Obama
grrlscientist | August 19, 2009tags: Obama, Bipolar Disorder, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, Onion News Network, ONN, streaming video
White House officials admit Obama's extreme confidence and total euphoria over "hope" and "change" were symptoms of a prolonged manic episode. He has since recovered and now is depressed -- just like the rest of the country. [2:30]
Not to split hairs, but a typical manic episode doesn't last three years.
gregladen | August 4, 2009Again, Maddow's report on Barack Hussein Obama.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
grrlscientist | July 16, 2009tags: Obama, billion dollar war machine, ONN, Onion News Network, satire, humor, funny, streaming video
This is a streaming video reveals that Obama Axed the Pentagon's Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In the Shape Of a Dragon [2:05]
emjohnson | July 13, 2009Greenpeace banner deployed on Mt. Rushmore. Image: S.J. Carrera / Greenpeace
There have been few more passionate and prescient figures in the history of science than the Russian naturalist and political radical Peter Kropotkin. Upon the confirmation of his geological research that demonstrated an ancient ice sheet had once extended across the Russian landscape, this evolutionary theorist and gentle anarchist reported in 1894 that "we must accustom ourselves to the idea that climate, like everything else on the earth, is a changeable element." In his many books and articles he regularly…
ddobbs | June 23, 2009Ezra Klein makes his call TKTK:
I think health reform is going to go the way of stimulus.
The stimulus was a huge and important accomplishment. If you had told liberals in 2007 that they were going to pass an $800 billion dollar spending bill that made good on decades of promises about infrastructure rebuilding and comparative effectiveness research and train construction and broadband internet and green energy, they would have laughed at you.
But by the time the bill actually wound its way through Congress, most liberals were frustrated by the outcome: A few Senate moderates had lopped $100…
ddobbs | June 23, 2009
I can't claim to be 'objective' or neutral on health-care reform -- but who can? Everybody needs health care, some more than others. I need it less than most, as my family and I are, knock on wood, generally blessed with good health. Even so, we laid out $18K last year for health care, still owe money -- and no one in the family ever entered an ER, got a scan, received a prescription costing more than $100, or got admitted to a hospital. And we're among the lucky ones who can (supposedly) afford insurance. (We pay $10K for a plan with a $5K deductible.) This is one of several reasons I'm…
ddobbs | June 18, 2009
A key component of health-care reform -- and saving our ass from going bankrupt and sick from spending too much on lousy treatments -- is establishing comparative effectiveness measures, otherwise known as "actually knowing WTF works and what doesn't."
This idea terrifies companies who don't want such objective measures. It also generates a lot of fear, partly via confusing or intentionally frightening arguments. Yet making sure we don't pay for stuff that doesn't work is key to reform -- a point made in this Times op-ed from libertarian economist Tyler Cohen, keeper of the blog Marginal…
ddobbs | May 22, 2009
Having lived with fire ants, stepped in fire ants, laid down with fire ants, and been bit just about everywhere by fire ants, the news that parasitic flies turn fire ants them into zombies by eating their brains pleases me immensely.
Speaking of pleasure: Vaughn whacks the dopamine = pleasure meme.
Sharon Begley says Obama may get a lot done, but he can't erase stereotype threat (so far).
We may be dozing, but Europe is ordering its swine flu vaccine. D'oh! Update: We're getting a start too.
"Good night, sleep tight, I love you." Why consistent bedtime routines work.
Why the best…
ddobbs | May 12, 2009Ezra Klein thinks the stars -- and the forces -- are so far lining up much more promisingly than in 1994:
The opponents of health reform are, at this juncture, entirely isolated. Industry is adopting an attitude of relentless positivity. Republicans are grudgingly attempting to appear cooperative. The only straight opposition is coming, as Maddow and Howard Dean say, from Rick Scott, a disgraced former hospital executive whose company was convicted of defrauding the federal government in the largest ever case of its kind.
You can say, of course, that the traditional opponents of reform will…
amillikan | April 21, 2009
Following through with President Obama's executive order issued March 9, Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells (link to PDF), the NIH has released a draft of guidelines revising the NIH's position on how it may fund "responsible, scientifically worthy human stem cell research, including human embryonic stem cell research." The funding only extends to human embryonic stem cells derived from embryos created in excess at fertility clinics. ScienceBlogger Nick Anthis from The Scientific Activist views the creation of these guidelines as a "significant…
palmd | April 8, 2009I'm not real interested in blogging about politics. It's just not my thing. But the recent increase in absurd and frankly scary rhetoric from the right is giving me the shpilkes. It's not just the tea-baggers (heh heh...I said "tea bagger"), but I might as well say something about their lame-ass tea parties. These tea parties differ, but many of them involve sending tea bags to a representative or to the IRS to protest taxes. These "parties" don't actually protest higher taxes, just the idea of taxes. After all, taxes have always sucked, and no one was having tea parties under Reagan,…
hrynyshyn | April 7, 2009I was going to ignore the open letter-to-the-president advertisement placed in major papers recently by the Cato Institute. You've probably heard of it -- the one that says Obama should ignore global warming alarmism because the science says it isn't happening. The one signed by "over 100 scientists." But the response elsewhere has been interesting. It focuses almost exclusively on the expertise of those who signed the letter, not the merits of the argument it makes. I find myself agreeing -- ever so slightly, with the Cato Institutes' Jerry Taylor, who defended the letter last week in the…
terrasig | March 28, 2009
Dr John Hope Franklin was a 1935 A.B. graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, TN, then earned his M.A. (1936) and Ph.D. (1939) from Harvard University. [For reference, W.E.B. DuBois also graduated from Fisk (1888) and was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895).] Franklin's doctoral dissertation, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, planted the seed for his classic 1947 work, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (subtitle later changed to "A History of African-Americans"). This book, now in its eighth edition, was written originally during his four-…
pontiff | March 25, 2009A press release from Caltech about Steve Koonin, who was the boss of my bosses during a SURF project and was a student of my undergraduate advisor at Caltech (and also responsible for severe drops in GPAs for many of the physicist students I knew at Caltech :)):
Steven Koonin, visiting associate in physics and former provost of Caltech, has been nominated by President Obama to serve as Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. The position requires Senate confirmation. Koonin is currently chief scientist for BP, where he is responsible for guiding the company's long-range…
ddobbs | March 11, 2009
Obama gave a major education speech at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce yesterday. The money quote:
For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline. ... It's more money versus more reform, vouchers versus the status quo. There has been partisanship and petty bickering, but little recognition that we need to move beyond the worn fights of the 20th century if we are going to succeed in the 21st Century. Well, the time for finger-pointing is over.
Been much buzz about this talk -- the main points of…
amillikan | March 10, 2009President Obama signed an executive order today to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research signed into place by President Bush in 2001. The ban limited funding to fewer than two dozen existing lines of embryonic stem cells, severely crippling scientists who use embryonic stem cells to research diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, among others—now, over a hundred lines developed since then will be eligible for funding. Said ScienceBlogger James Hrynyshyn of The Island of Doubt, "the news that...science will no longer be held hostage to fundamentalist…
bioephemera | March 9, 2009Yuval Levin has an editorial in today's WaPo that makes a very good point:
Science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. In science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so. There are, of course, different ways for politics to exert authority over science. To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities -- economic, political and ethical -- in…
denialism | March 9, 2009President Obama has lifted the ban on embryonic stem cell research enacted by Bush, but I'm left feeling that this intervention came many years too late.
Pledging that his administration will "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology," President Obama on Monday lifted the Bush administration's strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research.
...
But Mr. Obama went on to say that the majority of Americans "have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research; that the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight the perils can be…
bioephemera | March 9, 2009The President just released a new memorandum on scientific integrity:
Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security. The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and…
hrynyshyn | March 9, 2009O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The Tempest is not only one of Shakespeare last plays, but arguably his most profound. No longer content with mere comedy or historical tragedy, he explores the changes rocking the Western world in the 17th century as superstition gave way to reason. By the closing of the fifth act, the sorcerer Prosper laments that "Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own."
And yet, four hundred years later, faith in magic and and distrust of science…