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This is one way to narrow the field of viable Democratic candidates

If this is true—that the Edwards campaign has caved to pressure from the right wing—he has lost my vote. The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps -- John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned. The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare's Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan "anti-Catholic vulgar…

Amy Kobuchar Brings Down the House

This was at the Washington Press Club. A sample of her jokes: "I'd like to make this as short as Bill Richardson's tenure as Commerce Secretary," she opened. "I raised $17,000 from ex-boyfriends -- true story! I know that is the record in the Senate, but in the House it's held by Barney Frank." Roars of laughter, even from Frank. Then she turned to the "great reporters? in this room -- all of whom got scooped on the John Edwards story by the National Enquirer." She promised not to be too rough with them, though, since "I'm all about protecting endangered species." Perhaps best of…

Scientology: It's back on You Tube

Well, not the actual Scientology, but rather, the Anti-Scientology videos that had been pulled. According to The Standard, YouTube may be rethinking their process for handling DMCA takedown notices this week, after receiving thousands of bogus notices alleging illegal content on the site. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), over a period of 12 hours, from Thursday night to Friday morning, YouTube received over 4000 notices, all for content critical of the Church of Scientology. The notices were sent from an organization by the name of American Rights Counsel, LLC.…

Straight Talk From the Financial Times

And let us conclude the week's blogging with some wise words from the Financial Times: Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, evolution is under sustained attack from creationist theories inspired by fundamentalist religion -- sometimes dressed in scientific clothing as “intelligent design”. Opinion polls show that more Americans believe in Biblical creation than evolution, and even in Europe's relatively secular societies a growing minority rejects Darwin. Many scientists and liberal politicians regard the rising creationist tide as a side-show that they can safely ignore. They are wrong…

Noctilucent Clouds

Some unexpected demands have impeded my progress on the "transgenic drug" series.  I've written part of what I planned to post today.  But I want to work on it some more.   In the meantime, here is a picture of noctilucent clouds, from href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060718.html">NASA's APOD site.  We are all relieved that the space shuttle Discovery has landed safely.  It turns out that the space shuttle may be one reason that these unusual cloud formations occur. As explained by NASA: Noctilucent Clouds Over Sweden Credit: href="mailto:%20clearskies%20at%…

US Navy study: seven years of north pole summer ice left?

Today we hear about a new study suggesting the north pole's summer ice will be gone within seven years. Not, 40, not 30, not even 13, but seven. I can't find any information from the actual study. All that we know comes from a brief mention in Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, so this should be filed under "wait until further confirmation before getting excited and/or alarmed." But it does fit a trend of increasing temporal proximity. Here's what Gore said: Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the…

Have your Wii and eat it

(By Jacqui Monaghan) I am not ashamed to admit that I have a crush on Martha Stewart. I mean, come on: with those luscious locks, knitted ponchos, freshly baked cookies, and that home in the Hamptons, what's not to love? Apparently, even cybergeeks love her. This week, Martha will go where Bob Villa hasn't gone before: the cover of Wired magazine, icing a--get this--Wii cake. Aside from the fact that the words "buttercream" and "fondant icing" have now been printed, in ink, in Wired, and aside from the fact that, well, the cake looks like a Wii console (only tastier), there is another…

Lies wrapped in piety

I sat through another horrid performance from our creationist visitor, Terry Mortenson. He lied and lied and lied for a couple of hours again, and once again refused to answer questions. Once again, I twittered my way through it. My student, Kele Cable, was also there, and he has a blog entry where he lists all of the fallacies from Mortenson's talk from last evening. One amusing thing tonight was that a couple of nice Christian ladies had a 'conversation' with me. Have you ever considered the possibility that Christianity is true? Have you weighed what you have to gain from life with Christ…

New D-Wave CEO?

Hm, looks like D-wave has a new CEO. Not sure when this occurred (?), but a reader sends along an email with an announcement from a recruiting (?) firm: Lonergan Partners is pleased to announce that Vern Brownell has been named President and Chief Executive Officer of D-Wave Systems.... Vern Brownell joins D-Wave from Egenera, were he held various executive roles including CEO. Egenera was founded by Mr. Brownell in 2000 based on his experiences as the Chief Technology Officer at Goldman Sachs, where he and his staff of 1,300 were responsible for worldwide technology infrastructure including…

Thirty-one smiling faces in Chicago, thanks to you

Good news here. We’ve managed to fully fund our first proposal - thirty first graders in a magnet school in Chicago (one with 95% high poverty) will be benefiting from your generosity so far. On behalf of their teacher, I thank you. Of course, we’re not done yet. As an incentive, consider these extracts from letters I received from teachers last year whose students benefited from our efforts: I cannot thank you enough for funding this project for my students! I told them that our new aquarium is on its way, and they can scarcely contain their excitement. Your generosity will enhance their…

Baby Manta Born in Japan

The Japanese public watched in fascination last month as the first manta ray birth in captivity was broadcast nationwide from the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. Adult manta rays are large with ,Aeuwingspans,Aeu up to 25,Aeo across. However, baby manta rays are hardly guppies, emerging from their mother after a 374 day gestation period with a 6,Aeo wingspan. Wrapped like a burrito, the baby manta pops out and instinctively begins to beat its fins. Live manta birth from Japanese television Unlike other rays whose mouths are on the underside of their bodies, manta ray's mouths are forward facing.…

Sound production in Thyrohyrax

From Duke University: Paleontologists at the Duke Lemur Center have assembled a new picture of a 35-million-year-old fossil mammal -- and they even have added a hint of sound. By painstakingly measuring hundreds of specimens of a fossil mammal called Thyrohyrax, recovered from the famous fossil beds of Egypt's Fayum Province, the researchers determined that males of this now-extinct species -- and only males -- had oversized, swollen lower jaws shaped much like a banana. Further, the team speculated, the animals may have used the balloonlike structural chamber that shaped their bizarre jaws…

Protecting The Great Lakes

In a prior post summarizing the annual Michigan Physiological Society Meeting, I briefly mentioned the work from Adrian Vasquez, Milad Qazazi, Andrew Failla, Sanjay Rama, Samuel Randall, and Jeffrey Ram from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI). They were exploring the diversity of water mites, a type of arachnid, in Western Lake Erie and they found a mixture of both native and invasive species. Dr. Jeffrey Ram, Professor at the School of Medicine at Wayne State University, was kind enough to share images from their work. They refer to these particular water mites as "charismatic microfauna"…

Where ants take care of business

Image from www.antforum.nl Many species of ants are known for being rather clean by disposing of their dead outside of the nest and placing other wastes, like bits of food, in refuse chambers. Dr. Tomer J. Czaczkes (University of Regensburg) was surprised therefore to see "dark patches" build up in plaster nests that housed black garden ants (Lasius niger). Dr. Czaczkes suspected that these dark patches might actually be feces. He tested this hypothesis by adding food coloring to their diet. Perhaps not surprisingly, the dark patches changed to shades of blue and red. Several theories…

Check out this flying dinosaur

This newly discovered feathered dinosaur, Changyuraptor yangi, was built like a modern airplane. Illustration by S. ABRAMOWICZ, DINOSAUR INSTITUTE, NHM. Photo of fossil by: Luis Chiappe Dinosaur Institute, NHM as published in the USA Today The discovery of  this non-avian dinosaur, Changyuraptor yangi, that lived 125 million years ago suggests that flight came before birds. The fossil was discovered in the Liaoning Province of northeastern China by Luis Chiappe from the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, CA. At nearly 4 feet long, it is the largest so-called 4-winged dinosaur…

The Big Smoking Bong of Harvard Neuroscientists

Mind Hacks has alerted us to some amazing engineering from Harvard University: A team from Harvard Medical School are interested in how smoked marijuana affects the brain, but have come to the inevitable conclusion that it's actually quite hard smoking a joint when you're lying on your back being brain scanned. So the research team put their heads together (!), and realised they needed to design a bong - a water pipe for smoking marijuana - safe to use in an MRI scanner. This isn't a trivial task. Apart from being free of metal parts that could be affected by the MRI scanner's strong magnet,…

Anakin Skywalker has Borderline Personality Disorder

Ahh silly research - gotta love it! SAN DIEGO -- Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, suffers from a controversial mental condition and could use some couch time in a shrink's office, a team of researchers declared this week. "He's suffering. And he's suffering from a disorder," said Dr. Eric Bui, a psychiatrist in Toulouse, France, who co-wrote a study that diagnosed one of the most villainous and heroic characters in the Star Wars canon as having borderline personality disorder. According to the authors, who reported their findings at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in…

Fiji's Tough Library

I went to the library at the University of the South Pacific (USP) today. Man, they're tough (see photo). If I had gone to USP, I'd be broke. For a first noise offense, the library demands a ~$20 fine. Second offense, the fine is doubled. Third offense, suspension of your library card for a month. No bags can be taken in. Books from the Pacific collection must be checked out one at a time and not removed the premises. But, that said, the library is fully intact and things are where you want them to be. I also found some tidbits in the National Archives from historical colonial documents…

Up from the comments: wisdom on chemotherapy in the Cherrix case

The beauty of being here on ScienceBlogs.com is being part of an international discussion with so many folks from diverse backgrounds. So, on many occasions, commentors have more to say than I, with both broader perspective and greater brevity. In our recent discussion of the Virginia teenage cancer patient who wishes to refuse conventional cancer chemotherapy, Terra Sig reader, Ruth, weighed in as follows: My last paying job was doing patient follow-up at a major cancer center. Every year we had to contact former patients to see how they were doing. Some patients from the 1970's are now…

Pareidola rules!

New images of the Cydonia "face" show, as expected, that it's just another piece of Areology, not a monument left by aliens. But this will not stop the woowoos from claiming that this is evidence of long-gone alien monument building. In a classic case of pareidola, the same psychological process that lets people find Jesus in a pancake or Mary in a fence post, Cydnoia is beyond rational thought. Pareidola is also the reason why people see patterns of design in living things. It suits us to see evidence of intention in the living world, because that's what we evolved to do. We are supposed to…

Casual Fridays -- How interruptable are you?

One of my most difficult challenges as I work at home on Cognitive Daily and other projects is to keep focused on the task at hand. The internet, with its myriad distractions, is just a click away. It used to be that I could just head to a coffee shop with my laptop to get away from the internet, but now even that refuge is gone: My home internet service provider now offers free access from most coffee shops. I've had to discover new ways to remove myself from the distraction of the internet. I'm often surprised when the latest "convenient" device is unveiled allowing unprecedented internet…

I am the Atom!

My friend mdvlst just reminded me that there is actually an obscure DC superhero with my name, and moreover, she's a scientist superhero: Jessica Palmer is the costumed super-hero known as the Atom and hails from a parallel reality known as Earth-15. A child prodigy, Jessica first began studying science at age five when she attempted to prove the existence of a Multiverse. At age eight she graduated from M.I.T. and by the time she was eighteen, she was adventuring as a costumed super-hero. As the Atom, Jessica has the ability to condense her size and mass, enabling her to shrink to small…

An interview with the woman who can't forget

The WBUR/NPR programme On Point has a very interesting interview with Jill Price (right), a 42-year-old woman from Los Angeles who has a "non-stop, uncontrollable and automatic" episodic memory. Known in the scientific literature as A.J., Price is the first documented case of hyperthymestic syndrome, a condition in which autobiographical memories cannot be forgotten. Consequently, Price recalls every miniscule detail of her life since the age of 14, "like a movie" which is played over and over again on a daily basis. Since Price's case was first reported in 2006, a handful of people have…

Postdoc Carnival

Through our newest blog Highly Allochthonus I've learned that there is a Postdoc Carnival. Check out what blogging postdocs have to complain about say at Post Doc Ergo Propter Doc. And I've discovered that The Daily Transcript has been reviewed (about a month ago) at BlogCritics. Here's what they have to say: The Daily Transcript is a blog by Alex Palazzo, a "postdoctoral fellow working in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School." The material is highly focused on what it's like to be a functional research scientist. Posts rarely stray from the central theme of lab life…

Conferencia Mundial de los Pueblos sobre el Cambio Climático y los Derechos de la Madre Tierra

Global People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth Beginning Monday, April 19th, some 15,000 people from around the world along with representatives of 70 governments, mainly from Least Developed Countries, will meet in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. The conference will be an unprecedented event bringing countries affected by climate change together with experts and activists working to find solutions. "The main point of the conference is to convince developed countries to make and meet…

Daniel Son is an editorial intern for Townhall.com.

Daniel Son writes While an inordinate amount of attention is given to distant, theoretical threats of global warming, a tragically minimal amount of attention is given to the life and death problems of today, some of which directly result from policies enacted to stave off the "disastrous" conditions of global climate change. A clear example of what can result from bad policies can be found in environmentalists blocking DDT use in African nations; DDT has reduced malaria-related deaths by 75% in countries who used DDT programs. An African dies from malaria every 40 seconds--the equivalent of…

Another Reason to Consider Open Access

Jim Hu gives us another reason for scientists to consider publishing in open access journals: Sometimes I'd like to view your papers while I'm off campus and at a study section. Of course, if you're one of my grants, I have already accessed your paper from home. But if I can't access the paper from the NSF building in Arlington, or from a hotel where an NIH panel is meeting, I can't use information from it to argue against some other panelists misinterpretation of what you did. Publishers who are reluctant to go full open access might consider providing a means for NSF and NIH reviewers to…

Cut and Paste Bible Towards Reason

"I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." --Thomas Jefferson, 1819 Thomas Jefferson's audacious act of cutting and pasting passages from various translations of the New Testament has always fascinated me. Why did he do it? From The Smithsonian Museum of American History: {with my emphasis} At seventy-seven years of age, Thomas Jefferson constructed his book by cutting excerpts from six printed volumes published in English, French, Latin, and Greek of the Gospels of the New Testament. He arranged them to tell a chronological and edited story of Jesus's life, parables, and moral…

Volaticotherium antiquus

This sad jumble of bones is all that remains of Volaticotherium antiquus, a small rat-sized mammal that was recently dug up in China. There are two particularly outstanding things about this creature. One is that browner layer in the rock: that isn't an artifact, it's a bit of soft tissue that was preserved, called a patagium. A patagium is a thin membrane stretched between the limbs, and is used for…flying! This animal probably lived much like a modern flying squirrel (although it is definitely not a squirrel), gliding from tree to tree. The second surprise is the age. This is a Mesozoic…

Lamalera Fisherman Take On Whale in Hand to Fin Combat

Lamalera fisherman do things the old fashion way. They track down a 75ft-long sperm whale in two small hand-made boats and battle the beast with duri flensing knives and spears. Yeah that's tough. The whale, called Koteklema by the locals, provides numerous resources for the village. The villagers blame lack of harmony between different clans for their lack of [recent] success. "If there is no peace among us, there will be no good whaling," said villager Anna Bataona...The people believe in the harmony between life in the sea and the island. Peace on the land makes for good hunting from…

Plastic Trash Lines the Pacific

One of our astute readers pointed us to this piece published in today's The independent titled The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan. IF EVER there was a reason to join Craig in his Just One Thing Challenge. Now is the time! "A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said. The vast expanse of debris - in effect the world's largest rubbish dump - is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup"…

Inflation is Good For You

Is inflation really so bad? The great scourge of the American economy - and the economic phenomenon that gives Greenspan and Bernanke nightmares - turns out to have some pretty progressive side-effects. This paper is from the December 2006 issue of the Journal of Political Economy: This study quantitatively assesses the effects of inflation through changes in the value of nominal assets. It documents nominal asset positions in the United States across sectors and groups of households and estimates the wealth redistribution caused by a moderate inflation episode. The main losers from…

Eruptions out of the office

I will be away from Eruptions for the next 2 weeks or so. I won't be on vacation, I will actually be out on volcanoes themselves doing some much-needed fieldwork. It is a three volcano tour, starting with a trip to Lassen Peak to get a guided view with Michael Clynne of the USGS (the world expert on the volcano, the last Cascade volcano to erupt other than Saint Helens). Then follows a trip to Mt. Hood with Adam Kent from Oregon State (my doctoral alma mater) in Oregon to sample some of the youngest flows that are only a few hundred years old. Geologists from Oregon DOGAMI (Department of…

Comments of the Week #160: From the edge of the Universe to the first-ever nebula

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.” -Marie Curie There's nothing like looking into the deepest mysteries the Universe has to offer, and trying to come up with the explanation and understanding we can based on all the available data. That's what we're all about here at Starts With A Bang! It's less than two weeks until my talk at the May 24th event…

Comments of the Week #137: from quantum entanglement to string theory's basics

“A thing may be of deeper impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be more deeply underwater--but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.” -Brian McGreevy With everything going on in the world, it's always a wonderful reminder that here at Starts With A Bang! we're eternally focused on the cosmic story of what we know and how we know it. Regardless of what direction you want to push society, increasing our knowledge and understanding ought to be one thing we all agree on. This past week, here's a look back at what we've covered: What's…

Comments of the Week #114: From a 5th force to dark matter and life

“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.” -Muhammad Ali It may have been another fun week here at Starts With A Bang, where I've just learned something fun: I have an Erdös-Bacon number of nine! On the academic side, I published with Jim Fry, who published with Jim Peebles, who published with Bob Dicke, who published with Albert Einstein, who published with Ernst Straus, who published with Paul Erdös, giving me an Erdös number of six. But on the TV side, I was on Good Day Sacramento with Cody Stark, who appeared with Dolly Parton on Good Day…

Folk wanderings in "the Heartland"

In the early 20th century the geographer Halford Mackinder posited that the key to world domination lay in the control of the Eurasian Heartland. This was in sharp contrast to Alfred Mahan's emphasis on the role of naval power. Whatever the applicability of these geopolitical frameworks in the modern era, it is interesting to observe their precedents in the ancient and medieval world. The rise of Rome was facilitated by the Mediterranean essential role as a conduit for communication and trade which connected the cities which were the foci of the Empire. Easy transport of cheap grain from…

A big day for cranks

Today is a big day for cranks in two separate areas, but the interesting thing is the similarity of the responses. First we have Casey Luskin of the "top think tank" the Discovery Institute (wow, they must be right up there with Cato and CEI!) blathering about paleontologists don't know anything because of the self-correcting nature of science. After this latest find, one researcher realized its implications and was quick to quash any doubts this may spark regarding human evolution, stating: "All the changes to human evolutionary thought should not be considered a weakness in the theory of…

The Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting, part II

On to more of my thoughts about the outstanding Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting, held at the Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie (Bavarian State Palaeontological Collection - BSPG) in Munich last week. For part I go here, and for initial thoughts on what a neat conference it was go here. For those of you wondering (and for those of you that know that the pterosaur meeting was the third of three conferences I attended during August and September 2007), my plan is to talk about all three conferences, but in reverse order. Once I finish talking about pterosaurs, I'll do SVPCA…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 24 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: When One Hemisphere Takes Control: Metacontrol in Pigeons (Columba livia): Vertebrate brains are composed of two hemispheres that receive input, compute, and interact to form a unified response. How the partially…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 13 new articles published last night and another 12 new articles published today in PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: An Intracellular Antioxidant Determines the Expression of a Melanin-Based Signal in a Bird: To understand how traits used in animal communication evolved and are maintained as honest signals, we need to understand the mechanisms that prevent cheating. It has been proposed that honest signaling is…

Where Do All Those Pet Parrots Come From?

tags: parrots, pets, aviculture, bird breeding, avian, history A reader, Natasha, asked a question in response to a recent blog entry I made that is probably no doubt on the minds of at least a few others of my readers; Hi, Please don't take this badly, I really don't mean to troll. But I've noticed that a few Science bloggers, Jonah, Shelley and you, have parrots. I was wondering where you get them from, what their provenance is? Are they bred in the US? Or are they from the fairly huge amount of wildlife trade? If it is the second, does it make you in the least uncomfortable? Most of you…

Trump administration’s de-regulatory agenda: “Watching the American safety net unravel before our eyes”

In late July, while many of us were preoccupied with Republican Senators’ attacks on healthcare, the Trump administration released its first regulatory agenda (technically, the Current Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions). These routine updates are published so the public can see what they can anticipate from federal agencies in the way of rulemaking. (Celeste Monforton has been tracking the Department of Labor regulatory agenda for years.) The Trump administration’s first entry into this genre is better described as a de-regulatory agenda. It’s a dizzying array of delays,…

Dark Energy, Dark Flow, and can we explain it away?

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before." -Edgar Allen Poe Earlier this week, the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced for the discovery that the Universe is not only expanding, but that this expansion is accelerating! What does an accelerated expansion physically mean? If all you had in the Universe was some initial expansion and the mutual gravitational attraction of everything in it, you'd expect that as an object got farther and farther away from you, over time, its apparent motion away from…

Complex eyes in the Cambrian

I got a letter from a creationist today, claiming that "Darwinism is falsified," based on an article in Nature. It's kind of amazing; this article was just published today, and the metaphorical digital ink on it is barely metaphorically dry, and creationists are already busily mangling it. It's a good article describing some recent fossil discoveries, found in a 515 million year old deposit in South Australia. Matthew Cobb has already summarized the paper, so I'll be brief on the details, but it's very cool. What was found was a collection of arthropod eye impressions, probably from cast-off…

Grandma Manimal

Nothing gets the blood boiling like a manimal. For many people, the idea of breaching the human species barrier--to mingle our biology with that of an animal--seems like a supreme affront to the moral order. In his January state of the union address, President Bush called for a ban on "creating human-animal hybrids." These so-called chimeras, according to their opponents, devalue humanity by breaching our species barrier. "Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale," Bush declared. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas expanded on…

Friday Random Ten

Sonic Youth, "Or": Very smooth for SY. But great. They're an amazing band. The Flower Kings, "Blue Planet": A typical track from one of my favorite neo-progressive rock bands. For the Flower Kings, this is a short one at only 10 minutes. The Clogs, "Lantern": once again, one of my favorite classical-leaning post-rock bands. Slow, beautiful track, featuring steel drums and oboe, and even some light vocals. Mariliion, "Fantastic Place": one of my least favorite tracks from an amazing Marillion album. Overall, the "Marbles" album was fantastic, but this track just leaves me cold. Darol…

States' Rights: Amanda Speak, You Listen!

Amanda Marcotte reminds us of the origin of the states' rights claim (italics mine): For the slower (willfully and not) people out there, the rhetoric about protecting the innocent states from the all-powerful federal government--rhetoric that would have basically every stalwart Republican and Libertarian out there pumping his fist in solidarity--is referencing Alabama's "right" to prevent black people from voting, with violence if necessary. It's important to have long memories, because the language about "small government" and "states rights" is with us today, and there's no reason to think…

Man as an instrument & eugenics

There has been a lot of comment on the blogosphere about eugenics. From the Right, Ross Douthat here, here & here, from the Left Ezra Klein here, here & here, Kevin Drum here & Henry Farrell here. And from the libertarian angle the Elf here. Since a few of my posts were referenced I added a bit here & here. I think I'm pretty clear about "eugenics," and biological technologies. I'm not a "bio-utopian," but I think the future is coming and we need to grapple with it. I'm not scared of the word eugenics, but accept that the new biological technologies and choices will have…

YES, Introverts CAN Connect with Others

I've struggled with being introverted all of my life. I am not exactly shy (although I tend to be in many circumstances), but I am reserved. Many people find this intimidating, and I have been told many many times that I need to change my personality so other people will like me. Of course, this advice made me feel more uncomfortable rather than less, since I was constantly trying to ascertain what other people's expectations were and then attempting to fit in while simultaneously feeling like a complete fraud. So I avoided social situations whenever possible, spending most of my life by…