Fucking Morons
mikethemadbiologist | November 1, 2008...Republican political rally? Call me confused (italics mine):
"When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked," Elborno said. "It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic."
Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.
"I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said 'Why are you crying? and she said 'I already voted for McCain, I'm a…
mikethemadbiologist | October 30, 2008While I often disagree with Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), he usually doesn't practice sleazeball politics. He's also disgusted by the Cult of Stupidity that has enveloped the Republican Party:
For Hagel, almost as disturbing as Palin's lack of experience is her willingness--in disparaging remarks about Joe Biden's long Senate career, for example--to belittle the notion that experience is important. "There's no question, she knows her market," Hagel said. "She knows her audience, and she's going right after them. And I'll tell you why that's dangerous. It's dangerous because you don't want to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 25, 2008...it's applied research. As far as I can tell, the McCain campaign is referring to a study of olive fruit flies which are an agricultural pest. From the congressman who wrote the earmark:
"The Olive Fruit Fly has infested thousands of California olive groves and is the single largest threat to the U.S. olive and olive oil industries," he said. "I secured $748,000 for olive fruit fly research and irradiation in the (fiscal year 2008) appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA will use some of that funding for their research facility in France. This USDA research…
mikethemadbiologist | October 23, 2008Consider the following:
23% approve of George Bush as president.
28% do not know that the earth travels around the sun.
Discuss.
mikethemadbiologist | October 16, 2008Last night, "Joe the Plumber" (who's kinda like Conan the Barbarian, except that he's not) was featured front and center in the debates. So what did the actual Joe the Plumber think? By way of Jesse Taylor, from Politico:
"McCain was solid in his performance," he says. "I still don't know where he stands," he says of Obama. "I'm middle class. I can't have my taxes raised any more."
He also says he actually isn't in the bracket where Obama would raise his taxes -- but he's worried that Obama will shift the bracket down.
He also said that, in his encounter with Obama, the Illinois Senator […
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2008...John Bircher? By way of ScienceBlogling Ed Brayton, I came across this Salon article describing Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's claim that she is a young earth creationist (or, at the very least, believes that human and dinosaurs lived at the same time, which is fucking stupid enough). But it gets even more insane. From Dave Neiwert, we learn that she very well might be a John Bircher:
What's striking, as Michael points out, is the article in front of her: It's a piece about the "Con Con Call" -- one of those hysterical non-issues that conspiracy theorists of the far right in 1995…
mikethemadbiologist | September 13, 2008Yes, I'm being mean, but this clip below has all the legitimacy of creationism--which is to say none:
Really, creationism is just as nutty, this is simply not dressed up in pseudoreligious baggage.
Bonus Insanity: A creationist has put together a site opposing Electronic Arts' game Spore because it is brainwashing kids into 'believing in' evolution. Apparently, we "Evolutionaryists" are very mean too.
mikethemadbiologist | September 5, 2008If you thought Obama's minister was a piece of work, get a load of Palin's church (italics mine):
An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin's church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus.
Palin's pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church's website.
"He's a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,"…
mikethemadbiologist | August 28, 2008...they would have talked through the whole thing and nobody would have ever actually seen it. From Jesse Taylor (italics mine):
CNN's been talking since Obama was officially nominated about how Obama is the first black major-party candidate, yadda yadda yadda.
So, the highest ranking African American elected official in the country steps on stage...and CNN cuts away.
Then they come back to cover a seven-minute musical number by Melissa Etheridge replete with shots of teary-eyed delegates.
I don't think it even occurs to them that people would want to watch the convention and not their…
mikethemadbiologist | August 23, 2008Recently, I wrote about the staggering stupidity of the national political press corps. Eric Alterman provides another example, the LA Times "chief innovation officer" (italics mine):
Take the example of the Tribune Company's new owner, Sam Zell. Leaving aside his penchant for potty-mouth rejoinders for those who question his judgment, Zell has done nothing to slow the slide in the company's fortunes and much to accelerate it. Scrambling like mad for cash to service the company's debt, Zell sold off the profitable Newsday and borrowed $300 million against future earnings, a clear sign of…
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2008By now, you might have heard about McCain's forgetfulness about how many homes he owns (at least seven). But his campaign's response is utterly absurd (italics mine):
The houses gaffe doesn't matter because ... he was a POW!
"This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison," spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.
For those of you who haven't kept track, the McCain campaign just recently cited McCain's POW years in explaining away the Miss Buffalo Chip gaffe, and in dealing with the allegation that he broke the rules and listened in on Barack Obama during…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2008In a very interesting NY Times magazine article about wastewater treatment (no, really, it is worth reading), I came across this passage:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10wastewater-t.html?_r=1&ref…
And then there are those whose first, and final, reaction is "yuck."
"Why the hell do we have to drink our own sewage?" asks Muriel Watson, a retired schoolteacher who sat on a California water-reuse task force and founded the Revolting Grandmas to fight potable reuse. She toured the Orange County plant but came away unsatisfied. "It's not the sun and the sky and a roaring river…
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2008As Jesse at Pandagon notes, even though the presidential race is stagnant in that the numbers aren't shifting much, that's not the same as the race being in a dead heat. This would be obvious, if your typical political reporter wasn't a mathematically illiterate moron.
Yes, I know that there's only one poll that matters and it's in November, blah, blah, blah. But based on the available poll data, there's no way this is a dead heat. Why? Because, in 40 out of 41 polls since Clinton dropped out of the race, Obama has led McCain. If they truly were in a dead heat (i.e., 50/50), the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2008Ezra Klein has this to say about the Gang of 500 Mediocrities (also known as our national political press corps):
For reasons that I try not to speculate on before 9am, the media likes to make policy disputes sound incredibly complicated. Much too complicated for mortals to understand, or base electoral behavior on. Take this Time article on the various tax plans floating around the election. The piece argues that the plans are composed of loosely connected soundbites, lacking numbers or details or real information. To read it, you'd think the two proposals were impossible to estimate, or…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2008Glenn Greenwald's recent post about the botched anthrax investigation reminds me of a colleague who was investigated by the FBI after the anthrax attacks (and check out the letter claiming that Bruce Ivins was yet another scientist wrongfully accused).
When I heard that he was under investigation, I was shocked: he is one of the nicer scientists I know. Ultimately, he was cleared, and in a bizarre reversal, the government asked him for help in typing the anthrax strain.
The reason I bring this up is not to demonstrate that the FBI couldn't investigate its way out of a paper bag, but to note…
mikethemadbiologist | August 1, 2008More fallout from Bushist apparatchik Monica Goodling. Her political hackery weakened our ability to prosecute terrorists:
In one disgraceful example, Goodling refused to hire "one of the leading terrorism prosecutors in the country" because his wife was a Democrat:
He was an experienced terrorism prosecutor and had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service. ... The candidate's wife was a prominent local Democrat elected official and vice-chairman of a local Democratic Party. [...]
[Executive Office for…
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2008Recently, I finished Pretty Vacant which describes the origins of the British punk scene. At one point, the author describes one of the first punk-ish shows ever, and how, even though there were only about 65 people in the audience (a crappy black box hole), those 65 people would go on to have a tremendous influence in music, art, and politics*. They definitely punched above their weight.
Well, our national political press is the antithesis of that basement audience--a point I've made, oh, once or twice before. The 'Gang of 500' is one of the greatest collections of mediocrities going (...…
mikethemadbiologist | July 26, 2008...are stupid morons together. Matt Taibbi, while discussing 9/11 Truthers, describes creationists perfectly (italics mine):
Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the subject matter in much the same way a defense attorney does. A defense attorney takes a case and he sees six pieces of evidence that are going to convict his client, and he sets out to destroy those six pieces of evidence, irrelevant to the actual truth of the situation. That's not to denigrate…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2008Since I've ripped into Olivia Judson before, it's only fair that I note Judson's good suggestion--eliminate the term Darwinism (although we definitely need to keep TEH DARWINSIMZ!!; italics mine):
I'd like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed. (The science would be in a sorry state if one man 150 years ago had, in fact,…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2008Brad DeLong isn't the only one who thinks the Washington Post's reporting stinks:
At a lunch of eight people I was at last week--former cabinet secretaries, newspaper executives, deans, et cetera--somebody (not me) asked what learning-about-the-world reason there was to read the Washington Post. There was silence. Then, after a while, somebody said "the Style section." And then there was more silence.
My call for people to nominate reliable reporters--those whose bylines tell you that you can trust the truth, the importance, and the relevance of the matters asserted by the reporter--working…