Fucking Morons
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2009Or something. The healthcare debate is making movement conservatives completely unhinged. Bachmann:
"That's why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress," said Bachmann, "and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions."
This is the sort of cognitive dissonance I have come to expect from movement conservatives....
mikethemadbiologist | August 20, 2009In the ongoing Democratic Party effort to alienate rank-and-file Democrats, along with those non-aligned voters who supported Democrats, an weasel-dick cowardanonymous White House official expressed surprised at the support for the public option (italics mine):
"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether…
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2009One of the more successful healthcare interventions has been home nurse visits to families that have recently had a child:
"Optional Coverage of Nurse Home Visitation Services" certainly doesn't sound controversial. The initiative, which has existed in various forms at the state and local level for decades, would fund programs that "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains...modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices; [and] skills to interact with their child." Most similar programs have…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2009One of the things that has enabled the mainstreaming of various idiocies, from altie woo, to creationism, to global warming denialism is mainstream corporate media's inability to accurately describe lunacy. For obvious reasons, 'family-friendly' newspapers and teevee can't call creationists, birthers, or deathers batshit lunatic or fucking morons. This is where 'civility' (beyond the basic norms of decency when dealing with the mentally ill) and pretensions of 'balance' utterly fail.
In Idiot America, Charles Pierce provides a good example of how this works:
How does it work? This is how it…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2009I'll get to Whole Foods in a moment, but one of the reasons I wrote about the misuse of heritability by Megan McArdle last week is that I can't stand it when people misuse biology to push a political agenda (and hopefully, I'll be able to get back to that next week). As I argued in a previous post, we can disagree about how to respond to a set of facts, but the facts are what they are.
So, onto the Whole Foods grocery woo. The CEO of Whole Foods recently wrote a far right screed against health insurance reform, in which he argues that it would be unnecessary if we only ate our vegetables.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2009...falling out of the stupid tree and smacking into every branch on the way down would be another. By now, you might have heard about the corporate lobbyist-organized healthcare offensive, which is designed to 'confront' officials at public meetings about healthcare--that is, heckle, intimidate, and shut down these meetings. Democratic Representative Gene Green (R-TX) wasn't having any of it:
During the town hall, one conservative activist turns to his fellow attendees and asks them to raise their hands if they "oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care." Almost all the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2009Recently, I described polls that described how half of Southerners did not believe that President Obama was born in the U.S. David Weigel examines how many Southern whites believe Obama was born outside of the U.S.:
In the South, like everywhere else, the vast majority of non-white voters said that Obama was born in the United States; 97 percent of black voters, 87 percent of Hispanic voters, and 88 percent of other minorities. The extremely low overall percentage? That's due to white Southerners, who dragged down the average with an extremely high level of doubt about Obama.
So what…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2009So Arthur Laffer, the creator of the Laffer Curve, which was used to justify lower taxes on the grounds that the increase in economic activity would actually increase the amount of tax revenue despite the lower rates, just crapped out on national television this pearl of wisdom:
If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.
If I were a Very Serious Blogger, I'm sure I would have something trenchant to say, but, damn, what a fucking moron. Laffer is the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 1, 2009Research 2000 conducted a poll where they asked the question, "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?" It's probably not too surprising that only four percent of Democrats and eight percent of independents thought so--there will always be fucking morons who walk among us.
But what shocked me is that 28 percent of Republicans thought Obama was not born in the U.S. Well, actually, it doesn't shock me at all. It is depressing, however, to see a major political party headbutt the crazy train.
What's even more bizarre is the regional distribution of…
mikethemadbiologist | July 27, 2009It never ceases to amaze me just how little some people actually understand about taxes, given how het up we get about taxes. We saw this before, when Obama unveiled his tax plan. Now, Mitch Albom gets into the act, incorrectly calling the increase in taxes on the wealthiest Americans a 5.4% increase:
Someone making $1,000,000 per year wouldn't pay $54,000 more in taxes under this bill. They'd pay $9,000.
That's because the 5.4% surcharge would only apply to someone's income over $1,000,000. Your tax bill wouldn't suddenly go up by $54,000 if one year you made $1,000,000 instead of $999,999…
mikethemadbiologist | July 21, 2009A while ago, I argued that The Boston Globe is basically useless, and should go out of business. Some people took exception to that, including readers I know from the 'meat world.' And then The Globe published an op-ed by a creationist.
Fortunately, ScienceBlogling Jason Rosenhouse blasts the op-edo, so I don't have to (seriously, they're not even trying to come up with novel yet still stupid ideas. It's just the same old shit).
Since the op-ed was published, I've received several emails from people who thought I was wrong, but, now, have cancelled their subscriptions. I'll write this…
mikethemadbiologist | July 20, 2009I should never have to tag a post with "Secession." Moving right along...
Having grown up in Virginia, I'm well aware of the propensity of batshit lunacy: this is the state whose Republican Party nominated Ollie North for Senate. But Republican VA state delegate nominee Catherine T. Crabill has elevated the lunacy to a whole new level. To start with, she's an Oklahoma City bombing truther. But Crabill veers from the lunatic to the outright dangerous:
Crabill... claimed the Obama administration is pursuing legislation that will turn it into "the thought police" and wants to put…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2009Granted, picking on Fox News is like taunting the slow kid--it's cheap and makes you feel bad about yourself. On the other hand, this, reported by Alex Koppelman, just cries out for comment:
Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are -- we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other ..."
At this point, his co-host tried to -- in that jokey morning show way -- tell Kilmeade he needed to shut…
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2009Over the weekend, I had started writing a post titled "When Will [economist Paul] Krugman Have His Creationist Epiphany?" It was inspired by a comment left on a Krugman post about "the Great Ignorance which seems to have overtaken much of the economics profession -- the "rediscovery" of old fallacies about deficit spending and interest rates, presented as if they were deep insights, the bizarre arguments presented by economists with sterling reputations."
While Krugman argues this is due to flat-out ignorance, a commenter made a great point (italics mine):
This is a point I've kept making to…
mikethemadbiologist | June 1, 2009http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/27/735707/-Ronald-Reagan,-the-…
With the Sotomayor nomination, many conservatives have been shrieking about 'reverse racism'--you know, how the white man is being kept down, in this case by TEH LATINAZ!! AAAIEEE!! Well, wouldn't you know, but conservative icon Ronald Reagan was a big supporter of reverse sexism (video and transcript):
Partial transcript:
As I said during the campaign, I've long believed that the time has come for the highest court in our land to include not only distinguished men, but distinguished women as well. ... I had the…
mikethemadbiologist | May 31, 2009Friends, this is compassionate conservatism we can believe in:
Heh.
mikethemadbiologist | May 28, 2009A recent column by Dan Arielly gives me a reason to discuss what I think are some of the problems with the recent emphasis on irrationality in economic theory. Before I get into that, I should note that I liked Arielly's book Predictably Irrational, and am impressed by Shiller's work. The idea that people behave non-optimally regarding economics--that is, we are not perfect economic calculators--is very important. For instance, understanding economic bubbles doesn't really make sense unless one accounts for irrationality (e.g., Shiller's work). Likewise, Arielly's Predictably Irrational…
mikethemadbiologist | May 11, 2009Having been at Genome Camp (a.k.a. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories Biology of Genomes meeting) last week, I didn't have time to blog about the latest movement conservative idiocy of getting all het up about Obama asking for Dijon mustard at a restaurant. It's clearly another instance of attempting to place Democrats in cultural opposition to 'real' Americans, as Jesse Taylor notes:
But perhaps the strangest part of all this is that when Democrats get hit for elitism (Kerry's cheesesteak, Obama's mustard), they're asking for things that the places in question had in stock to sell to customers…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2009Republican Senator Susan Collins went along with Karl Rove and cut or eliminated funding from the stimulus package for pandemic influenza spending. While Democratic Congressman Obey was able to restore $50 million for infection reporting, all state and local funding was eliminated. Nicely done, 'moderate' Senator Collins (italics mine):
Did Rove, Collins and their compatriots want a pandemic?
Of course not.
They were just playing politics, in the exceptionally narrow and irresponsible manner that characterized the Republican response to the stimulus debate - and that, because of Democratic…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2009ScienceBlogling PalMD does a good job of eviscerating the false claims of expertise by woo practioner 'Dr.' Patricia Fitzgerald and the rest of the witch doctors over at The Huffington Post, so I thankfully don't have to (so many fucking morons, so little Mad Biologist...). But PalMD neglected to mention one thing about 'Dr.' Patricia Fitzgerald:
She is the "Wellness" editor of The Huffington Post.
That's right: a full-blown woomeister is the equivalent of The Huffington Post's medicine and health section. Is she an M.D.? Nope. Is she a Pharm.D.? Uh-uh. Maybe a Ph.D.? Guess what? No…