Fucking Morons
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2007We can't have that. A high school journalism teacher was banned from teaching journalism because the student newspaper ran an editoral calling for tolerance of gays:
WOODBURN, Indiana (AP) -- A high school teacher who faced losing her job after a student newspaper published an editorial advocating tolerance of gays can continue teaching at another school.
Amy Sorrell, 30, reached an agreement that allows her to be transferred to another high school to teach English, said her attorney, Patrick Proctor.
"The school administration has said in no uncertain terms that she's not going to be given…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2007Friday, Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias resigned because he had received 'massages' from an escort service. One of Tobias' major effects on U.S. foreign policy was to promote abstinence-only sex education:
Tobias, who was in Berlin for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS' 2004 Awards for Business Excellence, said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are "far more effective" than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias said, adding, "It's been the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 26, 2007I think the investigative power the Democrats currently wield--and the threat of subpoena--is starting to get to Secretary of State Condoleeza "Ferragamos" Rice. At a press conference today, Rice misidentified Russia (emphasis mine):
"The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous, and everybody knows it," Ms. Rice said before a meeting of NATO foreign ministers expected to focus on the missile-defense dispute.
"The Russians have thousands of warheads," Ms. Rice said. "The idea that you can…
mikethemadbiologist | April 25, 2007Hopefully, by now, the anti-Wiley blogswarm is getting geared up. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, ScienceBlogling Shelley over at Retrospectacle was threatened with a lawsuit by Wiley Interscience for reproducing part of a figure and a table (and why would they want to do that? She has such groovy taste in cars). Shelley has the best argument why it's wrong for Wiley to do this:
But it leads me to ask the question: What really constitutes fair use? This is taxpayer-supported research, which should be available for all. If a blog properly gives credit, isn't…
mikethemadbiologist | April 24, 2007I've invented a new unit of time, the Samuelson Unit, which is the length of time required for the Social Security system to become 'bankrupt.' Oddly enough, Social Security is always DOOMED roughly 34 years from the time of the estimate. In other words, Social Security is doing fine, and will continue to be solvent. Today, the NY Times had a pretty picture illustrating the Samuelson Unit in its full glory*:
Notice that the estimate every year has been that Social Security will be unable to meet its benefits 30-38 years out...for the last fourteen years. Got it? I loves me my Samuelson…
mikethemadbiologist | April 24, 2007Named after economist Robert Samuelson, who, along with the Concord Coalition, is fighting the Glorious War on Social Security. It's inspired by the Friedman Unit, named after NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who predicted for several years running that the "next six months" will be critical in Iraq. So what's a Samuelson Unit?
The length of time it takes for the Social Security Trust Fund to go bankrupt. As Atrios puts it:
Well, another year and not much has changed. Last year they said Social Security could pay full scheduled benefits without any program changes until 2040, and now it…
mikethemadbiologist | April 21, 2007
Remember Conservative Ideologues: You drink his blood after you molest him. It's more fun that way*
I would like to think certain things transcend political, religious, and ideological divides. One might think that Meals-on-Wheels, a program that relies heavily on donations, discounts, and volunteers to bring meals to elderly shut-ins would be liked by all. I would like to think that aiding frail, elderly people is about as universal as it gets. But never underestimate the moral depravity of the conservative ideologue.
In a recent post, I wrote:
Maybe it's that I grew up in Virginia,…
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…
mikethemadbiologist | April 16, 2007Former Republican governor and presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson just entered the running for the Stupid Asshole of the Week. From his comments to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington D.C.:
"I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that."
Thompson later apologized for the comments that had caused a stir in the audience, saying that he had meant it as a compliment, and had only wanted to highlight the "accomplishments" of the Jewish religion…
mikethemadbiologist | April 14, 2007You might do a little better if your campaign advisors don't insult your own party's base. From the New York Observer (italics mine):
I got to talk a little bit about it with Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the subject of genocide and an informal advisor to Mr. Obama's campaign who is helping to write the speech.
"We're going to hear something very unusual on the left, which is a genuine pride in what America can be again," she told me. "It's a bigger story about failing states. It's not a regional story. It's more freedom from fear and freedom from war."
Drafts of the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 11, 2007No, not those hideous boots! The Ug99 black stem rust fungus, a strain of Puccinia graminis. It doesn't kill people directly, but it could wipe out much of the world's wheat crop. As always, the developing world will probably be hit the hardest. And it's a potential failure of surveillance.
First, what the Ug99 fungus is:
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties…
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 30, 2007...or something like that. By way of skippy, comes this, erm, fascinating creationist exposition on the inertness of peanut butter:
People can't really be this stupid, can they?
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2007How can the DLC-wing of Democratic Party, including Rahm Emanuel, continue to claim to know what's best for the Democratic Party after they've been so badly schooled? By other Democrats (italics mine):
It isn't just Ford who wanted to take us down a different path--it is the entire neoliberal, neocon, triangulate from a point of weakness, liberal-hating, Michael Bloomberg and Joe Lieberman loving, DLC-nexus of Democratic Party aristocracy that wanted Dean out. For example, I think it is pretty clear, at this point, that one of the "top Democrats" who was opposed to Howard Dean continuing on…
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 29, 2007In response to us foul-mouthed evolutionists, Casey Luskin asks, "Yet for all their numbers and name-calling, not a single one has answered Egnor's question: How does [sic] Darwinian mechanisms produce new biological information?" I've never liked the whole "biological information" concept.
As far as I can tell, the creationists started bandying the term about after this George Gilder article in Wired was published:
Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists…
mikethemadbiologist | March 28, 2007Hunter has a superb piece on the declining (or perhaps negligible) authority of the punditocracy. Hunter writes:
I have never (and I do mean, never) gotten the impression that anyone among the upper echelons of the press understands just how badly their long-term credibility has been damaged by their uncritical kowtowing to administration propaganda when it comes to the Iraq War. I've never gotten the impression that they comprehend just how much their brand credibility was torn to ribbons, and how to this day there are large segments of the population -- the segments of the population that…
mikethemadbiologist | March 28, 2007By way of Seeing the Forest, I came across this Zogby poll from Sept. 2006 about the Iraq War. The stoopid is really painful.
Half of American voters (50%) say there is no link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks, while 46% believe there is a connection. However, just 37% of respondents in the poll agreed that Saddam was connected to the attacks and that the Iraq War was justified as retribution for his involvement, while 48% believed that there is no connection between Saddam and 9/11 and the Iraq War has diverted America's attention from the War on Terror.
That 46% still…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2007In a recent post that's made it's way around blogtopia (and yes, skippy invented that phrase), I referred to willful ignorance. I've used that phrase before, and one troll decided to get hung up on that phrase (even though I then explained it). In one of those internet tubes, I found an excellent parody of the anti-gay spew vomited forth by various rightwing faithtanks called "The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths." The whole thing is worth a read, but in the part where the author explains how to write a similar parody is an excellent description of willful ignorance (bold original;…
mikethemadbiologist | March 20, 2007In response to my latest post about Michael Egnor, I received a couple of comments lamenting my intemperance towards Egnor. Below is the long version, but Mark sums up the short version quite nicely (bold original; italics mine):
But his illness is the result of the actions of many doctors - doctors like Dr. Egnore who ignore reality, and don't practice medicine with an awareness of how their actions contribute to the evolution of the other species that surround us. It's people like Dr. Egnor who hand out antibiotics like candy, because after all, bacteria don't evolve, and so their…