Conservatives
mikethemadbiologist | April 17, 2007Instapundit is arguing that, had the Virginia Tech students been armed, fewer students would have died. Even if this were correct, it ignores all of the other times students would have guns. Do you really think drunk college students should be carrying?
If college hasn't changed too much since I went (which wasn't that long ago), there are a lot of students who start drinking Wednesday night, and don't really stop until Sunday night. Do you really want them to have firearms? How many shootings would happen because someone was drunk and stupid? As this horrible slaughter shows, just even…
grrlscientist | April 13, 2007tags: Liberalism, liberals, politics
This essay was sent to me by a friend and I thought you would appreciate reading it. I am posting it here intact, except for a few editorial improvements.
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of his…
mikethemadbiologist | April 6, 2007The AFL-CIO has a very interesting website site that calculates how much CEOs are paid relative to the average U.S. worker. While useful, for many economic conservatives, it won't matter at all, since, well, that's why they're conservatives. But I've devised my own comparison that will matter to even the most doctrinaire conservative:
The annual salary of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve ($186,000).
Since the average CEO of a Standard & Poor 500 company makes $14.78 million, that means that the average CEO makes 79 times more than the Fed Chairman.
I would argue that most…
mikethemadbiologist | April 1, 2007Garry Wills, in an essay from the NY Review of Books, "Bush's Fringe Government", writes the following about the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain:
How do you govern an apostate nation? When the entire culture is corrupted, the country can only be morally governed in spite of itself. A collection of aggrieved minorities must seize the levers of power in every way possible. One must govern not from a broad consensual center but from activist fringes of morality. That has, in fact, been Karl Rove's strategy. He cultivates the extreme groups that are out of step with the broad consensus of…
mikethemadbiologist | March 31, 2007...I plan on visiting the Smithsonian. Sadly, it hasn't been run very well the last seven years. Maybe the resignation of Lawrence Small will turn things around. Who is Small?
Here's what the Nitpicker has to say about l'affair Small:
But, in the past 20 years, Republicans--and some DLC Democrats--have come to believe in Corporate Pixie Dust. They believe, without any evidence to demonstrate the validity of their belief, that corporations are magical entities which always run smoothly and are led by the smartest goshdarned people in the whole wide world. Lawrence Small is just another…
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2007That's according to Republican congressman Randy Forbes, member of the Congressional Prayer Caucus. Personally, I think exercising Congress' oversight role and passing some legislation worth a damn might help a bit more, but then again, my prayers wouldn't count for much anyway according to the Caucus. From Americans United (italics mine):
A bipartisan [Mad Biologist: this is incorrect. Every member is a Republican.] group of U.S. House members offered a simple message to the American people today: "Pray, or God will lift his caring hand from the great nation."
Over three dozen…
mikethemadbiologist | March 28, 2007Blogger Mike Stark recently debated Myron Ebell about global warming. Apparently, Mike Stark did more than just hold his own, which is pretty impressive considering the debate was hosted by the ultraconservative Federalist Society. Stark had this interesting point about credibility, which is similar to a point I made about creationist credibility:
First of all, when arguing with somebody that either has no credibility or is not arguing a credible position, don't donate the credibility they need to be seen as your equal.
You see, by calling his credibility into question immediately - and…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2007The more you stare at this scandal, the more you feel like one of the proverbial blind men trying to figure out what the hell that elephant is. From ThinkProgress, here is what fired US Attorney Carol Lam might have been investigating:
To recap, the White House awarded a one-month, $140,000 contract to an individual who never held a federal contract. Two weeks after he got paid, that same contractor used a cashier's check for exactly that amount to buy a boat for a now-imprisoned congressman at a price that the congressman had pre-negotiated.
That should raise questions about the White House…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2007Yesterday, I was a little miffed about the coverage of the growing US Attorney scandal. During said crankiness, I asked how we have reached the point where the legality of an action is the only criterion to use when judging if that action is ethical:
...is there any doubt that the reason these USAs were fired was that they either refused to prosecute politically-motivated cases that were unsubstantiated or that they were investigating Republicans? While it remains to be seen if the firing is illegal, you would have to be delusional to think that replacing competent USAs in the middle of…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2007
Yum. Theological conservative tastes GOOOODDD!
Full disclosure: I have never bought into the belief of the Compulsive Centrists that John McCain is a moderate. A detailed look at his voting record shows that he is often very conservative, with the occasional moment of lucidity (e.g., recognizing that global warming is actually happening). But it is truly pathetic to watch a man who clearly doesn't agree with the theological conservatives twist himself into a pretzel in an effort to placate them. He's done it with evolution. Now, he is 'confused' about condoms:
The unthinkable has…
mikethemadbiologist | March 16, 2007
Hear the Mighty Roar of the Peter Pan Conservatives: those conservatives who think that policy failures are not due to strategic, tactical, or logistical flaws but solely due to to a lack of will. It appears that this way of thinking has completely permeated Little Lord Pontchartrain's brain. Neocon Irwin Stelzer had a luncheon meeting with the president. His description is chilling.
Stelzer describes four 'lessons' that were discussed. Here's the second lesson:
Second lesson: Will trumps wealth. The Romans, the tsars, and other rich world powers fell to poorer ones because they lacked…
mikethemadbiologist | March 15, 2007
To prevent brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that statements by Michael Egnor be read using approved devices such as the StupidView9000
Orac bravely dives deeper into the Discovery Institute's creationist drivel, and reports on the continuing ignorant idiocy of Michael Egnor. I don't know what's worse: Egnor's willful ignorance, or his pseudo-victimization complex. Let's deal with the ignorance first.
In an interview with Casey Luskin, Egnor states (italics mine):
EGNOR: Well, it's a pretty funny claim on the part of Darwinists. It's sort of like Al Gore claiming that he…
mikethemadbiologist | March 13, 2007...missing circuits in your head. James Carroll, in House of War, describes the bumpy road that nuclear hawk Paul Nitze, who advocated nuclear first strikes during the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, had during his Senate confirmation hearings (p. 281-2; italics and bold mine):
And then an odd thing happened. The Senate confirmation of the nomination should have been routine, but a conservative young Republican congressman from Illinois, looking to make a mark by embarrassing the Kennedy administration, attacked Nitze from out of nowhere. The congressman charged him with having…
mikethemadbiologist | March 9, 2007There's something very interesting about the unfolding story of the possible FDA cefquinome approval (I've covered it here). After doing a Technorati search, virtually all of the blogs that discuss this issue are either non-partisan or progressive/liberal (I say 'virtually' because I might have missed one, but I actually didn't see any). The rightwing bloggysphere is nowhere to be found. Any thoughts on why that might be? Maybe they are just slow off the mark on this one? Infections don't check political affiliation....
mikethemadbiologist | February 26, 2007When I heard that Republican Senator and presidential candidate John McCain spoke at the Discovery Institute, I was disappointed but not surprised. In March, there's going to be a report released about antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A major finding of the report: roughly 40,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.
The problem of antibiotic resistance is, fundamentally, a problem of evolutionary biology. Species of bacteria which had very few resistant strains (or none at all) now contain high frequencies of resistance strains (e.g…
mikethemadbiologist | February 26, 2007...the man who helped bring you Iran-Contra, you know you've gone too far. Seymour Hersh has a new article in the New Yorker about the Bush Administration's Middle East 'strategy.' It's more ridiculous than Iran-Contra.
Why do I say that? Because we're backing indirectly Sunni groups in Lebanon opposed to Hizbollah that are linked to Al-Queda.
Let's replay that last sentence:
Because we're backing indirectly Sunni groups in Lebanon opposed to Hizbollah that are linked to Al-Queda.
[sound of jaw hitting floor]
I swear to the Intelligent Designer, these guys are dumber than Conservapedia.…
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2007And it's free! Bob Altemeyer, whose work on the authoritarian mind significantly influenced John Dean'sConservatives Without Conscience, has released a free online book, The Authoritarians, which is about, well, authoritarians. Here's an interesting bit from the book about evolution from Ch. 4:
For the record, Darwin never said humans evolved from monkeys, even though many other people besides fundamentalists think he did. Even with the limited knowledge available to him 150 years ago, Darwin realized that humanity's ancestors had long separated from the evolutionary path that led to…
mikethemadbiologist | February 23, 2007
Beta test version of Conservapedia graphical interface. Isn't he reassuring?
I feel bad for John Stewart and Stephen Colbert because when idiots unintentionally parody themselves, their gigs will be up. Conservapedia is going to be the gift that giving...for bloggers anyway. Here's what it says about the Holocaust (and, yes, this is the entire entry):
The Holocaust was the massacring of the Jewish race during World War II. The Germans are not to blame for this but the Nazi[s] are. Besides 6 million Jews dying, 3 million Christians were killed also along with many priests and nuns. This is…
mikethemadbiologist | February 22, 2007...El Jefe Maximo is still pushing the elimination of the estate tax because the offspring of the ludicrously wealthy need a break:
If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.
The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.
Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights…
mikethemadbiologist | February 22, 2007Some of my fellow ScienceBloglings have written about Conservapedia's treatment of evolution. What has always puzzled me about creationists is the rather frequent denial of mutation. For example, in the section on macroevolution, titled "Is the theory of macroevolution true?"*--which should tell you what's to come right away, the entry reads:
2. Differences between organisms can be explained by known mechanisms of genetic mutation.
* Counter: There has not been enough time for mutation to generate existing biological diversity.
* Counter: There has been enough time enough…