Fucking Morons
mikethemadbiologist | April 7, 2009Atrios is right: Fairfax County, VA's policy about taking a birth control pill is school is nuts:
When a Fairfax County mother got an urgent call from school last month reporting that her teenage daughter was caught popping a pill at lunchtime, she did not panic. "It was probably her birth-control pill," she thought. She was right.
Her heart dropped that afternoon in the assistant principal's office at Oakton High School when she and her daughter heard the mandatory punishment: A two-week suspension and recommendation for expulsion....
Health advocates say that harsh penalties for students…
mikethemadbiologist | April 1, 2009Actually, he didn't. He interviewed anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy. Which is worse. Here's one small dose of stupidity:
Most people who blame autism on vaccines point to the mercury in the shots, yet mercury has been removed from most vaccines and autism rates continue to climb.
We don't believe it's only the mercury. Aluminum and other toxins also play a role. The viruses in the vaccines themselves can be causing it, too.
That part in italics is demonstrably false. No virus has ever been shown to cause autism (horrible effects, including brain damage and hearing loss, yes).
And it's…
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2009The GOP has officially entered a self-parody feedback loop. Case in point, House Minority leader Rep. Boehner's spokescritter on Obama's tax reform commission (italics mine):
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) offered tepid support for the concept of tax reform but was leery of what he sees as a chance for more tax increases.
"Obviously, the tax code needs reform, but I hope that when the administration talks about generating more revenue that isn't code for raising taxes," Boehner spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier said.
The people who collect all of the taxes? They're called the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2009At this point, diversity in the Obama administration means you've never worked for Goldman Sachs. Meet the newest Obama nominee, Gary Gensler for head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (italics mine):
Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was in the Treasury Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall Street lobbyists was all the rage. Sanders gets right to the point: "Mr. Gensler worked with Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan to exempt credit default swaps from regulation, which led to the collapse of AIG and has resulted in the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 15, 2009Because AIG is paying bonuses to the division that created a lot of Big Shitpile (italics mine):
The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be…
mikethemadbiologist | March 8, 2009This little security breach and its cause are disturbing (italics mine):
A Cranberry company that monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing networks discovered a potentially serious security breach involving President Barack Obama's helicopter.
Tiversa employees found engineering and communications information about Marine One at an IP address in Tehran, Iran.
"We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, which is the president's helicopter," said Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa.
The company told Target 11 that it was able to trace the file back to its original source…
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2009In Colorado, someone is very bothered by the idea of kosher salt:
You've heard of kosher salt? Now there's a Christian variety.
Retired barber Joe Godlewski says he was inspired by television chefs who repeatedly recommended kosher salt in recipes.
"I said, 'What the heck's the matter with Christian salt?'" Godlewski said, sipping a beer in the living room of his home in unincorporated Cresaptown, a western Maryland mountain community.
By next week, his trademarked Blessed Christians Salt will be available at http://www.memphi.net, the Web site of Memphis, Tenn.-based seasonings manufacturer…
mikethemadbiologist | March 6, 2009In the past, I've referred to Peter Pan Conservatives--those who think that winning wars is largely about will (and not logistics, supply, or local political conditions). Well, Treasury Secretary Geithner is now practicing Peter Pan economics:
...top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as "toxic waste," are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them -- and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.
Thus, in a recent interview…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2009Who knew Warren Buffett had his own special tax bracket? With reporting like this, who needs Republicans? From a NY Times story about limiting the tax break for charitable donations by the rich (italics mine):
"If you're a teacher making $50,000 a year and decide to donate $1,000 to the Red Cross or United Way, you enjoy a tax break of $150," Mr. Orszag wrote. "If you are Warren Buffett or Bill Gates and you make that same donation, you get a $350 deduction, more than twice the teacher."
(Actually, Mr. Buffett's overall tax rate was somewhere around 17 percent, according to his testimony…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2009Despite some of the gnashing of teeth and wailing around these parts about how mean we are to creationists on ScienceBlogs and how this will backfire, as I've noted before, creationist is slowly becoming mainstreamed as a pejorative (as opposed to a religious belief that should be exempted from criticism). Steve Benen writes:
I call them "conversation enders." These are comments that lead you to know, the moment you hear them, that the writer/speaker is either clueless or intellectually dishonest, and there's really no reason to engage the person in a serious dialog.
I suspect we all have…
mikethemadbiologist | February 25, 2009
Creationists say my head will explode. OH NOES!!!!
Driftglass bravely dove into the shallow end of the gene pool that is the Conservative Political Action Conference, which he describes perfectly:
For all nine-minutes of bullshit, faux-introspection chin-music that came from the Right about change, future and vision after they got hog-slaughtered in the last two elections, if you want to know what is really at the corrupt, oozy heart of the American Conservative movement (and its filthy little avatar, the Republican Party) look no further than their ideological trade show: the Conservative…
mikethemadbiologist | February 20, 2009One of the more promising trends I've seen is that the various forms of denialism that scientists regularly decry (including those of us here at ScienceBlogs) are starting to be recognized by non-scientists. I don't know if there's a direct cause-and-effect here, or if like-minded people are coming up with the same idea (the most depressing cause would be if this got started with a stupid blog comment...). Anyway, I bring you public policy professor Mark Kleiman (italics mine):
One largely unremarked aspect of global-warming denialism (as exemplified by George Will and demolished by Mike…
mikethemadbiologist | February 12, 2009But he's not willing to let the rest of us know what this vital information is:
So we called Barnes and asked him what he was referring to.
At first, he cited the fact that it's been cold lately.
Perhaps sensing this was less than convincing, Barnes then asserted that there had been a "cooling spell" in recent years. "Haven't you noticed?" he asked.
Asked for firmer evidence of such cooling, Barnes demurred, telling TPMmuckraker he was too busy to track it down.
We pressed Barnes again: surely he could tell us where he had found this vital new information, which could upend the current debate…
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2009Yves Smith lays out just how stupid Treasury Secretary Geithner's proposal is. I think these are the key points (italics mine):
Let's start with the basics. The US banking system is insolvent. Got that? Insolvent. That does not mean every bank in the US is toast, in fact quite a few are probably just fine, and another large group is no doubt hurting and undercapitalized, but a couple of years of not shooting themselves in the foot again would enable therm (via earnings) to rebuild their equity bases sufficiently to proceed more or less as normal.
The problem is that a significant portion of…
mikethemadbiologist | February 9, 2009These Twitter feeds, captured by Atrios and written by 'moderate' Democrat Claire McCaskill, make it so perfectly clear that many elected officials have no idea how things are funded:
"Proud we cut over 100 billion out of recov bill.Many Ds don't like it, but needed to be done.The silly stuff Rs keep talking about is OUT."
And then:
"Going to Museum of Am History today.Haven't been since it re-opened.Want to check it out.Also grocery store and later a movie date with Joe."
As Atrios notes:
Hopefully she enjoys the museum. Amusingly, she also voted for the Coburn amendment which forbids the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 9, 2009...so why did the Blue Dog Democrats and conservative Republicans cut it? According to the latest about the Recovery and Reinvestment Act (funny how everyone's forgetting about the reinvestment part), the Blue Dogs and 'moderate' Republicans cut in half the proposed funds to supplement state budgets. This defeats the whole purpose of a stimulus.
Hardly a day goes by in any state where there aren't newspaper stories about state and local budget cuts. For the most part, these aren't scaling back future projects, but cuts in ongoing, existing projects, such as education. Yet the Blue Dogs…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2009I think the creationist controversy sheds a lot of light on the conservative movement as a whole. So, in the comments of this post by Brad DeLong that wondered how in the hell anyone still seriously argues on behalf of the Treasury View in economics, I remarked that it reminded me of creationists:
....in biology, for example, the profession itself does not lend credence to creationism. The fundamentals, as opposed to the cutting edge (or arguments about the relative importance of various phenomena), are not in question. These are political controversies, not scientific ones. That is,…
mikethemadbiologist | February 2, 2009By now, you might have heard about the growing outrage that bankers at banks receiving bailout money are drawing bonuses. It's reached the point where Sen. Claire McCaskill has proposed capping bankers' income at a salary equivalent to that of the president of the U.S. I didn't really have much to add about how ridiculous the arguments for paying the bankers bonuses when their firms have been nationalized (if, nothing else, most employees, who through no fault of their own, working in dying businesses are getting laid off--that is, no salary at all). But a quotes from a NY Times article…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2009At the behest of Our Benevolent Seed Overlords, I recently discussed elitism and how to restore science to its rightful place. I think, though, porn is probably not the best way to do so (italics mine):
...the [NSF] employees in question weren't just logging onto their Facebook accounts or buying birthday gifts on Amazon.com. The report says they were watching, downloading and e-mailing porn, sometimes for significant portions of their workdays, and over periods of months or even years.
In one particularly egregious case, the report says one NSF "senior official" was discovered to have spent…
mikethemadbiologist | January 26, 2009And you thought the War on Science was over. Bush appointee Kathie Olsen, who was the deputy director of NSF, and who couldn't give a straight answer to Senator John McCain when asked about human influences on global warming, might have been "burrowed" into the NSF:
How was Olsen permitted to slip inside the NSF bureaucracy after playing such a front-and-center role in the Bush administration's politicization of science? We're looking into whether her case fits the technical definition of "burrowing" -- and what the Obama team can do about it -- but suffice to say that her survival hasn't…