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Marking and Tagging the Public Domain

I am cribbing significant amounts of this post from a Creative Commons blogpost about tagging the public domain. Attribution is to Diane Peters for the stuff I've incorporated :-) The big news is that, 18 months since we launched CC0 1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide...it's been a success. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. CC0 has been used by the pharmaceutical industry giant GSK as well as…

On Science Commons' Moving West...

I've kept this blog quiet lately - for a wide range of reasons - but a few questions that have come in have prompted me to start up a new series of posts. The main reason for the lack of posts around here is that I've been very busy, and for the most part, I've used this blog for a lot of lengthy posts on weighty topics. At least, weighty to me. If you want a more informal channel, you can follow me on twitter, as I prefer tweeting links and midstream thoughts to rapid-fire short blog entries. The joy of a blog like this for me is the chance to explore subjects in greater depth. But it also…

Back on the nets---but why bother

Mark Crislip has a nice piece up at Science-Based Medicine about the battle against the medical "de-lightenment". In his post, he looks at some data about what sorts of criteria anti-vaccinationists use in their propaganda. Not surprisingly, appeals to emotion and to pre-existing beliefs are much more common than actual facts. The question then becomes, "Why bother?" We on the side of science-based medical humanism tend to believe that education is the best solution to problems such as implausible health claims, but since these things function more as belief systems than as opinions…

Is Rush dumber than my shoe, or just evil?

Yes, I know, the two are not mutually exclusive, but I still think it's a good title. The latest bit of evil idiocy? More fanning of fears about health care reform. Don't misunderstand, there's plenty of potential pitfalls to health care reform, but Rush is an idiot. He calls it "Five Freedoms You'll Lose Under Obamacare". Let's see what he's talking about. I'll let you in on his absurdist intro just for the fun of it: One of the best points that anybody could make in describing the uniqueness and greatness of this country, do you realize that the history of the world is tyranny? The…

Jenny McCarthy not dumb enough for ya?

Yes, that's right, the Huffington Post, that broadsheet of blarney, that tabloid of medical trumpery has done it. Not content to risk our mental health by lending legitimacy to all kinds of pseudoscientific charlatans, they just let Jim Carrey write a piece on vaccines and autism. Yes, the boyfriend of uber-fukwit Jenny McCarthy has drunk her Kool Aid, but that's no surprise. I'll leave a good fisking to others, because a few of the commenters showed signs of higher cortical function, and this deserves some coverage. Take this one for example: I think Jim and Jenny McCarthy are instilling…

Project Jason: Psychics and missing people

As a skeptic, when discussing psychics and how there is zero scientific evidence for the existence of psychic powers, I often come up against the attitude that says, "What's the harm if people believe in psychics?" What's the harm indeed? Have your palm read, and it's kind of fun, but you generally don't take it all that seriously. The same is true of psychic readings, which, for most people, seem to be more a form of entertainment than anything else, given how little stock most people put in them. The prevailing attitude out there seems to be that, if people are willing to give up their…

Hox cluster disintegration

Hox genes are metazoan pattern forming genes—genes that are universally associated with defining the identities of regions of the body. There are multiple Hox genes present, and one of their unusual properties is that they are clustered and expressed colinearly. That is, they are found in ordered groups on the chromosome, and that the gene on one end is typically turned on first and expressed at the head end of the embryo, the next gene in order is turned on slightly later and expressed further back, and so on in sequence. That the tidy sequential order on the chromosome is associated with…

No arguments allowed

Tim Blair posted this accusation that the UN was lying about the tsunami relief effort: Via Diplomad, some comments from the UN's Jan Egeland: In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an "air-freight handling centre" in Aceh. Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers - 90 of them - which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food,…

Governor Jerry Brown signs California Bill AB 2109, but tries to water it down in a sop to religion

I've been blogging a lot about California Bill AB 2109. Basically, it's a bill that was proposed as a means of addressing the increasing problem of non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates because religious and philosophical exemptions are too easy to obtain. Boiled down to its essence, AB 2109 would require parents to see a pediatrician or health care practitioner for a discussion of the benefits and risks of vaccines and, more importantly, the risks of not vaccinating. You'd think that the antivaccine movement wouldn't have a problem with a bill that in essence requires informed…

Another Immigration Horror Story

A couple of days ago I wrote a rant about how painful it was to deal with the Massachusetts and the federal government. In contrast, civil servants in the Quebec and Canadian governments have often gone out of their way to help me out ... and boy did I ever need their help (maybe someday I'll write about it). T. Price, an American Postdoc living in Montreal, then left his own story in the comment section. It got labeled as junk by TypePad and I just "unjunked it". It illustrates much of my rant and I would like to share it with you: Your rant is spot on. I don't even speak the language of the…

The ducks are gonna get you

Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She's only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it's very sad. Here's the letter — I will say, it's a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren't wrong in every particular. I've transcribed it below. I couldn't help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit. Homosexuality, including same sex marriage, is not an enlightened idea [But…

An Unlikely Thank You

This past weekend was high school graduation weekend for most of the schools in our area. At times like these, I sometimes hear folks waxing nostalgic about certain teachers who made an impact on them. I never had a chance to thank a couple of teachers who taught me extremely valuable lessons that served me well over the years, so here goes. First, there was my fourth grade teacher. She introduced to me to an idea which has always stuck with me, and which has served me well in my many years as a college professor: Adults, and teachers in particular, can be wrong. Up until this time I had…

Dr. Pamela Gunter-Smith: Career Path of An Administrative Leader

Scientists who are still at the bench may not ever think much about administration or, if they do, their thoughts may be markedly negative. And yet administrative work can be both important and personally rewarding and fulfilling, just as much so as bench research. I know, that sounds like sacrilege, but I've done both, so I think I know what I'm talking about. So for my contribution (as terribly late as it is) to the Diversity in Science blog carnival, I want to talk about African-American women in higher education administration. In 2001 I had the good fortune to attend the HERS Bryn…

Sunday Sermon: Home, sweet oikos

Many years ago, the University of Chicago invited Amartya Sen, who had recently won a Nobel Prize in Economics, to come and speak. He appeared beside Gary Becker, a distinguished professor of the University's famed economic department, and an adherent to the "Chicago School of Economics." At one point, after the speeches, a question was posed about how the two would define the role of economics in society. Becker gave what is probably his standard Econ 101 introduction, explaining how economics studies how rational human behavior influences the aggregate behavior of markets, etc. After…

Turn or go straight? Quick!

This is a classic problem. You are in a car heading straight towards a wall. Should you try to stop or should you try to turn to avoid the wall? Bonus question: what if the wall is not really wide so you don't have to turn 90 degrees? Assumption: Let me assume that I can use the normal model of friction - that the maximum static friction force is proportional to the normal force. Also, I will assume that the frictional coefficient for stopping is the same as for turning. Stopping I am going to start with the case of trying to stop. Suppose the car is moving towards the wall at a speed…

Simple Experiments with Friction

Now I get to do something with that force scale I built. I had a request some time ago to talk about friction. Friction is surprisingly complicated. When two surfaces rub against each other, why is there a friction force? The basic answer is that the stuff the two surfaces are made of (atoms) are interacting with each other. If you like, you could think of the bumps on one surface hitting the bumps on the other surface. I know I said it was complicated and that doesn't seem to complicated - does it? The complication comes when you try to model this interaction by looking at either all…

Parkour Physics: Wall Climb

Forgive me if I don't know the official parkour term for this move. This is where you have two walls that are close to each other and you vertically climb them. Here is a shot of Mark Witmer (from Ninja Warrior) doing the wall climb. Doesn't look too hard, does it? Well, I think it depends on how far apart the two walls are. This is actually one parkour move that my kids like to do (Hey kids! Don't do that! Let me get my camera though because this will be perfect for my blog) I am going to start with this second kind of wall climb. Simply because it is easier due to symmetry. So,…

So, you are going to take physics?

The fall semester is coming up soon. Some students will be taking physics in college. So, here are some pre-class tips - mainly aimed at college students taking algebra-based physics. Are you afraid? If you are reading this, maybe you found it because you were looking for stuff on physics. Maybe you are a little scared. You have heard physics is a tough course. Well, that is only kind of true. First, the fear thing. Use it to your advantage. Let fear be a motivator to help you keep up with the class. I think that is the biggest mistake students make. They think of intro physics as…

The Neuroscience of Gambling

This is just sad: Harrah's New Orleans, the largest casino in the city, is on pace for its best year ever: gambling revenue is up 13.6 percent through the first five months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2005, pre-Katrina. The casinos in this region are generating more revenue -- from significantly fewer players -- in large part because of the extra money that many area residents have in their pockets and fewer alternatives on where to spend it, casino executives and others in the region say. I sometimes wonder if, one day, we'll view casinos as we currently view cigarettes: a…

Make love, not war

Who remembers Robert Ardrey? I must shamefully confess that I was a fan back in the 1970s, when the 'killer ape' hypothesis was in the air. This was the idea that one of the things that made humans different and drove the evolution of the human brain was aggression and competition, specifically that big brains evolved as a weapon in a multi-million year intra-specific arms race. Arms races are cool concepts that, when first introduced to natural selection, seem like powerful mechanisms to drive the evolution of elaborate features. I outgrew Ardrey, have no fear. As I learned more biology, I…

David Galenson

In my recent WSJ article on age and creativity, I didn't have space to discuss the fascinating research of David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who brings together a vast array of evidence to better understand the nature of creative production over time. Galenson divides creators into two distinct categories: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. In general, conceptual innovators make sudden and radical breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, often at an early age. In contrast, experimental innovators work by trial and error, and typically require decades of…

Empiricism, Economics and Mystery

I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's takedown of modern economics, which is a lucid dissection of his own field. His core argument is that economists made the old Keatsian error, mistaking a beautiful theory for the truth: As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression…

Grit

I had an article in Boston Globe Ideas section on the psychology of grit. For more on the subject, check out the incredibly interesting work of Angela Duckworth. You can also take the grit survey here. It's the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane…

Major teen suicide cause found; Discovery Institute nowhere to be found

Several of the blogs have pointed to the Disco. Inst.'s shameful abuse of the suicide of Jesse Kilgore in an end-of-year fundraising pitch. Kilgore, a college student who had recently returned from military service in Iraq, had been challenging aspects of his upbringing, and his father (a fundamentalist pastor) concluded that reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion inspired Jesse to kill himself. The Disco. Inst. decided that the best thing to do was to glom onto that father's grief in order to drum up end-of-year donation. Given that the suicide rate for Iraq veterans keeps rising, I'd…

The rise of the irreligious Left

Barry Kosmin at CUNY has published the results of three surveys of American religion since 1990. These "American Religious Identification Surveys" (ARIS) were done in 1990, another in 2001, and finally in 2008. One of the major findings of the ARIS has been the rise of those who avow "No Religion". Looking through the data it is also clear that aggregating nationally understates some of the local changes. In 1990 47% Vermonters were non-Catholic Christians (i.e., Protestants). In 2008 29% were. In 1990 13% of Vermonters had No Religion. In 2008 34% of Vermonters had No Religion! In fact, No…

Philosophers' Carnival #32

Welcome to Philosophers' Carnival #32, a monthly blogospheric showcase of philosophical musings. As you wander through the exhibit tents, experience the wonders created by minds with time to ponder (and keyboards with which to capture that pondering). Please remember that unused game tickets are not subject to refund, and that the carnies are independent contractors, not employees of Philosophers' Carnival Industries LLC. Also, a quick administrative note: Due to some unpleasantness with the 4-H goats, the Epistemology tent was, er, eaten. Thus, epistemology exhibits have been moved to the…

The inevitable follow-up to the last breastfeeding post.

I think after this one, we'll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids! My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment expressing some dissatisfaction with that examination. You really should read the whole comment, but his main points are roughly: You can find evidence that supporters of breastfeeding are biased, but that doesn't mean you aren't also biased. In a body of scientific literature, we ought to weigh…

More misogyny from the Disco. 'tute

Disco. 'tute president Bruce Chapman is upset. There are ladies with their bloomers in a twist over something or other that they claim Herman Cain said. Let's read Chapman and see if we can guess what Cain is supposed to have done: A number of significant insights are emerging from the charges of sex harassment lodged against Herman Cain. It may be wise to withhold judgement [sic] about the particulars so far. There are a number of groups operating behind the scenes to drive the story one way or another. Aha! Charges of sexual harassment were filed, but we should be dubious because shadowy…

Campaign finance, corruption, and elected judges

As the Times puts it: Former Justice OâConnor Sees Ill in Election Finance Ruling: âGosh,â she said, âI step away for a couple of years and thereâs no telling whatâs going to happen.â Justice OâConnor criticized the recent decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, only obliquely, reminding the audience that she had been among the authors of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that was overruled in large part on Thursday. ⦠She has become increasingly vocal in recent years about doing away with judicial elections. Most states elect at least some of…

How We Decide, stuff happens in the brain

When I found out a while back that Jonah Lehrer's next book was titled How We Decide, I knew I was going to check it out. It's no coincidence that I recently reviewed Predictably Irrational, I blog because I'm interested in reducing the human animal down its basic units of organization. Due to my disciplinary focus I generally touch upon behavior genetics or the inferences of human history one can glean from evolutionary genetics. History, psychology and economics are all domains which have piqued my interest. But I'll be honest and admit that I tend to avoid neuroscience because there's a…

Greek & Shakapearean tragedy; genocide & slavery

Recently I listened to an interview of the historian Joseph Ellis. Ellis observes that the decimation of Native Americans was a Greek tragedy, while the perpetuation of slavery for three generations of the republic was a Shakespearean one. The distinction which Ellis makes is that Greek tragedy is fated, while Shakespearean tragedies are subject to the whims of our own will and contingent choices. The latter we may theoretically forestall or alter, but the former is subject to the deterministic wheels of history. I believe that as a factual matter Ellis is correct; the indigenous peoples…

I'm so sorry for you, Indiana

But then, you elected this profoundly stupid man to be your governor, so it's all your own fault. I was reading an interview with Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana that was just embarrassingly bad. To me, the core of the Christian faith is humility, which starts with recognizing that you're as fallen as anyone else. And we're all constantly trying to get better, but... so I'm sure I come up short on way too many occasions. Our country was founded -this is just an historic fact; some people today may resist this notion but it is absolutely true- it was founded by people of faith. It was…

The dead are dead

One of the most important tools for promulgating religion is fear, and one of the biggest sources of fear is the inescapable fact of personal mortality: we're all going to die someday, and we all know people we've loved who have died. Religion steps up to the challenge of death in its usual glib and dishonest way, and promises a mysterious "afterlife," in which you'll get to go on being you despite the inconvenience of your flesh rotting away. None of the proponents of this belief have the slightest scrap of evidence for their claims, other than an appeal to emotion and desire, and sometimes…

Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart?

A few days ago I noted that smart people believe in evolution. And stupid people do not. Inductivist looked at the IQ scores in the GSS for whites and this is what he found for various religions: Mean IQ of whites from General Social Survey by religious affiliation Episcopalian 109.9 Lutheran 107.4 Mormon 105.7 Presbyterian 102.3 United Methodist 101.8 Southern Baptist 98.0 Assembly of God 94.5 Pentecostal 92.2 Surprised? I hope you're not so ignorant that you are! Here are the top 10 religious groups in SAT score from 2002: Average SAT score by religion for…

I Hope Obama Doesn't Mention 'Educational Efficiency' in the State of the Union: On Misusing the Residual

At this point in Obama's term, I'm simply hoping that the things I care about, like Social Security and education, aren't mentioned by Obama in his State of the Union address. I've given up on thinking he'll actually institute good policy (lost hope, if you will), and am just attempting a holding action. This is the administration that told Democrats they had to choose between school funding and feeding hungry children, and also has imposed Education Secretary Arne Duncan's failed ideas on the entire country, so I'm not optimistic. Matthew Yglesias draws our attention to a Center for…

America's Food Availability Crisis

tags: Hunger in America, food banks, food pantries, soup kitchens, food stamps, poverty Image: Orphaned. One thing that the Thanksgiving Holidays has made clear: America, the land of plenty where holiday overeating is celebrated as a social good, is suffering from a food availability crisis. The Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture describes a range of food security categories, ranging from "food secure," which includes high food security and marginal food security, and "food insecure," which includes low food security and very low food security.…

Influenza models examined by IOM

On December 11, The Institute of Medicine, one of the four constituent parts of the National Academies of Science, released a "letter report" reviewing the scant information on effects from non-drug measures to slow or contain spread of an influenza pandemic (available as a free download here). The report was produced after a special workshop on October 25 in which the panel participants heard from a variety of experts, with subsequent deliberations that produced the summary letter report and its recommendations. "Letter Reports" are mini-versions of the full IOM treatment where a specially…

SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR STEVE SCHLOZMAN!

By Stacy Jannis Kavli Science Video Contest Manager The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts. Steven Schlozman, M.D. is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a staff child and adult psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA. He is also the co-director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry for Harvard Medical School. His…

Coyne on the compatibility of science and religion

Somebody is going to have to declare Jerry Coyne an official member of the "New Atheist" club and send him the fancy hat and instructions for the secret handshake. He has a substantial piece in The New Republic that is both a review of two recent books by theistic scientists, Karl Giberson (who really detests me) and Ken Miller, and a definite warning shot across the bows of those who believe science and religion can be reconciled. First, let's consider the reviews of the two books — they're less interesting, not because they're poorly done, but because Coyne's opinion is almost identical to…

Fumento fumes

Michael Fumento is piqued because nobody paid any attention to his ludicrous and childish dare to us, DemFromCT at DailyKos and Tim Lambert and MadMike here at SciBlogs: Okay guys, put your bucks where your blogs are! Ten to one odds for each of you; each gets to pick the amount in question. I say the year 2008 will roll around and there will be plenty of terrible problems in the world, but pandemic avian flu won't be among them. Naturally some of these anti-scientists have insinuated that somebody must be paying me to say pandemic avian flu is a bunch of bird droppings -- that's also how the…

Kevin In China, part 12 - Chinese Ebola, or, Getting the Taste of Chinese Medicine

I was wondering why it took Kevin so long to send in another report. Well, he was sick... Chinese "Ebola" This write up is going to be short and concise. Most of the days it consists of I wasn't in the mood for remembering details, so some of these days will fly by. 22 July Today was another town day. Nothing special going on; Ci Ling was going elsewhere in Shennongjia to go white water rafting. The location she went to has some sort of Chinese secret and foreigners aren't allowed to go. Ci Ling told Vanessa and I that if we were caught we'd be fined 500 to 1,000 Yuan. She said not to worry…

Testing for swine flu

The first cases of swine flu were diagnosed in the US in San Diego in mid-April. The discovery was serendipitous, the result of out-of-season US-Mexican border surveillance and use of a new diagnostic test at the Naval Health Research Center. When the new test protocol showed infection with influenza A with undeterminable subtype, follow-up testing showed it to be an previously unknown swine flu virus. Detection of a second, apparently unlinked swine flu infection in San Diego got the outbreak (now pandemic) investigation rolling. That was just over 2 months ago, but it established the…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Daniel Brown

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Daniel Brown from the Biochemical Soul blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? My name is Daniel Brown, and I am a biologoholic. I grew up as a rat-tail-sporting, barefoot…

EPA’s trichloroethylene (TCE) risk assessment: Will it succeed in protecting workers?

What do these places have in common: Camp Lejeune in North Carolina; Mountain View, California, where Google headquarters are located; Endicott, NY – the birthplace of IBM; and 389 Superfund sites in at least 48 states plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands? All are contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE), a volatile organic compound classified as a carcinogen that’s been widely used as a solvent and degreaser in large-scale industrial processes, small commercial shops and in some products used by individual consumers. On June 25th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its…

Seussian Paradigm Shift

I wrote this for Dr, Seuss's 105th birthday, and thought it was worth posting (a bit belatedly) for his 108th. I once read an incredibly entertaining literary critical analysis of _The Cat in the Hat_ which began from the premise that all the action in TCITH is an attempt to fill up the overwhelming absence of the mother from the scene. She has "gone out for the day" leaving her children untended, something she clearly is in the habit of doing, since there's a sequel with the same issue embedded. The glimpses we get of "mother's new gown" and her empty bedstead stand in implicit reference…

Putting the Lawn Back, Eating More Industrial Food and Other Adventures from the CounterIntuitive Edge of Sustainability

My friend Alice hosted an urban permaculture class at her house a few years ago. She lives in an brownstone in a downtown neighborhood of Albany with her husband and two young kids, and the occasional housemate. Two permaculture design teachers and a host of enthusiastic students came together to create several designs for how she might optimize resource use and productivity at her home. She and her family chose one of the plans, and set to work on a number of inside and outside projects, including transforming her small, sunny backyard into an urban garden, full of food producing plants.…

When the Power Goes Out

We're just about at the one year anniversary of the Northeastern power outage that had many people out this way out for a week or two last year, and what's the forecast up at our place? Snow, followed by sleet and icy rain and more ice. This seems like a recipe for trouble. Being of a vaguely apocalyptic mindset, your blogiste is pretty good for a power outage, but it occurred to her that not everyone is probably ready. In fact, despite the fact that FEMA has *said* that in a crisis it may not be able to reach people immediately, despite the fact that an awful lot of Americans had extended…

Let the games begin: Dueling TSCA reform manifestos

by Richard Denison, cross-posted from EDF Blogs Today, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) unveiled its "10 Principles for Modernizing TSCA."   Also today, the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition - of which EDF is a member - issued a news release and unveiled its 9-point "Platform for Reform of TSCA."  How do they line up? I'll leave to you readers to decide just how much alignment (or lack thereof) there is between these dueling manifestos.  To get the ball rolling, I'll use this post to single out three key differences. First, however, let me say I welcome the fact that ACC is…

Cong. Review Act is bad public policy

Last night, I read a bunch of posts in the blogosphere and then watched a segment on MSNBC's Keith Olberman talking about the Congressional Review Act of 1996 (CRA) and how it could be used to undue regulations issued in these final weeks of the Bush Administration.  Some people seem to be chomping at the bit thinking that the CRA is the answer to their disdain for Bush's policies.  In the short term, they may be satisfied, but in the long term, the CRA is bad public policy.  That's the debate that I wish was taking place.  Back to Basic Civics 101.  The Congressional Branch…

End the occupation

No one likes occupiers. They're like fish and houseguests, they start to stink after a short period of time. And I worry that as time goes on the movement will only have a more and more destructive impact on progressive politics and political discourse. This isn't to say they can't be effective, or haven't been effective at at least one goal, that is bringing the topic of economic inequality back into the spotlight. However, as time goes on their leaderless, agenda-less actions are becoming more random, and less likely to result in a good outcome in the coming political fight. In fact,…