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An Open Letter to John McCain regarding Planetaria and Science Education

An Overhead Projector I was recently contacted by Glen Gould, a reader who is also a relative regarding the repeated mention by Republican Candidate John McCain of the "Overhead Projector" earmark for a planetarium in Chicago. Glen, together with my sister, Bunny Laden, are very serious amateur astronomers. For instance, when Bunny and Glen bought a car a few years ago, the first thing they did on considering each possible model was to measure the vehicle to see if it would fit their telescopes. Glen is also an engineer and spends considerable volunteer time in areas of the humanities…

Medicine and evolution, part I: Introduction

Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that, since my move to ScienceBlogs six weeks ago, I haven't written nearly as much about evolution or intelligent design as I used to on the old blog.. There are probably at least several reasons for this. For one thing, lots of other topics have forced their way to the forefront of my attention, including more autism quackery by the Geiers, a politically oriented medical journal that is anything but scientific, the fire at The Holocaust History Project, applying science to green tea, and a variety of other things. Also, in light of the Dover…

Briefing from the radioactive badlands of the American Southwest, 1954

[We are fortunate to have this transcript, taken by a company stenographer, from one of the early efforts of the resistance to instruct an army company in tactics. Although we now have more sophisticated technologies to hold these invaders in check, it is instructive too see how the American military in the 1950s struggled to cope with an unusual enemy, a struggle that was described in an excellent documentary produced by Warner Bros.] Men — and ladies — the purpose of this briefing is to instruct you in the basic anatomy of the enemy. We have lost many soldiers to the assumption that these…

On Being A Patient

In response to my recent post on being mauled by the PA at my annual gyn exam, reader Danimal was moved by my saying this I say if it hurts, you should feel free to yelp. And no doctor or PA should be shushing you. I am ashamed to say that when my PA shushed me, I let her make me feel embarrassed, and I actually apologized to her. That is just messed up. to comment thusly: You disappoint me Zuska. On the bloggesphere you have no problem barfing over someones shoes, usually when appropriate, including mine. Yet here it was entirely appropriate, yet you did not. Come on, you can do better.…

GOP prez candidates: We proudly don't know 8th grade science

From last night's debate: FAHEY: (inaudible) do not believe in evolution. You're an ordained minister. What do you believe? Is it the story of creation, as it is reported in the Bible or described in the Bible? [Governor] HUCKABEE [of Arkansas]: It's interesting that that question would even be asked of somebody running for president. I'm not planning on writing the curriculum for an 8th-grade science book. I'm asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States. Stop. Pastor Huckabee (to borrow McCain's phrase) thinks you need to be less knowledgeable to be president than to…

Your regularly scheduled conference scheduling freakout

Jason Rosenhouse takes a level-headed look at a brewing coynetreversy (a coynetroversy, like the verb, to coyne, involves adding heat, not light, while casting maximal aspersions, ideally to create a controversy where none need exist). Jason explains the situation: Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers (here and here respectively) have taken note of a session at the upcoming AAAS Annual Meeting entitled: Evangelicals, Science, and Policy: Toward a Constructive Engagement. They object to this intrusion of religion into a science meeting. In the comments to their posts, Nick Matzke has been gamely…

Finally: Finger Trees!

For ages, I've been promising to write about finger trees. Finger trees are an incredibly elegant and simple structure for implementing sequence-based data structures. They're primarily used in functional languages, but there's nothing stopping an imperative-language programmer from using them as well. In functional programming languages, lists are incredibly common. They show up everywhere; they're just so easy to use for recursive iteration that they're ubiquitous. I can't think of any non-trivial program that I've written in Haskell, Lisp, or OCaml that doesn't use lists. (Heck, I've…

Federal oversight of Cal/OSHA – What is it good for?

by Garrett Brown, MPH, CIH If there is one thing that Christine Baker, Director of California’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), and Juliann Sum, Chief of the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH or Cal/OSHA), cannot stand – it is criticism, no matter how constructive or gently offered it may be. With a “thin skin” sensitivity and an aggressive impulse to counter-attack that rivals Donald Trump’s, Baker and Sum tend to go crazy about the annual report by Federal OSHA on the state of Cal/OSHA.  In July 2015, DIR/DOSH wrote two tart letters to federal OSHA (here, here)…

The Meaning of the Fort McMurray Fire

The Climate Change Connection It is hard to understand the connection between climate change and wild fire. This is in part because it is hard to understand the factors that determine the frequency and extent of wild fires to begin with, and partly because of the messiness of the conversation about climate change and fire. I'm going to try to make this simple, I don't expect to succeed, but maybe we can achieve a somewhat improved understanding. Fires have to start, then they burn for a while, then they stop. Most wild fires are probably started by humans. This does not mean that human…

How To Evaluate Science Stories

I'm on my way to a taping of the Humanist Views with Host Scott Lohman. I do these now and then and have done so since I first moved to Minnesota back when it was still cold here. We'll be talking about science knowledge, and why basic science knowledge is important. We'll also be talking about how to go about evaluating science stories you encounter in the news, or more likely, on your Facebook feed or in other social media. Pursuant to this, I wrote a blog post that talks about how science stories go out to the general public. I also report on a request I sent out a few days ago to my…

Simon Conway Morris and Life's Solution: it's tea.

I've finished Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book I've mentioned before and promised, with considerable misgivings, to read thoroughly. I didn't like his ideas, I thought he'd expressed them poorly before, but I'd give his book on the subject a fair shake and see if he could persuade me. My opinion: it's dreck. To be fair, I thought there were some improvements. I've long thought that his writing was leaden and clunky, and painful to slog through. I think that in this book he has achieved something of a more tolerable…

Age of Autism's Anne Dachel takes on Bill Moyers over vaccines. Hilarity ensues.

Thanks to the partying and backslapping going on in the antivaccine movement over the reversal of the decision of the British General Medical Council to strike Professor John Walker-Smith off of the medical record, after a brief absence vaccines are back on the agenda of this blog. Antivaccine cranks view the decision as a vindication and exoneration of antivaccine guru Andrew Wakefield even though it is nothing of the sort and is in fact a decision based on questionable (at best) scientific reasoning. Actually, as some of my commenters have pointed out, Justice Mitting applied legal…

More acupuncture Tooth Fairy science as 2015 approaches its end

Several years ago, Harriet Hall coined a term that is most apt: Tooth fairy science. The term refers to clinical trials and basic science performed on fantasy. More specifically, it refers to doing research on a phenomenon before it has been scientifically established that the phenomenon exists. Harriet put it this way: You could measure how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves under the pillow, whether she leaves more cash for the first or last tooth, whether the payoff is greater if you leave the tooth in a plastic baggie versus wrapped in Kleenex. You can get all kinds of good data that is…

Bird brains

I'm teaching a course in neurobiology this term, and it's strange how it warps my brain; suddenly I find myself reaching more and more for papers on the nervous system in my reading. It's not about just keeping up with the subjects I have to present in lectures (although there is that, too), but also with unconsciously gravitating toward the subject in my casual reading, too. "Unconsciously"…which brings up the question of exactly what consciousness is. One of the papers I put on the pile on my desk was on exactly that subject: Evolution of the neural basis of consciousness: a bird-mammal…

The latest "Obama = Hitler" shenanigans: Too stupid even for the Hitler Zombie...

Remember the Hitler Zombie? He doesn't show up all that much anymore. The reason is not because a lot of brain dead Nazi analogies aren't being used to demonize political opponents. In fact, If I had a mind to, I could probably populate this blog with nothing other than people whose brains have obviously been eaten by the zombie, leaving so little intellectual firepower left that they actually believe that comparing President Obama to Hitler makes sense. Mainly, the reason that I don't do Hitler Zombie bits so often anymore is that the monster has chomped so many brains, producing so much…

The sociology of the antivaccination movement

Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on January 12, 2006. For those who haven't seen it before, pretend I just wrote it. For those who have, savor its Insolence once again. I was perusing some journals yesterday, including the most recent issue of Nature, when I came across a rather…

Yet another acupuncture meta-analysis: Garbage in, garbage out

Ever since I started paying attention to it, acupuncture has, at least until recently, inspired ambivalence more than anything else in me. As a skeptic and science-based physician, I found it very easy to dismiss utter quackery like homeopathy or the various "energy healing" modalities, such as reiki or therapeutic touch strictly on the science alone. After all, homeopathy is based on magical thinking more than anything else, specifically the concepts of "like cures like," the concept that dilution with vigorous shaking can make a remedy stronger, and the idea that water has "memory" all are…

Liveblogging a PLoS ONE Article

PLoS ONE has recently published a paper entitled "Beyond the Gene" by Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel, in which the authors take a stab at the long standing question: What is a Gene? Because this is such a big picture question, the appropriate discussion of the paper would involve a synthesis of what they authors wrote, what has previously been written, and what I think about all of that. I'm not going to do that. I'm too lazy and too stupid to do that. Instead, I'm going to read the paper and live-blog it. This one's for you, Bora. Quick tip: If you're planning to read an entire paper,…

South Bend could use a new news anchor for WNDU. This one fell for quackery.

When it comes to Twitter, I run hot and cold. I'll frequently go weeks when I barely touch my Twitter account, and nothing gets posted there except automatic Tweets linking to my new posts. Then something will happen, and suddenly I'll post 20 Tweets in a day. Rinse, lather, repeat. I guess I'm just too verbose for Twitter or I just don't grok it the way I do blogging. Either that, or I do enough social media that adding Twitter is just one bit of social media too far. That's why I tell people that Twitter is not a good way to get my attention if that is your goal. It might be days, if not…

No, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is NOT a "vaccine skeptic." He is antivaccine. So is Donald Trump.

This week hasn't been a particularly good week for science. It started out on Monday with news of the social media storm from over the weekend over a blatantly antivaccine screed published the Friday before by the director of The Cleveland Clinic Wellness Clinic. Then, towards the middle of the week, we learned that our President-Elect, Donald Trump, had met with an antivaccine loon of the worst variety, someone whose misinformation I've been dealing with since 2005, in order to discuss some sort of commission on vaccine safety—or autism (it's not clear which). Whatever it was, there's no way…

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, "I didn't really mean it" edition

It’s always nice when I learn that a target of my—shall we say?—Insolence takes note of what I’ve written. Well, maybe not always nice. Sometimes that notice takes the form of attacks, such as those by our good quack buddy Mike Adams, who’s been writing mean and nasty things about me for over three months now, although I do note that he’s become painfully, tediously repetitive. It’s as though he’s not even trying any more. Sometimes, however, it’s someone less ludicrous and more potentially dangerous. I’m referring in this case to Del Bigtree and Polly Tommey, the producers of Andrew…

Basics: Numerical Calculations

**Pre Reqs:** [Kinematics](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-kinematics.php), [Momentum Principle](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/10/basics-forces-and-the-moment…) What are "numerical calculations"? Why are they in the "basics"? I will give you really brief answer and then a more detailed answer. Numerical calculations (also called many other things - like computational physics) takes a problem and breaks into a WHOLE bunch of smaller easier problems. This is great for computers ([or a whole bunch of 8th graders](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/…

Weather, Climate Change, and Related Matters in 2015

I had considered writing an accounting of all the outlandish weather events of 2015, but that project quickly became a tl:dr list of untoward happenings which is both alarming and a bit boring, since it is so long. So, I decided to generate something less comprehensive, focusing more on the context and meaning of the diverse and impressive set of outcomes of anthropogenic global warming, an historically strong El Niño, and, well, weather which is already a pretty whacky thing. See: Highlights of Climate Change Research in 2015 It should be noted right away that 2015 is the last year in which…

Setting up a Digital Ocean remotely hosted WordPress blog

Mike Haubrich and I are developing a science oriented podcasting effort. It will be called "Ikonokast" (all the good names, like "The New York Times" and "Apple" were taken). We decided to enhance the podcast with a WordPress based blog site, perhaps with each page representing one podcast, and containing backup and supplementary information. Here is the site, set up and running. After considering our options, we decided to try using a Digital Ocean "Droplet" to host a WordPress blog. Here, I want to tell you how that went, and give a few pointers. This might be a good idea for some of…

I get email

Those Australians…they recently ran a segment on their Dateline program featuring their fellow Australian Ken Ham and the Creation "Museum", which includes portions of an interview with me. Actually, I seem to be the only critic to get any airtime in the show, which is flattering, but I could have used a little more support! Anyway, the show was recently aired, my name is played up as an atheist opponent of creationist nonsense, and now I'm suddenly receiving lots of email from Australian creationists because they want to persuade me to their foolish cause. And some of them are just weird. I'…

Surveying the "integrative medicine" landscape (2012 edition)

One of the most potent strategies used by promoters of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)--or, as its proponents like to call it these days, "integrative medicine" (IM)--is in essence an argumentum ad populum; i.e., an appeal to popularity. Specifically, they like to use the variant of argumentum ad populum known as the "bandwagon effect," in which they try to persuade patients and physicians that they should get with the IM program because, in essence, everyone else is doing it and it's sweeping the nation. Not coincidentally, this is one type of method of persuasion much favored…

Starchild Abraham Cherrix: The elephant in the room

I hadn't intended to mention this case again for a while, but an article in Stats.org brought up a point that, although I had somewhat alluded to it, I hadn't really explicitly addressed. It has nothing to do with the judicial decision, the Cherrixes' successful appeal for a new trial and the stay ordered by the higher court, or any the legal issues involved with the case. It has to do with the atrocious reporting of this case by the mainstream media. In other words, it has to do with how the case has been framed, which has been essentially a near total success for the Cherrixes and those who…

I do not think that study shows what you think it shows

Of all the cranks, quacks, antivaccinationists, and pseudoscientists that I've encountered (and applied a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to) over the years, there are a few who belong in the top tier—or, if you prefer, the bottom tier. They stick out in my memory for a variety of reasons, either through their sheer crankitude on a variety of subjects (such as Mike Adams), sheer persistence on one subject (such as Jake Crosby or any of the denizens of the antivaccine crank blogs Age of Autism or The Thinking Moms' Revolution), or fame for promoting quackery (Joe Mercola). One of these…

Chris Christie and Rand Paul's pandering to antivaccinationists: Is the Republican Party becoming the antivaccine party?

"I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice as well. So that’s a balance the government has to decide.” -- NJ Governor Chris Christie, February 2, 2015 "The state doesn't own the children. Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom." -- Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), February 2, 2015 Longtime readers know that I lived in central New Jersey for eight and a half years before taking an opportunity to return to my hometown just under seven years ago. Having spent the better part of a decade there, I think I understand New Jersey, at last the northern and…

Makin’ ’em sweat

Poor Adnan Oktar. The New Humanist published an exposé, and he and his organization are clearly freaking out. I've been getting several near-hysterical emails a day from the Turkish creationist mouthpiece, Seda Aral, insisting in many different font colors that the accusations are baseless and are a sign that the humanist movement is melting down. They've also come out with these stilted videos where Oktar goes page by page through the New Humanist. Man. That looks like a really good magazine. And then the creationists have produced a web page that claims to address criticisms of Oktar.…

The Deep Rifts simply call us unto the breach once more

I hereby declare this the official theme of the whimpering, pathetic, anti-atheist backlash of 2009: there are Deep Rifts in atheism. It's all over the place, and it's a little weird. YOU would think, wouldn't you, that one of the principal attractions of atheism would be the complete absence of schisms. Where the devout always seem to be working themselves up into a frenzy over some obscure theological point, non-believers can glide through life, absolved, as they are, of the need to negotiate the terms of their disbelief. If there's no God, there is no message. And if there's no message,…

Ideals - Abstract Integers

When I first talked about rings, I said that a ring is an algebraic abstraction that, in a very loose way, describes the basic nature of integers. A ring is a full abelian group with respect to addition - because the integers are an abelian group with respect to addition. Rings add multiplication with an identity - because integers have multiplication with identity. Ring multiplication doesn't include an inverse - because there is no multiplicative inverse in the integers. But a ring isn't just the set of integers with addition and multiplication. It's an abstraction, and there are lots of…

Fields, Characteristics, and Prime Numbers

When we start looking at fields, there are a collection of properties that are interesting. The simplest one - and the one which explains the property of the nimbers that makes them so strange - is called the characteristic of the field. (In fact, the characteristic isn't just defined for fields - it's defined for rings as well.) Given a field F, where 0F is the additive identity, and 1F is the multiplicative identity, the characteristic of the field is 0 if and only if no sequence of adding 1F to itself will ever result in 0F; otherwise, the characteristic is the number of 1Fs you need to…

Robobugs: Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean...

...they're after you? Are we being spied upon by bug-like robots? There have been three independent sightings according to the Washington Post: Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month. "I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects." Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too. "I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said…

Is the Microbiome Being Driven by the Right Biologists?

Earlier this week, I attended the International Human Microbiome Consortium Meeting (the human microbiome consists of the organisms that live on and in us). I'm not sure to make of the whole microbiome initiative, but one thing is clear to me: this is being driven by the wrong group of scientists. Instead of being directed by biologists (medical primarily) who have devised a set of important questions, and want to use the power of high throughput genomics, including metagenomics which sequences of all the DNA in a specimen--bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, and, yes, human (which raises…

How Experts Really Speak

The Mad Biologist digs bloggers who are very mad. Before we get to the Mad blogger Grand Moff Texan (aka "The Asshole of the Gods. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it."), I've noticed that the Punditocracy and the celebrity media have the disturbing habit of dismissing out of hand the measured opinions of bonafide experts (see global warming or anything on Fox News). What always amazes me is not the dismissal, but the utter arrogance that underlies it. This doesn't just apply to science-although we can all think of some real doozies. I think this arrogance is even worse when…

Peter Pan and the Iraq War

'Will-based' foreign policy making seems to have overcome the modern conservative movement (maybe it should be called 'realpolitik backlash'...). There is the constant belief--and it has to be called a belief since it doesn't appear to be evidence-based--that if we just wish hard enough, the tactics, strategy, and logistics will simply solve themselves. But reality doesn't work that way. In 1944, the British 1st Paratroop Division dropped into and around the city of Arnhem, with the goal of taking and holding the Arnhem bridge until relief arrived. For many of reasons, the relief didn't…

Sick Jewish Veteran Harassed By Evangelicals

The 'godly' singing "The Old Rugged Cross." Or something The last thing most people in the Coalition of the Sane want when they are being treated for a serious illness in the hospital to have the staff try to convert you to another religion. And when you force a sick patient to choose between following the dictates of his religion or not eating in an effort to convert him, that is not 'godly', that is inhumane. It's also par for the course for Christopathic Uruk-hai. From the Des Moines Register (italics mine): U.S. Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans…

The accommodation of religion

The Islamic Republic of Harvard?: But the decision put Harvard in the awkward position of having to arbitrate what constitutes legitimate religious practice. Marine claims there was a "moral and ethical responsibility" for the administration to act on this request, telling the Associated Press last month that "it's a pretty big breach of their moral and religious code ... and it's just not possible for them to be in a mixed environment." But according to Aljawhary, "It's not like we can't work out when men are around." In fact, "we were not 'demanding' women-only hours," Aljawhary said. If…

Paul Krugman Is Very Shrill

As a fellow card-carrying member of the Ancient, Holy and High Hermeneutic Order of the Shrill, I mean that as a compliment: There aren't many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief -- of the black-humor variety -- in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy. A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. "Has the G.O.P. gone insane?" they ask. Why, yes, it has. But this isn't something that just happened, it's…

"Vigiliance of Sexual Safety" and Pestering Women in Elevators

There's a lot heat that has been shed over the last week based on what struck me as a brief comment by Rebecca Watson about getting hit on in an elevator at 4am, as part of a much longer vlog: Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don't do that. You know, I don't really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and -- don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes…

How Idiot Male Rape Apologizers Ruin Life for the Rest of Us

By way of Atrios, we come across this hideous display of victim blaming: Many of the tragedies mentioned about spring from what I see as a naïve faith in the power of the modern sexual revolution. Women today are technically free to do all sorts of things that were forbidden to their grandmothers, which is all well and good. But in practice, rape and the notion of sexual conquest persist for the same reason that warfare persists: because the human animal-- especially the male animal-- craves drama as much as food, shelter and clothing. Conquering an unwilling sex partner is about as much…

Ways to skin the cousin marriage issue

Another article about cousin marriage in the UK. The issue here is simple; you have a National Health Service which covers everyone, and doctors are noticing that Pakistanis are overrepresented in many cases of recessive diseases. The culprit is probably cousin marriage. Here are two points which are both valid: 'In our local school for deaf children, half the pupils are of Asian origin though Asians only form about 20 per cent of the population,' said Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley. 'I also know of several sets of parents in my constituency who are cousins and whose children are severely…

Jumping genes = new species?

As of this moment RPM has not commented on a new paper in Science, Gene Transposition as a Cause of Hybrid Sterility in Drosophila. Here is an accessible summary. The basic idea is found in the abstract: ...Genomic and molecular analyses show that JYAlpha transposed to the third chromosome during the evolutionary history of the D. simulans lineage. Because of this transposition, a fraction of hybrids completely lack JYAlpha and are sterile, representing reproductive isolation without sequence evolution. JYAlpha is implicated in sperm motility. In D. melanogaster is located on the 4th…

Top 25 science books

Discover is doing a "25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time" list. The great thing about stuff like this is it gets you thinking, talking, and exposes what your priorities are. There isn't a canonical list with a clear rank order. I mean, yeah, Principia is the bomb, but people can make a case for The Origin of Species. Below is the list from Discover, and below the fold my quick & dirty re-order. Hope it tells you something about me. 1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie] 3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (…

The election - the monkey wrench

It's past midnight here on the West coast, and I'm about go to sleep, so, I'm going to say something really quickly about the election. Wow. Really wow. Myself, I'm not super excited about the Democrats winning the House, and quite likely the Senate (it'll come down to the Virginia recount and Tester holding on to the lead in Montana). I'm not particularly aligned with either party, but at this point I'm mildly happy because I'm aiming for gridlock. I don't think our country is going in the right direction, or, more precisely, in any genuine direction. George W. Bush came into office in…

NASA's Michael Griffin: How Not to Talk to Your (Future) Boss

I think NASA director Mike Griffin wants to lose his job (not a good idea these days...): NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is "not qualified" to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned. In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to witnesses. In addition, Griffin is…

The Tea Party and the High-Misinformation Content Voter

I want to follow up on something from a post about the educational failure committed by our political press corps (italics original; boldface added): That so many people lack even a basic understanding of how government works and what it does--even among likely voters (keep in mind that your average Tea Buggerer spends a lot of time gathering 'information' and is a likely voter)--is a catastrophic failure of our news media. The more I roll that around in my head, the more terrified I get. For those not familiar with wonky political terms, a low information content voter is a euphemism for…

Why I'm Not Worried About the Never-Ending Democratic Primary

In the midst of all of the gnashing of teeth and wailing of DOOOOOMMMM!!! because of the never-ending Democratic primary, I still think a contest up to the convention is a good thing (and I've always thought so). There's one thing many pundits as well as Democratic primary partisans seem to have forgotten: Most Democrats are thrilled that for the first time in nearly thirty years, most of us actually cast a primary vote that matters, even those of us whose favorite candidates dropped out. As Digby notes: I realize that a good many people think I'm living in cloud cuckoo-land, but apparently…

Deeeeeepaaaak!

Deepak Chopra recently gave a talk in which he rattled off all of the amazing assertions below. The essential nature of the material world is not material; the essential nature of the physical world is not physical; the essential stuff of the universe is non-stuff. Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition -- and we can call it the superstition of materialism -- which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe. This is a fundamental misunderstanding  that perception is in the brain. It's not in the brain;…