Fucking Morons
mikethemadbiologist | November 19, 2007I often always have many unpublished posts in my cue, so I was going to let my response to Katha Pollitt's Nation column about the sexism behind a lot of the Senator Clinton bashing slide by, but then I read Amanda's post about Pollitt's column. Onto what Pollitt wrote (italics mine):
The more people insist that sexism plays no part in the primary campaign or its media coverage, the more likely I am to vote for Hillary Clinton and I'll bet I'm not the only one. Her poll numbers with women are rising, after all. I think a lot of women are just fed up to here with the sexism they see around…
mikethemadbiologist | November 16, 2007NARAL just doesn't get it: when NARAL supports Republicans or Democrats who, by undermining Democratic initiatives, weaken the Democratic Party, NARAL is strengthening those who oppose legal and safe abortion.
It's as if the NARAL leadership is afflicted with a severe case of Compulsive Centrist Disorder. While the Democrats might not be stalwarts for safe and legal abortion, the Republicans have enshrined the Fetish of the Fetus. Supporting those who hurt the Democratic Party is supporting those who want to outlaw abortion, plain and simple. How can NARAL not get that?
mikethemadbiologist | November 15, 2007When I discovered that Shakes, filling in over at Crooks and Liars, had linked to my post about Senator Obama and Social Security, I thought might get hordes of angry Obamaites*. Instead, what some of the comments repeated two common mistakes about Social Security (although thankfully other readers slapped them down).
The first fallacy is that Social Security is in crisis. It's not. Let's try this way of explaining it, since the other ways don't seem to have worked (an aside: why do I even put hyperlinks in my posts? The conservatives either don't bother to read them, or don't know how…
mikethemadbiologist | November 10, 2007Rightwing nut David Horowitz just finished celebrating Islamofascist Awareness Week. One of the goals of Horowitz's exercise is to intimidate faculty and students into political correctness*. A while back, while reading Hanna Rosen's God's Harvard, this description of how one faculty member at Jesus mill Patrick Henry College**, Bob Stacey, was fired for teaching those heretical philosophers Kant and Plato struck as the kind of campus Horowitz would like:
Just before class, someone pointed out the window, where you could still see the outlines of last night's moon. "Please take your seats…
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2007Not only does Conservapedia, which is like Wikipedia but stupid, spew idiocy about evolution, have some true hackery about evolution, but this part, pulled from the main page, says it all:
(here's a full-sized image complete with cheesy soundtrack)
Masterpiece? Are conservatives trying to destroy what culture the U.S. does possess?
Help Public School Kids by Funding my Challenge at DonorsChoose
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2007I have a week off, so I've been going to the gym in the morning later than usual. I'm still recovering from the near-lobotomization of morning radio, so I wasn't prepared for a report on the "superbug" on Fox's The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet--think of it as a cheap knockoff of Regis and Kelly. Since the sound wasn't turned on for the television, I should have just left it alone, but no, I had to check out the video on the interwubs when I came home.
First, anyone who says that evolutionary biologists suck at communicating should watch this bozo. It's a classic example of how not to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 29, 2007
Onward Glorious Conservatives! Don't retreat from the librul modelers!!!
By now, you might have heard about the Bush Administration's massive 'editing' of the CDC testimony about the health consequences of global warming. Over at Science Progress, there is a copy of the unedited, original CDC text. At this point, no one in the Coalition of the Sane should be surprised that every single one of the specifics about what global warming would actually do was expunged--we wouldn't want the public to worry their purdy lil' heads about all of that scary stuff. What did interest me was the...…
mikethemadbiologist | October 28, 2007A while ago, I wrote about the MBTA's test program of playing crappy commercial radio over the PA system at Boston subway stops. Because what Boston really needs is government-sponsored noise pollution. After many complaints, the MBTA has decided to shelve the program, for now anyway:
...disparate T riders are united in joy and a degree of quiet. The two-week-old experiment in bringing disc jockeys and music to MBTA platforms, "T Radio," has been shelved, at least for now.
"There is a God," said Tom Augello, a multimedia editor from Cambridge.
Augello is still bitter from a trip to South…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2007By way of Shakes, this display made its way into the House debate on S-CHIP:
What does abortion have to do with healthcare for children? It's as if conservatives believe in the totemic power of the Fetish of the Fetus. As bad as the Democrats can be, when they usually try to make some semblance of an argument. This is just waving the Bloody Fetus around, and hoping it causes enough people's brains to shut down their ability to think ('cuz fetuses are icky).
This is completely insane. How does one have a national conversation about anything when one half is utterly incapable of a…
mikethemadbiologist | October 23, 2007If memory serves me correctly, Senator Obama was counting on the 'youth' vote* as his secret weapon. That's fine, but then why on earth would Obama court virulent anti-gay bigots, especially when younger voters of all political affiliations are the most likely to be tolerant of gays? This certainly won't help him in the primaries. Unlike some political issues, gay bashing is easy to understand and remember. Is there something I'm missing, or is he just desperately trying to prove how piss poor a candidate he really is?
*I always thought eighteen meant adulthood. Presumably, we're not…
mikethemadbiologist | October 22, 2007By now, there's little to add to the criticism of Donald Kennedy's absurd statement regarding Princeton economist Paul Krugman that:
And yet maybe Krugman is not really an economist -- at least not according to the definition offered more than a century ago by Francis Amasa Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, who wrote that laissez-faire "was not made the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man were an economist at all."
Most modern economists continue to celebrate Walker's orthodoxy, and behind it, the classical doctrines of Adam…
mikethemadbiologist | October 22, 2007Atrios identifies the problem with the Republican choice-based 'vision' of healthcare:
Well, really, the Republican vision, as slobbered over by cenrtist [sic] David Broder.
In this case, he is visualizing a radically different kind of medical marketplace, in which families armed with specific information about the treatment success and prices of hospitals and doctors can shop at will for the best quality and most affordable care.
We pay doctors to make these decisions for us because most of us haven't been to medical school. I know this point is simple and obvious and everyone makes it, but…
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2007I'll get to Noah in a bit. But first, digby describes the lobotomization of our national discourse:
Something very disconcerting has been happening in our discourse for some time, even worse than the up-is-downism that has characterized the most unctuously presumptuous members of the Cheney administration. It's no longer just Bush who is blatantly dumb on TV. A lot of public figures these days adopt all the poses and cadence of ordinary conversation, but actually speak in some sort of gibberish language that makes no sense.
...They gesture and talk and sound for all the world as if they are…
mikethemadbiologist | October 13, 2007The MBTA in its infinite wisdom has started a pilot program to commercialize the public announcement system at subway stops:
The roar of subway cars and chords of amateur musicians at the T station will now face competition from Neil Diamond songs, 1970s trivia, and live playoff updates from Fenway Park.
It comes from T-Radio, an experiment that began yesterday at three stations and may someday broadcast on every subway platform in Eastern Massachusetts. Disc jockeys and media personalities will mix in light news, weather, entertainment tips, and the like. If it proves popular enough to go…
mikethemadbiologist | October 11, 2007
We likes Ann Coulter!!!
Professional provocateur Ann Coulter in an interview on MSNBC advocated the conversion of the Jews (italics mine):
During the October 8 edition of CNBC's The Big Idea, host Donny Deutsch asked right-wing pundit Ann Coulter: "If you had your way ... and your dreams, which are genuine, came true ... what would this country look like?" Coulter responded, "It would look like New York City during the [2004] Republican National Convention. In fact, that's what I think heaven is going to look like." She described the convention as follows: "People were happy. They're…
mikethemadbiologist | October 11, 2007
It's bad enough that a plane which previously made non-stop flights from the continental U.S. to Guantanamo Bay crashed in the Yucatan with tons of cocaine aboard. What's even more ridiculous is the 'cover' story.
The plane was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft which is in the business of "Aircraft Consultance and Sales."
According to Boing Boing:
Mad Cow Morning News visited the owners of the plane, "Donna Blue Aircraft Inc" of Coconut Beach FL., and discovered that it's an "empty office suite with a blank sign out front."
There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc., at the address listed at…
mikethemadbiologist | October 10, 2007As if outing Valerie Plame, whose primary task was to monitor and contain WMD proliferation in the Middle East--including Iran, wasn't bad enough, the Bush Administration destroyed another intelligence gathering operation for political gain (italics mine):
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had…
mikethemadbiologist | October 8, 2007David Brooks wonders why the GOP is in shambles. Bush voter in 2000 and 2004 and conservative John Cole has a very succinct answer:
For starters, people got tired of being associated with these drooling retards.
Let's elaborate further:
Then, when they realized that these drooling retards had ideological allies running the show in the Bush administration and then began to experience their idiotic policies, they moved from disgusted to outright hostile.
....Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on…
mikethemadbiologist | October 2, 2007One of the major fallacies of intelligent design creationism is that so many structures appear to be haphazardly designed. Case in point: polyadenylation in Giardia lamblia. ScienceBlogling Carl Zimmer, in an excellent post about the recently published Giardia genome, describes the system:
There's all sorts of fascinating stuff lurking in Giardia's genome. As they surveyed its 6470 genes, the genome team was struck by how simple Giardia is, compared to other eukaryotes. I think this diagram in particular does a nice job of illustrating Giardia's simplicity. The top drawing shows what…
mikethemadbiologist | September 30, 2007And some Republicans wonder why most Jews don't vote Republican. Well, conservative talk radio is one answer. Here's what conservative talk radio host Mike Rosen has to say:
Sure. [Caller], you have exceptions like Milton Friedman, for example, a brilliant free-market economist who was more libertarian than conservative and one of my all-time heroes. Milton Friedman certainly understood the big picture, but so many Jews who are regarded by people as instinctively good merchants are just that. They're merchants at the retail level and don't have, I don't think, a good grasp of the big…