Politics
grrlscientist | October 21, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part four of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
grrlscientist | October 20, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part three of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
oracknows | October 20, 2009Somehow I missed this when it first aired last week, but...take that, Bill Maher:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Doubt Break '09
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Ron Paul Interview
emjohnson | October 20, 2009"Keeping an open mind is a virtue, but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out." - Carl Sagan
On Saturday Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine and author of numerous books including Why Darwin Matters, posted an "Open Letter to Bill Maher on Vaccinations":
Bill, your comments about not wanting to "trust the government" to inject us with a potentially deadly virus, along with many comments you have made about "big pharma" being in cahoots with the AMA and the CDC to keep us sick in the name of corporate profits is, in every way that matters…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part two of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
pharyngula | October 19, 2009A couple of Republican district chairmen took it upon themselves to defend Senator Jim DeMint (R, Crazytown). Uh, maybe.
There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation's pennies and trying to preserve our country's wealth and our economy's viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.
I bet that if you sat those two down and asked them if they knew…
oracknows | October 19, 2009Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I've warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they've failed by science various "alternative" medicine practices. This began much earlier this year, when I pointed out how Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) invited the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse to the Senate to testify.…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part one of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
tqa | October 18, 2009
You would think that it would be hard to find a statement more outrageous than hopefully-soon-to-be-former-Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell's attempt to prove that he's not a racist:
"I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."
For that matter, you'd think it would be hard to find conduct more outrageous than Bardwell's repeated refusal to marry interracial couples. Unfortunately, this turns out not to be the case. It's almost painfully easy to find both more outrageous statements…
grrlscientist | October 17, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, christianity, atheist meets god, Edward Current, streaming video
It's the moment of judgment for one fool who says there is no God. Christians, get ready to laugh as he learns his eternal fate!
oracknows | October 17, 2009Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this: I'm incredibly grateful that this is the season finale of Maher's show. I don't think I can take much more of his moronic anti-science stances being proudly trumpeted.
It was painful to watch and showed very much that Bill Maher still doesn't get it. In fact, if anything, he escalated his quack…
grrlscientist | October 16, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
Next week, starting Monday, I will show you the entire film because this film is not yet in general circulation.
The critics say:
"An astonishingly wide-ranging film. An informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests." - New York Times
"Lively and engaging...Smartly Done" - Los…
illconsidered | October 16, 2009There is an overwhelming consensus supporting the basic tenets of anthropogenic global warming theory. Those tenets are that CO2 levels are rising, this rise is caused by human activity, this rise is causing a rapid warming trend and this trend will continue unless CO2 levels stabilise. Contrarians still like to deny this, but the existence of this consensus is an indisputable fact.
Additionally, but with much less certainty, the general picture emerging from scientific research is that the kinds of temperature changes that may be in the near future (~50 years) will cause problems ranging…
esiegel | October 16, 2009...we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the…
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2009The entry about the Fake Advertising Mom provoked a reaction I didn't see coming. I said that pregnancy and nursing changes a woman's body in plainly visible ways and that the fake moms in ads usually show no such signs, in addition to being too young to be realistic mothers of the children they're photographed with. This, to my mind, was a feminist observation.
I picked up feminism from my first wife who had been a women's-lib radical on the extreme left during the 70s. In that mode of thinking, feminists accept and celebrate the female body for what it is. Attempting to look like 20 when…
j7uy5 | October 16, 2009Just goes to show how lobbying reform hasn't gone anywhere near far
enough:
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/10/guest-post-bank-lobbyists-not-only-trying-to-kill-new-regulations-they-are-trying-to-weaken-existing-regulations.html">Bank
Lobbyists Are Not Only Trying to Kill NEW Legislation, They Are Trying
to Weaken EXISTING Regulations
By George Washington of
href="http://www.washingtonsblog.com/">Washington's Blog.
Everyone knows that the lobbyists for the financial giants are trying
to kill any tough new regulations.
But they are also trying to weaken existing…
jrosenhouse | October 15, 2009So wonders Razib Khan over at Secular Right::
In any case, I'm on the record as saying that predictions for 2012 are very premature. But, it looks like 3 of the front-runners for the G.O.P. nomination are rather frank Creationists (Palin, Huckabee and Pawlenty). I'm skeptical about any of these as likely candidates (i.e., if you had to make a bet you're going to be surprised), but if you keep adding individuals to the list it seems likely that we're looking at a serious probability that the G.O.P. nominee in 2012 will be a Creationist.
In a primary debate last year John McCain forthrightly…
awild | October 15, 2009Every year my part-time photography business does a little better than the year before. A few new clients, a few new venues, a few more visitors to my web sites. It's not a meteoric rise by any measure, but considering the current economic situation I am counting my blessings.
Naturally, of course, when business is good I muse about expanding it. What would it take to become a full-time professional photographer?
If I replaced all the time I spent running PCRs with time spent calling up potential clients and marketing my wares, and replaced the time I spent writing papers with time…
pharyngula | October 13, 2009Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Mormon Church has made some interesting remarks.
In an interview Monday before the speech, Oaks said he did not consider it provocative to compare the treatment of Mormons in the election's aftermath to that of blacks in the civil rights era, and said he stands by the analogy.
"It may be offensive to some -- maybe because it hadn't occurred to them that they were putting themselves in the same category as people we deplore from that bygone era," he said.
Did you get that? He thinks the Mormons, who are trying to deny a civil right to another minority and reserve…