment I thought the Second Holocaust was off. In response to this plan put forward from Obama -- The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation's challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy…

The Gang of 500 Mediocrities (Our National Political Press Corps)

Recently, I finished Pretty Vacant which describes the origins of the British punk scene. At one point, the author describes one of the first punk-ish shows ever, and how, even though there were only about 65 people in the audience (a crappy black box hole), those 65 people would go on to have a tremendous influence in music, art, and politics*. They definitely punched above their weight. Well, our national political press is the antithesis of that basement audience--a point I've made, oh, once or twice before. The 'Gang of 500' is one of the greatest collections of mediocrities going (...…

Poverty and Science Performance: Yep, Still Linked

A while ago, I looked at the relationship between poverty and educational test scores in Massachusetts, which, on the whole, performs the best in the U.S. Not surprisingly, as poverty increases, performance decreases. The pattern also holds for science scores on the state exam, the MCAS: The horizontal axis is the percentage of children in a school who qualify for free lunch, and the vertical axis is the percentage of children who, according to their MCAS scores, are either classified as "Need Improvement" or "Warning/Failing" in science. The R2--how much of the school to school variation…

How to Deficit Spend Stupidly

I've often discussed on this blog how the advantage of having a fiat currency is that one can deficit spend when you need to (think of it as being on the gold standard, except that you can mine as much gold as you need, when you need it)*. Of course, if you deficit spend when there is no idle capacity (human or mechanical) in the real economy, this can lead to inflation. Likewise, if you flood a sector or group of people with dollars when they don't need it, this also will lead to inflation and price distortion, and can result in socially undesirable outcomes (e.g., rampant income…

Palin's 'Spudnut' Moment Tells You Everything You Need to Know About the Conservative Movement's Grasp of Reality

If you haven't heard about Sarah Palin's latest inanity (it's hard to keep current...), she offered an ungrateful nation this utterance: But after this, for several minutes that we as a nation will never get back, you rambled about a bakery called the "Spudnut Shop," that doesn't want the government telling it how to operate, or something: Well, the spudnut shop in Richland, Washington -- it's a bakery, it's a little coffee shop that's so successful, 60-some years, generation to generation, a family-owned business not looking for government to bail them out and to make their decisions for…

Tristero: It's Not the Politics, It's the Collection Plate

Tristero correctly points out those churches that are concerned that they will lose their tax exempt status have a solution to their problems: ...this is a lie because the reverend knows very well that the IRS is not banning him from endorsing a candidate. He is quite free to do so. Likewise, his church is also free to endorse whoever they want to. All they need to do - and it's no big deal, really, unless the reverend and his church worship filthy mammon above all - is to forgo tax-exempt status... Where I kind of disagree with Tristero is with this: Maybe, but it is an indication of how…

According to NPR, It's Not Torture When We Do It

You see, this is the method of The Enemy, so therefore we don't torture. Or something. From Glenn Greenwald comes this nauseating account of media spinelessness in the face of the evil that is torturing another human being: The most noteworthy point was her [NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard] explicit statement (at 17:50) that "the role of a news organization is to lay out the debate"; rarely is the stenographic model of "journalism" -- "we just repeat what each side says and leave it at that" -- so expressly advocated (and see Jon Stewart's perfect mockery of that view). She also said -- when…

Is the DOMA Brief a Result of 'Burrowing'?

A few months ago, Dday started to sound the alarm about "burrowing" by Bush administration appointees: This is about getting civil service protections for hardcore conservative loyalists. In past transitions, this has been done to protect new rules or regulations that the outgoing President would like to see maintained, and that's true here as well. Recent rule changes in the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service will be harder to reverse with a champion inside the agency. But I hardly think it ends there. The same with all those career Justice Department officials whose…

Begley Mistakes the Symptom for the Disease

Recently, Newsweek published an article by Sharon Begley that claimed that the conflict between high-profile publication and quick release of medically-important data has led to delays in medical advancements (ScienceBlogling Orac takes down her particular example). But Begley is confusing a symptom, publication practices, with a much larger problem: incentives. What do I mean by incentives? Last week, I described how the data release policies of large and small sequencing centers differ due to distinct funding incentives: the larger centers are paid to rapidly produce lots of high…

The April 14th Tea Party Rally: A Cup of Rather Weak Tea

Maybe I should have worn this hat? I was going to write a magnus opus about the Tea Bugger rally on the Boston Common on Wednesday. But, as we used to say in more civilized times, meh. Basically, there was an hour of some really schlocky pseudo-patriotic music, wherein every third word was freedom (FREEE-DOM! Gives the whole notion of freedom a bad name). Then between 'songs', we would be regaled with stories of heroic sacrifices by soldiers, followed by other sentences that were heavy with "freedom" and "amen." Because opposing taxes on the wealthiest is just like storming the beaches…

Pennywise, Pound Foolish: Home Ownership as an Investment

I'll have more to say about housing as an investment (hint: in quite a few cases, it's incredibly bad), but one thing to keep in mind is that people don't always protect their investments as well as they should. Last week, there was a massive, nine-alarm fire, in a Boston apartment building--fortunately no one was seriously injured, in part because many people were at work. But this is what shocked me--no fire sprinklers in a ten story building (italics mine): The lack of sprinklers was of particular concern to fire officials. The building, formerly known as the Cambridge House and built as…

The Failure of the Progressive Bloc

Chris Bowers and Digby both comment on the failure of the Congressional progressives to exact demands on healthcare (and many other issues), as opposed to the conservative Democrats who really did drive the debate. Digby writes: In the case of health care, as I wrote way back when, the congressional liberals were always going to be jammed at the end because the Medicaid expansion alone is something they desperately wanted for decades and couldn't ever get (which doesn't excuse why they negotiated with themselves the whole way along.) There was just no way that a progressive bloc strategy was…

Genome Annotation: There's Too Much Crap in GenBank

One of the exciting things about bacterial genomics in that, within a year, we'll definitely be in the era of the $1,500 bacterial genome, although that's probably an overestimate. This cost includes everything: labor, sequencing, genome assembly, and genome annotation. While sequencing is highly automated, and has been turned into a production process, akin to a factory, high quality genome annotation, until very recently, has not. Automated software gets about 95% of gene calls right, but the other five percent differs based on the algorithm used. Unfortunately, this means that, instead…

Moving Towards a Judge Dredd Economy?

For those who haven't read the Judge Dredd stories (I'm not referring to the movie), they take place in a dystopian future (other than Star Trek, do sci-fi stories occur in any other kind of future...) where the predominant theme is that, due to technological advances, very few people have jobs, creating huge urban megalopolises (megalopolae?) where crime is rampant. With that cheery introduction, we note Matthew Yglesias' assessment of the news bidness: You hear a lot of talk about different kinds of ideas to bolster revenue models or get people to read more. But the reality is that the web…

Antibiotics and...Enemas? Why I Will Never Read HuffPo Again

I was going to let the latest Huffington Post idiocy about antibiotics causing cancer go unremarked since Orac slaughtered it, but then I read the comments and became mad. Really Mad. First, this from the book promotion masquerading as an article: And many people still believe that antibiotics are helpful; we've all heard stories of mothers and patients coming close to demanding them. But did you know that antibiotics can cause a great deal of long-term harm in the body? Let me explain... Yes, we know they can in rare circumstances. That's why they should be used only to treat bacterial…

Rick Scott's "Conservatives for Patients' Rights"?

Isn't that like "Pedophiles for Childrens' Welfare?" From The Nation, your healthcare has a new special friend: ....Rick Scott is the man who best embodies the spirit of the current conservative opposition. The name may not exactly be a household word, or it may ring a faint bell, but Politico recently reported that the millionaire Republican would be heading up Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR), a new group that plans to spend around $20 million to kill President Obama's efforts at healthcare reform. Having Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff…

Everything I Know About Movement Conservatives, I Learned from Creationists

Seriously. The political tactics are virtually identical. From The Krugman (italics mine): As the debate over President Obama's economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan's opponents aren't arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don't want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don't want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending. Some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already…

Should NIH Be in the Drug Development Business?

In an excellent review blasting the false dichotomy of more versus less regulation (for additional commentary, see Amanda and Ezra Klein), economist Dean Baker proposes that the government get into the drug development business directly: ...the government could pay for the research upfront and make all research findings and patents fully public. It already spends $30 billion a year financing biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, an amount almost as high as the pharmaceutical industry claims to spend on its research. NIH research is highly respected, with almost all…

"There. Are. Four. Lights": How Torture Became Mainstream

In his weekend roundup, driftglass reminds us that there was a time when our mainstream pop culture villified torture and praised those who attempted to resist it: And then Fox TV's Torture Porn Show, also known as 24, made torturing fashionable. Strength was to be had in torturing people, not in resisting it. At this point, it's tempting to bemoan our nation's sorry fate, but Thomas Levenson offers a good explanation of how we reached this dismal point (italics mine): ....this [bizarre and obscene definition of lynching] is an example of the kind of rhetorical deceit that would have made…

One More Reason Why One Should Wary of Stocks

Or, for that matter, jumping into the water with financial sharks under any circumstances. The NY Times has an article about the ongoing legal trials of David H. Brooks, the chief executive and chairman of a body-armor company. The article primarily focuses on what a loathsome piece of shit Brooks is: not only did he rip off investors and the U.S. government, but his body armor doesn't work as advertised in hot weather. Which would be fine if we were engaged with Al-Queda...in Iceland. But this section at the end caught my attention (italics mine): One of the many former shareholders who…

Kim Stanley Robinson at Duke

I haven't had a chance yet to listen to the whole of Kim Stanley Robinson's talk at Duke, but what I've seen so far is very good. I'm more posting this here so I have a reminder to watch the rest once I get home, but nothing is stopping you all from enjoying it now. science is a Utopian project; it began as a Utopian project and it has remained so ever since, an attempt to make a better world. And this is not always the view taken of science because its origins and its life have been so completely wrapped up with capitalism itself. They began together. You could consider them to be some kind…

We Can Afford Mortgage Cramdown

So can the banks. A key impediments to economic recovery is underwater mortgages: people repay housing loans for more than the underlying property is worth. Many Dirty Fucking Hippies sane people have recommended that banks be forced to 'cramdown' these mortgages*. This would make the banks' books more transparent (and probably cause some 'zombie' banks to go under), but it would also mean that many households would be spending some of the money that used to go to the overpriced mortgage. Banks, as you might expect, don't like cramdown. They claim it's too expensive, and they simply can'…

Tax Cuts Won't Help You, but a Wage Increase Will

This should be the new Democratic talking point about tax cuts: We need to change the thinking. Taxes are not too high. Incomes are too low. If you are having problems paying your taxes then you need a raise, not a tax cut. Democrats need to practice this response to anyone talking about tax cuts. The sooner Republicans realize that talking about tax cuts leads people to want and think they deserve a raise, the sooner they will stop talking about them and we can have some sanity in our economic discussions. I like this, since it mirrors my experience. Really long-time readers will remember…

What Would the "Third Way" Blue Dog Democrats Actually Do to Fix Our Problems?

By way of Oliver Willis, we discover that the Corporate Democrat Third Way propaganda tank has decided that doubling down on failed Blue Dog policies is exactly what it will take to kill off the Democratic Party will resuscitate the Democratic Party's fortunes: The party is about to come to a major fork in the road," said Jonathan Cowan, Third Way's president. "A left turn at this juncture is a turn toward permanent minority status." The group's efforts reflect the underlying tension President Barack Obama faces as he heads into the last two years of his first term. Liberals say there's an…

An Explanation for Why College Prices Are Rising So Much

I've often wondered why college tuitions are rising so rapidly ever year. While in the ultimate sense, they rise because they can--there are enough wealthy people who can pay full freight, it's not clear what internal cost require such massive, regular price increases. Well, Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman propose that these increases are part of larger economic trends. First, college has to be understood as a service industry (italics mine): First, higher education is a service industry. From 1947 to 2009 the average annual price increase for services was 4.0 percent, while for…

Early Adopters and What I Think Will Be Hot in Evolutionary Biology in the Next Two to Four Years

And by hot, I mean employable. I'll get to that in a bit, but I first want to relate some history. Back when I was a wee lil' Mad Biologist, and molecular population genetics was in its infancy, there was a brief period where people had to be convinced that this stuff was useful (it was). Then it became fashionable, and the 'early adopters'--people who were regularly using PCR and clone-based sequencing (followed by S35 sequencing)--became hot intellectual commodities for about five years. Then the field became crowded, but 'good' molecular population geneticists (whatever 'good' means)…

Newt Gingrich, Food Stamps, and Flat Earth Economics

Apparently, if Newt Gingrich is to be believed (and why would anyone do that?), he doesn't understand how food stamps stimulate the economy: Well, you know, I carry around a bumper sticker that says 2 plus 2 equals 4. So I'd be very curious how a dollar given to somebody becomes a $1.79. And I think if we could get that to work with the U.S. Treasuries, so if people gave the Treasury $1,000, it became $1,790, we could pay off the federal debt and never worry about spending or anything. I mean, I -- you know, somehow, I don't understand how liberal math turns $1 into $1.79. As I've mentioned…

Not A Tiny Tiny Plush Toy

tags: Central Park, NYC, tufted titmouse, Baeolophus bicolor, image of the day Central Park Tufted Titmouse, Baeolophus bicolor. Image: Bob Levy, author of Club George [larger view]. The photographer writes; A few days after capturing the image of a Tufted Titmouse in midair that appeared on this blog on December 30, 2008 I returned to get more shots of these birds. I had not been delighted with the quality of most of my photos partly because the lighting conditions had been poor and mostly because these tiny creatures don't stay still long enough to keep them in the viewfinder for more…

Birdbooker Report 46-47

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "One cannot have too many good bird books" --Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927). The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…

Mystery Bird: Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Polioptila caerulea

tags: Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Polioptila caerulea, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Polioptila caerulea, photographed in Starr County Park, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 5 April 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/1000s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Now here's a little bird, barely bigger than the menacing thorns it's paused…

NYC Area Cricket Crawl

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. ~ Emily Dickinson This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids. What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC) Where: New York City area When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…

NYC Area Cricket Crawl

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. ~ Emily Dickinson This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids. What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC) Where: New York City area When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…

NYC Area Cricket Crawl

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. ~ Emily Dickinson This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids. What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC) Where: New York City area When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…

Mystery Bird: Great-Tailed Grackle, Quiscalus mexicanus

tags: Great-Tailed Grackle, Quiscalus mexicanus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Great-Tailed Grackle, Quiscalus mexicanus, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2 January 2006 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2006:01:02 15:42:48 Exposure Time: 1/159 F-Number: 10.00 ISO: 200 Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, author of Aimophila Adventures and Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Start at the reeeaaarrr--among the blackish birds of North…

NYC Area Cricket Crawl

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. ~ Emily Dickinson This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids. What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC) Where: New York City area When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…

NYC Cricket Crawl

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. ~ Emily Dickinson This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids. What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC) Where: New York City area When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…

NYC Area Cricket Crawl

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. ~ Emily Dickinson This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids. What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC) Where: New York City area When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…

NYC Cricket Crawl

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. ~ Emily Dickinson This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids. What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC) Where: New York City area When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…

Birdbooker Report 76

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

Happy Thanksgiving!

Or, for you non-Americans, happy Thursday! Or, for you Australians, happy Friday or Tuesday or whatever it is down in your topsy-turvy country where you've even got your seasons reversed. Oh, heck, forget it. Happy Day! Find whatever reason you want to celebrate. Again, for you non-Americans, this is a peculiarly American version of a fall harvest festival. We are supposedly celebrating an event in our history from the 17th century: the fellowship and cooperation between the Pilgrim immigrants and the native Americans that culminated in a shared feast. The truth is a little uglier and…

Will they be locked up and left to die in a pandemic?

Huge industrial style poultry farms, where birds are locked in cages in close quarters, are the perfect environment for disease spread. What about locked up people? Two million of them. Two million. The US locks up more of its population than any nation on earth. By a long way: This is not something we've always done in the US. It's shockingly recent, within the lifetimes of virtually everyone who is reading this. It really took off with the Reagan counter-revolution and has continued until today, slowing only because states can no longer afford it: source: Crooked Timber Since 1980 the…

Other people get email about me

Uh-oh. I'm in big trouble now — I've been ratted out to the governor. My nefarious schemes will certainly be foiled now! Here is the revealing letter; I've added a few comments in red to it. Dear Governor Pawlenty I am an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, having received my Ph.D. in Zoology in 1954 [We've gotten better since then]. I have for some time been concerned about the behavior of Paul Zachary Myers, Associate Professor of Biology at the Morris campus of the University. His rabid attacks on our most treasured institutions [What? The Discovery Institute?] give me great…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Corliss Lamont's confession of faith

A Sermonette is a good place to reprint a confession of faith. This one is bit old (over 51 years) but (unfortunately) is still pertinent. It was uttered by Corliss Lamont, son of a Chairman of the Board of the infamous J. P. Morgan investment bank , who became a committed social activist during the Depression. In the 1950s, along with many others, he became the target of Senator Joseph McCarthy, godfather to Karl Rove and the current crop of illegitimate offspring of that vile opportunist (aka the Republican party). I grew up in the McCarthy days and recall vividly the pall it cast over…