Fucking Morons
mikethemadbiologist | February 5, 2007I want to follow up on a point Amanda made in response to my post about the Texas plan to immune all girls against HPV. (Maybe between the two of us, we'll rub some good points together and come up with an idea...) Amanda writes (italics mine):
...it's true that the opt-out policy does mean that it's going to be a lot harder for vindictive, misogynist parents to refuse to protect their daughters from cervical cancer. It's the difference between neglect and active abuse, really. Without mandatory vaccinations, denying your daughter preventative treatment was easy, since you simply had to…
mikethemadbiologist | February 4, 2007...so we can fight among ourselves here? I don't think the Iraq War was supposed to work that way. The Sunday edition NY Times has a story about Sunni-Shiite conflict in... Dearborn, MI. Fortunately, it's only reached the level of vandalism. What adjective do you use when events surpass surreal?
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2007It should tell you just how loony the Christopath right is when a conservative Texas governor gains admission to the Coalition of the Sane (for the time being, anyway). How did Texas governor Rick Perry do it? By mandating that schoolgirls receive the HPV vaccine, and that the state subsidize the vaccinations. From the AP:
Some conservatives and parents' rights groups worry that requiring girls to get vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way they raise their children.
By using an executive order…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2007I recently posted about creationists who want their 'biology' courses to be taken seriously by universities. Josh takes to task a libertarian who states "if we chose to mandate what is taught about human origins, and we are true democrats, we should mandate equal time for creationism and evolution." So, I found on the internets a description of Biology for Christian Schools, a creationist textbook, written by the textbook's authors.
Creationism should never be viewed in the abstract, but as the mindless indoctrination that it is. Hold your breath and dive in; the passage destroys the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 26, 2007
This is not George Bush
(image from here)
The Peter Pan syndrome is in full effect at the White House. After meeting with George Bush, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the meeting (italics mine):
In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president's minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new "way forward" for U.S. forces in Iraq.
"He's tried this two times -- it's failed twice," the California Democrat said. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2007I compliment Sen. James Webb on his post-State of the Union speech, and he goes and votes against Sen. Dodd's amendment to require Congressional approval to increase troop numbers in Iraq. Also voting in surprising fashion were Democrats Casey, Cardin, and Nelson. Republican senator Hagel showed that he's another all-talk Republican: despite his blistering criticism of the Bush administration, he also voted against Dodd's resolution.
Biden also voted against the resolution, but at least he has a good reason:
I'm not for capping for a simple reason: It maintains the status quo. I don't want…
mikethemadbiologist | January 22, 2007A few days ago, I posted about the conservative dogpile over at the Weather Channel because one of their bloggers had some very scathing comments about global warming denialists. I found this post by a self-described "literature guy" which makes two very good points.
First, he makes a very good point about expertise and trust (italics mine):
Read posts by people who are angry that Dr. Cullen has made the monumentally unremarkable statement that anti global-warming dogma is junk science and that meteorologists--who have as much right to offer authoritative opinions on climate change as Imams…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2007A few weeks ago, climatologist and Weather Channel blogger Heidi Cullen suggested that:
I'd like to take that suggestion a step further. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming...
Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy.…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2007The frustration of the soldiers in Afghanistan must have just 'surged'. Why? Because, as part of the Bush-McCain surge, soldiers in Afghanistan will be withdrawn and sent to Iraq just in time for a Taliban offensive:
A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.
Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.
The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan's…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2007So those who oppose global warming are using the same strategy as the creationists: teach the 'controversy.'
This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth."
After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film. The movie consists largely of a computer presentation by former Vice President Al Gore recounting…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2007By way of Litbrit at Shakespeare's Sister, I came across a Greg Palast article about possible motivations for a troop increase in Iraq. Palast writes (bold in original; italics mine):
Here's my question: Who asked the waiter to deliver this dish? Who asked for the 21,000 soldiers?
We know the US military didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Outgoing commander General George Casey called for a troop reduction.)
We know the Iraqi government didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is reportedly unhappy about a visible increase in foreign occupiers).
So who wants the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2007Right-wing dorkball* Michael Ledeen has discovered why Iraq has not gone exactly as planned:
Note that an increase in embeds doesn't necessarily require an increase in overall troop strength. We've got lots of soldiers sitting on megabases all over Iraq. They should be out and about, some of them embedded, others just moving around, tracking the terrorists, hunting them down. I don't know how many guys and gals are sitting in air-conditioned quarters and drinking designer coffee, but it's a substantial number. Enough of that.
It was the "designer coffee." Not a complete failure of strategy,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2007...you know the wheels have come completely off. Said Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson:
You talk about the hostile enemy, obviously being Iraq, but hostile enemies right here on the home front. Yesterday Senator Ted Kennedy, proposing that any kind of a troop surge should mean there should be congressional approval of that. A lot of democrats not coming to his side on this. But obviously this is not going to be an easy sell on Capitol Hill, even if it's not an easy sell to the American Public.
That meat popsicle called Kennedy, an elected Senator, an enemy of the U.S. Not an idiot, or a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2007Over at DailyKos, Darksyde comments on the motivations of the Kansas creationists (italics mine):
It's easy to get lost in the scientific or religious discussion, but this isn't about evolution or science or even religion. It's just another right-wing funded attack on behalf of the mega-rich, cleverly packaged to appeal to the very working families whose future it will devastate. The real goal is to undermine confidence in public education, maybe ultimately replacing those institutions with privatized versions (No doubt run by a recently acquired subsidiary of Neoconia Inc., suckling at the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2007White House spokesvermin Tony Snow yesterday just propelled us a little bit further down the path of either tyranny or impeachment:
"You know, Congress has the power of the purse," Snow said, then added: "The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way."
No, he doesn't. If Congress does not allocate funds for a troop increase, then the president is illegally using money appropriated for another purpose. It's that simple, although Senator Kennedy laid it out far more eloquently. Snow also said that he doesn't "want to play junior…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2007Suppose you were a very large media corporation, and you found out that some of your radio subsidiaries were espousing specific acts of violence toward other people (last I checked, that's called terrorism). You would:
1) Fire the offending parties.
2) Offer some mealymouth bullshit explanation ("If anyone was offended...").
or...
3) File a lawsuit against the blogger who posted mp3s of the offensive clips.
Well, the Disney corporation picked option number three. Disney-owned California radio station KFSO, in its effort to capitalize on right-wing hate radio, gives a microphone to some…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2007Did you vote for that? I didn't. It's great that Pelosi said on national television that Bush won't be receiving a blank check. But it's another part of the interview that bothers me. From Crooks and Liars (italics mine):
PELOSI: I'm saying two things. We will always support the troops who are there. If the president wants to expand the mission, that's a conversation he has to have with the Congress of the United States .
But that's not a carte blanche, a blank check to him to do whatever he wishes there.
And I want to make a distinction here. Democrats do support increasing the size of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 7, 2007While Iraq was the national backdrop for the 2006 elections, individually many campaigns succeeded (or did better than they had any right to do) due to a desire to end corruption (e.g., the Ohio state elections). Yet Rahm Emanuel, head of the DCCC, and the Congressional Black Caucus ('CBC') just don't seem to get that. First, Rahm Emanuel.
In Mark Foley's old district (FL-16), David Lutrin, a progressive liberal, was poised to run against Mark Foley. He certainly wouldn't have been a favorite to win, but then again, many successful Democrats didn't look like winners in early 2005 either.…
mikethemadbiologist | January 6, 2007...while professionals do logistics (more about that in a bit). There's a fascinating interview with Wesley Clark where he discusses the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.
First, I was glad to see that I'm not the only one who thinks that using the National Guard as a way to avoid having a draft degrades one of their most important functions--the response to natural disasters:
Now, one more thing that's worth talking about on Katrina of course, is, the National Guard leadership. Most of them were in Iraq. Both Mississippi and Louisiana have what they call an enhanced infantry brigade. And this…
mikethemadbiologist | January 4, 2007Have you ever been really, really hungry? Well, this python certainly was.
The lump in the python is a sheep. A pregnant sheep.
Ewe.