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Aetosaurs and whistle-blowing, the saga continues

Long time readers will, I'm sure, recall Tet Zoo's role as whistle-blower back in April 2007. The article that started all the trouble - The armadillodile diaries, a story of science ethics - was posted here. Well, as you'll know if you've seen today's Nature, a new article by Rex Dalton brings this story to wider attention... For those who haven't read the original Tet Zoo article and can't be bothered to do so now, the story is - to put it very briefly - that Spencer Lucas and some of his colleagues (Andy Heckert, Justin Spielmann and Adrian Hunt) at the New Mexico Museum of Natural…

Fun With Set Theory: Cantor's Diagonalization

While I've been writing about the Surreal numbers lately, it reminded me of some of the fun of Set theory. As a result, I've been going back to look at some old books. Since I've been enjoying it, I thought you folks would as well. Set theory, along with its cousin, first order predicate logic, is pretty much the foundation of nearly all modern math. You can construct math from a lot of different foundations, but axiomatic set theory is currently pretty much the dominant approach. (Although Topoi seem to be making some headway...) There's a reason for that. Set theory starts with some of…

Basics: Going Meta

In math and computer science, we have a tendency to talk about "going meta". It's actually a pretty simple idea, which tends to crop up in other places, as well. It's also one of my favorite concepts - the idea of going meta is just plain cool. (Not to mention useful. There's a running joke among computer scientists that the solution to any problem is to add a level of indirection - which is programmer-speak for going meta on constructs inside of a programming language. Object-orientation is, in some sense, just an example of how to go meta on procedures. Haskell type-classes are an…

Basics: Calculus

Calculus is one of the things that's considered terrifying by most people. In fact, I'm sure a lot of people will consider me insane for trying to write a "basics" post about something like calculus. But I'm not going to try to teach you calculus - I'm just going to try to explain very roughly what it means and what it's for. There are actually two different things that we call calculus - but most people are only aware of one of them. There's the standard pairing of differential and integral calculus; and then there's what we computer science geeks call a calculus. In this post, I'm only…

Present at the Future

tags: book review, science essays, technology, Present at the Future, Ira Flatow Many months ago, I was signed up for the HarperCollins email list that briefly describes their books that are hot off the presses, prior to their public release. The publisher then holds a contest where they ask you to email them a little essay describing why you would be the best person to review a particular title in their list, then they choose the winners and mail the books. Even though HarperCollins published several scientific books this past year, including one that dealt with evolution, my essay was…

Wow! Even WORDS Evolve!

tags: researchblogging.org, linguistics, evolution, irregular verbs, languages When I was an undergrad, I almost took a degree in linguistics because I was so fascinated by languages, especially by the rate and patterns of change that languages undergo. So of course, I was excited to read two fascinating papers that were published in this week's issue of Nature. These papers find that individual words evolve in a predictable manner and this rate of evolution depends upon their frequency of use. Further, this predictability can be defined mathematically. To test this hypothesis, one group…

Why Do Wasps Do That? The Molecular Mechanism of Eusociality

tags: researchblogging.org, Brown paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus, hymenoptera, evolution, eusociality, social behavior Brown paper wasp , Polistes fuscatus. Fairport, New York, USA. 2003. Many thanks to Alex Wild for sharing his amazing images here. Thanks to Elizabeth Tibbetts for the species identification. [larger view] Eusociality, or "true social behavior", is the most extreme form of cooperative sociality known. Due to its seemingly altruistic nature, eusociality has provided many interesting challenges for evolutionary theory. Eusociality, as exemplified by ants, bees and wasps, is…

Women, Science, and Publishing Revisited

tags: researchblogging.org, female scientists, science publishing, double-blind review, single-blind review, cultural observation, gender bias, sexism, feminism A microbiologist at work. Image: East Bay AWIS. A few months ago, a controversy occurred in the blogosphere regarding whether scientific papers whose first author is female are discriminated against during the peer-review process, and the suggestion was to institute double-blind peer review as a way to mitigate this possibility. "Double-blinding" as this is sometimes referred to, is a process where a manuscript that has been…

Not Extinct Yet

The Good News: Not extinct -- YET! Portrait of the Sumatran Rhinoceros, Didermoceros sumatrensis. Photo by Alain Compost (WWF-Canon). For those of you who like to read about endangered species that have somehow managed to survive despite our best efforts to exterminate them, I have some good news! A small but apparently viable population of the Sumatran rhinoceros subspecies, Didermoceros sumatrensis harrissoni, is now confirmed to exist in the northeast state of Sabah on the island of Borneo. The Sumatran rhino is comprised of several subspecies that are thought to be extinct throughout…

Goodbye, Beautiful Dream

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. -- Carl Sagan A trio of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Campephilus principalis. Adult male (left) and female (lower right). Painting by John James Audubon (1785-1851). With every day that passes, the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker looks more like an apparition or, more likely, a case of mistaken identity. Bird artist and ID expert, David Sibley, and several of his colleagues, Louis Bevier, Michael Patten, and Chris Elphick, published a rebuttal that was released today at 2pm EST by the top-tier journal, Science (this rebuttal should be…

Fast, Foamy and Furious

H1N1 swine 'flu is coming home, and it is a big hit on campus. With universities starting, and the weather cooling, the prospect for an early and nasty 'flu season was evident, and, amazingly, proactive measures were taken. The first signs were the free, stand-alone, water free, hand sanitizer dispensers, appearing in high traffic and food areas. Then came the Fast, Foamy and Furious! - signs that is. In the bathrooms. Apparently the best way to get people to lather up and scrub is to convince them to sing "Happy Birthday". Twice. Quietly. Annoyingly enough, this clearly works, since weeks…

Usher syndrome part IV: Clinical management and research directions

Guest Blogger Danio, one last time: Part I Part II Part III The current standard of pediatric care mandating that all newborns undergo hearing screenings has been applied successfully throughout much of the industrialized world. Early identification of hearing impairments gives valuable lead-time to parents and health care providers during which they can plan medical and educational interventions to improve the child's development, acquisition of language skills, and general quality of life. Up to 12% of children born with hearing loss have Usher syndrome. However, diagnosing Usher…

The Good Fairies of New York

tags: The Good Fairies of New York, Martin Millar, fantasy, humor, book review Immediately after I'd broken my arm, I found it impossible to concentrate for long periods of time (longer than five or ten minutes at a stretch) because of the intense pain or because of the haze caused by the pain medications. But nevertheless, I wanted to retreat into a book, so I decided to read a book that was completely different than my usual fare -- just for fun, of course. Thanks to one of my readers, I already had the perfect book in my possession; The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar (Brooklyn,…

New, first-of-its-kind Canadian study to chronicle the impact of occupational cancers

by Kim Krisberg Dr. Paul Demers says he frequently finds himself having to make the case for why studying workplace exposures to carcinogens is important. Oftentimes, he says, people believe such occupational dangers are a thing of the past. "A lot of people are still developing cancer and dying from cancer due to workplace exposures, but only a small fraction of those are compensated, so people may think the magnitude of this problem is small," said Demers, director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre in Ontario, Canada. "I wanted to have better data." And in just a few years, he will…

Worker safety rule stuck in White House black hole, disease risk persists

While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on April 12, 2012. The silica rule still has not come out. By Celeste Monforton More than 425 days—-that’s 14 months—-have passed since the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) a draft proposed regulation designed to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. The hazard is one of the oldest known causes of work-related lung disease, yet OSHA does not…

Broken water pipes and asbestos exposure in Houston

My fellow blogger Celeste Monforton has been working for the past several months with the Houston worker center Fe y Justicia to respond to outrageous employer behavior that exposed construction workers to asbestos and raised questions about how the city selects contractors. Earlier this week, Jeremy Rogalski and his investigative team colleagues at KHOU 11 News released a news story documenting what occurred. Last summer, a heat wave and drought in Texas dried out the soil so much that underground voids put pressure on Houston's aging water pipes. Six hundred water mains broke, creating an…

USDA gives us 30 more days to tell it why 175 birds-per-minute line speeds will take a toll on poultry workers

Gabriel Thompson writes today in The Nation about a summer job he had a few years back, working on the assembly line at a Pilgrim's Pride poultry plant in Alabama. The chickens flew by on hooks at 90 birds-per-minute as he sliced and cut the meat non-stop. It didn't take long for him to meet co-workers who suffered from painful and debilitating musculoskeletal disorders caused by the high-speed, repetitive work. Thompson writes: "One was unable to hold a glass of water; another had three surgeries on her wrists; a third had discovered, after a visit to the doctor, that her thumb joint had…

With friends like these.....White House throws OSHA under the bus

I was already tired of President Obama repeating the Republican's rhetoric about big, bad regulations, how they stifle job creation, put an unnecessary burden on businesses, and make our economy less competitive. He did so last month in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and in his State of the Union address. But yesterday, the White House went too far. In advance of the President's speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) threw two OSHA initiatives under the bus. Right after mentioning President Obama's January 18…

Are you subject to an “absence control program” at your job?

The phrase used in human resource circles is an “absence control program.” It's a program in which employees receive demerits company-determined infractions such as an absence or being late for a shift. If a worker accumulates too many demerits or "points," s/he is fired. I worked at a restaurant job in the 1980’s with this kind of program. Many absences such as having car trouble or calling in sick were considered excused absences by our managers so many of us never received any "points." But what I’ve been learning lately about these programs illustrates how some of them completely…

President Obama on the ACA: Many achievements, much left to do

In a Special Communication published in JAMA, President Obama assesses the Affordable Care Act's progress and recommends additional steps for elected officials to take to improve US healthcare. He notes that when he took office, more than 1 in 7 Americans lacked insurance coverage. Since the ACA's adoption, the uninsured rate has declined by 43%. Having 29 million people uninsured in this country is still shameful, but it's a big improvement over the 49 million uninsured in 2010. In addition to reducing uninsurance, Obama notes, "The law has also greatly improved health insurance coverage for…

"Holding it": Tyson, Perdue workers denied bathroom breaks

It wasn’t too long ago that OSHA issued a citation to Allen Harim Foods, a poultry producer in Delaware, for failing to give their workers access to the bathroom. “Employees were not granted permission to use them [toilets] and/or were not replaced at their lines, waiting up to 40 minutes to use lavatories.” Today, Oxfam America issued a report which suggests that “holding it” is a situation faced by workers throughout the poultry industry. It’s not just a problem for workers at lesser known companies like, Allen Harim. Workers employed by Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Sanderson Farms…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Raquel Rutledge follows up her in-depth investigation into diacetyl exposure among coffee plant workers with news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking into the hazardous exposures that some 600,000 people face as they work to roast, grind, package and serve coffee. Rutledge reports that in the wake of newspaper’s 2015 investigation, CDC is now conducting tests at facilities across the nation — in fact, the first test results from a coffee roasting facility in Wisconsin found very high levels of chemicals that have the…

New report investigates chemical safety inside the fragrance industry, calls for stronger oversight and disclosure

Take a quick look around your home and chances are you’ll find at least one product with an ingredient simply described as “fragrance.” But what exactly does that mean and is there anything harmful in the ubiquitous chemical cocktails we refer to as fragrance? Maybe. But the real answer is that it’s hard to know for sure — and that, say advocates, is bad for public health. “The problem with fragrance is a systemic one,” Alexandra Scranton, director of science and research at Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE), told me. “It’s a black box of an industry.” Scranton is the author of a new report…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Maquiladora workers (manufacturing workers) in Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, are at the center of a growing worker rebellion in border factories, which employ more than 69,000 people, are nearly all foreign-owned, and pay some of the lowest wages along the border, reports David Bacon in The Nation. In fact, manufacturing workers in Juárez typically make 18 percent less than the average manufacturing worker in one of Mexico’s border cities. Bacon reports: Ali Lopez, a single mother at the planton outside the ADC CommScope factory, describes grinding poverty. “…

Will DC get the country’s most generous paid family and medical leave?

Last week, District of Columbia Councilmembers David Grosso and Elissa Silverman, along with several colleagues, introduced the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015, which would establish the most generous system for paid leave within the US. It would allow covered DC workers to take up to 16 weeks of paid leave in a year, at full pay for those who make up to $52,000 annually, to address their own serious medical conditions, bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or deal with deployment-related issues. Emily Crockett of RH Reality Check explains the funding mechanism: The…

Judge greenlights class action suit, dismantles Uber’s employee classification arguments

The ride-hailing mobile app Uber is desperate to prove it’s nothing more than a technology platform that connects drivers and passengers. As long as it can classify its workers as independent contractors, it can sidestep a whole host of labor and wage laws. But a court ruling issued earlier this week could open the door to change all that. On Tuesday, a federal judge in San Francisco granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Uber’s classification of workers as independent contractors. The decision doesn’t rule on the question of whether Uber drivers should be classified as…

Ritual and Rationality

While reading up on the subject, I'm writing the introductory remarks for a study of Bronze Age sacrificial sites. In January I put a couple of paragraphs up here about the possibly redundant distinction between retrievable hoards and irretrievable sacrifices. Here's some more, about ritual and rational behaviour. Ritual and rationality As Richard Bradley has argued at length (1995), the distinction between ritual and domestic behaviour is not very helpful when dealing with prehistoric societies. One may easily think that "ritual" equals "irrational" and thus "functionally inexplicable".…

The US Libertarian party

Every now and again I say something, and someone replies with stuff about wild-eyed Libertarians, and I don't care because I don't know any of them. But anyway, via RS I ended up at lp.org and this seemed a reasonable chance to find out what they thought; so I ended up reading their platform. I urge you to; it is short, succinct, and quite readable; as well as being rather wild-eyed. As I know nothing about flavours of Libertarianism in the US of A, I'm going to assume they are typical or mainstream, for libertarians that is. I pick out a couple of things: schools, taxes and the environment…

What Exxon Knew and When, round three?

If you're feeling cheated out of round 2, its because it didn't seem terribly exciting. Round 1 refers, naturally. Round 3 is called Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models to which the obvious answer is "so what?" Confirming publically available information with other publically information available is hardly the stuff of deep dark secrets. There's an attempt right at the start to establish that Exxon "knew" what was going on: "The potential problem is great and urgent," Knisely wrote. Sounds serious? But Knisely was a summer intern. I mention this…

Tuvalu

On with the boring. Disclaimer: this is nit-picking, for the question "is Gore accurate?". On the wider issue, I'm with the judge and with RC: Gore is basically correct. First off, its not really Tuvalua, its vaguer: "that's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand" is what the judge has him saying (p 26). Which also fits a transcript NJ kindly pointed me to. Just in case we're in any doubt as to the tense Gore is using, the book rather helpfully has a double page spread with large letters for the hard-of-reading (p186-7) saying "Many residents of low…

Pat Boone's ACLU Lies

The Worldnutdaily, for some strange reason, has made Pat Boone - yes, that Pat Boone - a weekly columnist; I guess Perry Como was busy. Most of his columns are just plain embarrassing, of course, but this one about the ACLU was even worse than usual. Let's see if we can count how many lies, falsehoods and exaggerations he can pack into a single article. He starts by claiming that they favor "Eradication of any reference to the Ten Commandments or the Bible from public buildings or hillsides or even cemeteries." This is false. They have no objection to such things in cemetaries, as long as the…

Equal Access Cases and Late Night Ghouls

A follow up on my earlier post about the equal access case involving Good News Club and access to a school take home flyer program. Marci Hamilton, a respected legal scholar from Yeshiva University, asks an interesting question: How does one square this decision with the 4th Cir's willingness to permit the Wiccan woman to be excluded from delivering prayers at city council meetings? I'm blanking on the name of the latter case, but it would seem that equality is at issue in both cases, and the results would seem at first blush in conflict with each other. A very intriguing question. The case…

Luttig's Resignation: the Real Story?

Sandefur links to this article by Harvey Silvergate in Reason about J. Michael Luttig's resignation from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to become the chief counsel for Boeing. That article in turn refers to a piece in the Wall Street Journal that is no longer available, unfortunately. Both articles argue that Luttig's resignation was prompted by Luttig's anger at the administration's handling of the Padilla case. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold, beginning with Silvergate's explanation of the Padilla situation and how Luttig was involved: Simply put, after years of helping…

Government Funding and the Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine

A Federal district court in New York has ruled that a Bush administration requirement that any international agencies receiving funding for programs to combat AIDS must sign an anti-prostitution pledge is unconstitutional. See the ruling here. Two international groups filed suit against the US Agency for International Development (USAID), arguing that the restriction violates their first amendment rights. The restriction is found in a 2003 act called the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003. The problematic provision of the act was designed solely…

Revenge of the Pre-Meds

As the number of students taking physics who go on to major in physics is vanishingly small-- something like 3% of students in introductory physics take even one more class-- physics departments end up serving a number of different constituencies. There are students majoring in other sciences, future engineers, and then there are the pre-meds. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, the MCAT includes a section on physics. As a result, everybody who wants to go to medical school needs to take physics, so we teach a lot of future doctors (along with a lot of people I devoutly hope never to…

Curry's wide Sargasso Sea of Stupidity

This entire episode is so depressingly stupid that I almost threw the post away. But, courage! As my title suggests, this is a morass of stupidity, of interest only to the navel-gazers within the incestuous world of climate blogs. Anyone with an interest in the actual science should steer clear. Metaphorically: if you're starting from one side of the Sargasso Sea and wish to reach clear water on the other side, you're better off going round rather than pushing through and clearing an endless buildup of weed off your rudder. The motive for this was, now that I have a moment from the rowing to…

Curry jumps the shark

[Originally posted 27/7; updated a few times and now again (see end) so re-publishing with current date to push it to the top] It looks like it is finally time to announce Judith Curry's departure for the dark side, prompted by her comments at RC. I still think she has good intentions, at heart, but has been "captured by the septic narrative" or somesuch. In some respects this intervention is fairly typical of her previous stuff - which is to say, she mouths off without having done her homework, then tries to back off. But the direction she mouths off in is very revealing. So, where to start…

Kramnik vs. Deep Fritz

Vladimir Kramnik will receive a lengthy section in any book devoted to history's greatest chess players. He's been a top grandmaster for close to twnety years. He defeated the seemingly invincible Gary Kasparov in a straight-up match. He has successfully defended his title twice, both times coming from behind. So try to imagine the sting that comes from knowing the following position will forever be placed just below his name: This is the penultimate position from the second game of Kramnik's ongoing match against the top computer chess-playing program Deep Fritz. The dust has settled…

Why Physicists Disparage Philosophers, In Three Paragraphs

Periodically, some scientific celebrity from the physical sciences-- Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, say-- will say something dismissive about philosophy, and kick off a big rush of articles about how dumb their remarks are, how important philosophy is, and so on. Given that this happens on a regular basis, you might wonder why it is that prominent physicists keep saying snide things about philosophy. But never fear, the New York Times is here to help, with an op-ed by James Blachowicz, an emeritus philosopher from Loyola, grandly titled There Is No Scientific Methods. It's actually…

Fermi Pipeline Problems

There was some Twitter chatter the other night about a new arxiv paper called The Gender Breakdown of the Applicant Pool for Tenure-Track Faculty Positions at a Sample of North American Research Astronomy Programs: The demographics of the field of Astronomy, and the gender balance in particular, is an important active area of investigation. A piece of information missing from the discussion is the gender breakdown of the applicant pool for faculty positions. For a sample of 35 tenure-track faculty positions at 25 research universities advertised over the last few years in astronomy and…

What is this all about?

"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." -Randall of xkcd In January of 2008, I began writing this blog, Starts With A Bang, both for myself and for all of you, because we all have something in common. Image credit: © Stéphane Guisard, "Los Cielos de Chile", via astrosurf.com. The same planet, the same heavens, the same laws of nature and the same Universe are something that we all have in common. And all of us, no matter how intrinsically smart, talented, or brilliant our instincts are, come into this world knowing absolutely nothing about it. But…

When supernovae get too big!

"You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape." -Woodrow Wilson Without a doubt, one of the most spectacular light shows of the cosmos happens when stars burn out -- reaching the end of their normal life cycle -- and die in a great supernova explosion. We've spoken in the past about the main ways that these stars die. Either a very massive star -- something more than ten times as massive as our Sun -- reaches the end of its nuclear fuel, and its core collapses,…

More Willie Soon

The Willie Soon Story broke on Saturday night, having cloned off the front page of the Sunday New York Times into a few secondary sources. But we all saw it coming. Since then there has been quite a bit more written and there will be quite a bit more. The main thing I want to add to the discussion is this. It is clear that Willie Soon was taking piles of Big Fossil money for his climate research. It is clear that his research was widely discredited in the mainstream scientific community. It should have been easy to check to see if he was using the money properly (mainly, with respect to…

Sins of Our Fathers, a New Novel by Shawn Otto

Sins of Our Fathers, by Shaw Otto, is coming out shortly but can be preordered. JW, protagonist, is a flawed hero. He is not exactly an anti-hero because he is not a bad guy, though one does become annoyed at where he places his values. As his character unfolds in the first several chapters of Shawn Otto's novel, Sins of Our Fathers, we like him, we are worried about him, we wonder what he is thinking, we sit on the edge of our proverbial seats as he takes risk after risk and we are sitting thusly because we learn that he does not have a rational concept of risk. We learn that his inner…

Climate Or Bust: Sanders and Clinton Should Step Up Now

This is a guest posts by Claire Cohen Cortright. Claire Cohen Cortright is a mother, climate activist, and biology teacher living in upstate New York. She is an active member of Citizens Climate Lobby and moderator at Global Warming Fact of the Day. ______________________________________________ It is time, now, for climate activists to get vocal. As it becomes more clear that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, there is increasing talk about the importance of unifying the party. Negotiations are on the horizon … for Vice President and for the Party’s…

Lessons from the Iowa Caucus

Increasingly, I feel the need to declare my position on the candidates before commenting on the process, because, increasingly, the conversation has become one of comparative litmus tests. So, here's the deal on that: I like Clinton and Sanders both, and I like each of them for both overlapping and different reasons. As a life long Democrat I'm glad to see such good candidates running. I will decide whom to support in the Minnesota Caucus some time after I walk into the building, most likely. Then, later, I will decide which candidate, if any, I might work for during the time between our…

What Exxon Knew Then Is What We Know Now

Look at the graph at the top of the post. This is a graph from the now famous Exxon documents that date to 1981, explaining how Exxon scientists were projecting global warming with continued release of the greenhouse gas CO2 into the atmosphere. There is a lot written about that work which remained secret until just a few days ago. The timing of this expose is interesting because it comes at about the same moment as a call to use US RICO laws to investigate and possibly prosecute those who seem to have been conspiring for a long time muddy the waters about the science of climate change in…

Cephalopod camouflage, or: turning invisible is easier than it looks

Octopus vulgaris reacting to a diver (predator). The initial change from camouflaged to conspicuous takes only milliseconds due to direct neural control of the skin. Full expression of the threat display (right) is two seconds. Video frame rate is 30 frames per second. Watch the video clip. Everyone here is familiar with the incredible ability of cephalopods to change their appearance, right? If you aren't, review your cuttlefish anatomy and watch this video. A few frames from the video are shown on the right. This is an amazing ability, and the question is how do they do it? Roger Hanlon has…

My Review of Hillary Clinton's Book Part I

Before discussing What Happened by Hillary Clinton, the nature of the political conversation demands that I preface this review with some context. First, about me. I supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election because I did not want Donald Trump to be president. During the primary, which was not the 2016 election, I seriously had a hard time deciding between the various candidates (Clinton and Sanders). On an issue by issue basis, I preferred Sanders' position over Clinton. However, on the issues about which I have an informed view (climate change and energy related, and…

Gender Apartheid

Sandefur links to this post about the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia and many other countries that wonders why the West has not been as adamant in opposing this as they were in opposing apartheid in South Africa (aside from the obvious practical argument based on oil and necessity, of course). After listing some of the barbaric laws in that nation, the author writes: And this is just a bare outline of the laws. Imagine the day-in and day-out degradation of having to live under these rules every day. Imagine being subject to total control by one's own family members and not being able to…