Politics
pharyngula | October 8, 2009The Supreme Court just heard arguments in the case of Buono v. Salazar, a case which is challenging the use of a gigantic cross on federal land, which was initially erected to honor WWI dead but has now become a cause celebre for the wanna-be theocrats who want official endorsement of America as a Christian nation. This exchange with Scalia is simply stunning: the man is an incompetent ideologue who I wouldn't trust to rule on a parking ticket. Can we have him impeached?
Here's how he reacted when told that non-Christians might object a teeny-tiny bit to having their dead memorialized with a…
pharyngula | October 8, 2009Would you believe that Tom Coburn (Repugnant, Oklahoma) has introduced a bill to end funding for political science research? He even suggests that people should just watch Fox News or CNN instead, as if those are examples of objective, empirical research.
Well, heck, if that's the way it works, let's just get rid of the NIH and NSF altogether, and instead tell people to watch those nifty keen 'science' programs about UFOs and Bigfoot on the History Channel. That's what the scientists sucking on the public teat do all day anyway, right?
Oops. I hope I didn't give him any ideas.
palmd | October 8, 2009Why am I politically liberal? Is it because liberal ideals conform to my own sense of morals about how a just society should function? According to some, that idea is laughably wrong. Let me share with you an exchange from facebook:
Me: The michigan house passed the doctor tax. Time to write and call your state senator to remind them that taxing the person providing the service you need is really freakin' stupid.
Conservative friend: You've gotta LOVE those Democrats in Lansing...just keep taxing and spending and taxing and spending....If this fucking thing passes the senate and governor…
grrlscientist | October 7, 2009tags: Intelligent Alien Design, Discovery Institute, Gordon J. Glover, Casey Luskin, humor, parody, satire, Canadian cartoon, streaming video
This video is a hypothetical dialogue between Gordon J. Glover and the official spokesperson of the Intelligent Alien Intervention Institute on Science NEWS. They discuss the Academic Freedom legislation that recently became law in Louisiana and how it might also help various theories of Paleo-Contact to be taught alongside mainstream archaeology in the public science classroom.
Hint to the humor-impaired: this video is a parody mocking Intelligent…
ddobbs | October 5, 2009Never know what'll top the charts. Top post was a post I put up in January, "Pfizer takes $2.3 billion offl-label marketing fine." That post reported the news (via FiercePharma) that Pfizer had tucked away in its financial disclosure forms a $2.3 billion charge to end the federal investigation into allegations of off-label promotions of its Cox-2 painkillers, including Bextra. (Lot of money ... but it didn't quite wipe out the company's 2008 net income.) The company had set aside the money as part of a deal it was negotiating Justiice. Finalizing the deal, however, took until September. At…
emjohnson | October 4, 2009CBS is reporting that ex-Senator Rick Santorum (who lost his Pennsylvania seat in 2006 with 41% of the vote) has entered the running for 2012 along with the likes of Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. All of them are staunch right-wing fundamentalist Christians who have advocated changing the Constitution to reflect Biblical Law.
I have something of a history lesson for Republicans who think that these views have any place in the United States. However, before that, to get a flavor of Santorum's unique lunacy I thought I'd quote his Associated Press interview from 2003 in which he states that…
palmd | October 3, 2009Times columnist David Brooks would like to distance the conservative movement from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and all the other "not true Republicans" out there. His simplistic tactic is to claim that Beck and Limbaugh haven't won the GOP any elections. If elected positions were the only important facts in a democracy, he might have a point. But Beck, Limbaugh, and their allies don't care about elections. They represent a fundamentally anti-democratic philosophy of "if you can't get there democratically, do it the other way."
What are these "other ways"?
Women have apparently screwed…
oracknows | October 3, 2009...from PZ Myers at the AAI Convention:
The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy. He did a good job of walking a difficult tightrope; he made it clear that the award was granted for some specific worthy matters, his humorous approach to religion, while carefully dissociating the AAI from any endorsement of crackpot medicine. It won't be enough, I…
oracknows | October 2, 2009...for Bill Maher to receive the Richard Dawkins Award. It was a huge mistake on the part of the Atheist Alliance International to award it, for the reasons I've repeated ad nauseam over the last couple of weeks; so I won't go there again.
What I really want to know is what happened. I can't be in L.A. this weekend. Actually, I'd much rather be in London for TAM London than in L.A. anyway. Unfortunately, I can't be in either place (although I will be going to Chicago next weekend for the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress; keep that in mind if any of you Chicagoans wants to try a…
j7uy5 | October 2, 2009This is a bad sign. Specifically, it is an instance of the mainstream media starting to hint at the truth. I take this as a sign that things are getting worse, as the effort to keep up the pretense is no longer even remotely credible.
What this article shows, is that the economic models are wrong. That in itself is not news. Regular visitors know that all models are wrong. But they can be useful, if the underlying assumptions are correct, or nearly so.
U.S. Job Losses May Be Even Larger as Labor's Model Breaks Down
By Carlos Torres
Bloomberg
Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economic…
drorzel | October 2, 2009We're currently in the early stages of the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser, helping to raise money for educational projects. This is especially important in the current economic climate-- even before things went south, many schools and classrooms were strapped for cash, but now it's even worse.
But I can understand if that's not a noble enough cause for you. Helping poor people isn't enough for everyone. So here's something to sweeten the deal: PETA doesn't like DonorsChoose because some of the science classes seeking funds are looking for dissection equipment for biology classes. Janet gives…
emjohnson | October 2, 2009
I had the opportunity to see this live in April. I had never heard of Lawrence Lessig prior to this presentation, but I haven't been able to forget it. I'm so pleased to have found it online.
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Notables from the last 24:
Over at Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity.
The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social cognition. This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say "by product") of social cognition and behavior.
May be something to that, Razib says â but it would be nice "get in on the game of normal human…
jstemwedel | October 1, 2009I don't usually go looking for a fight, but there are some cases where I'll make an exception.
You know, of course that I'm a big fan of DonorsChoose. And you'll recall that PETA's tactics make them a problematic organization as far as I'm concerned regardless of what your views on animal welfare or animal rights might be.
So, when PETA takes a swing at DonorsChoose, of course I want to jump in off the ropes and swing back. What's PETA's issue with DonorsChoose?
DonorsChoose.org is a nonprofit organization with a noble mission - to help teachers purchase materials for classroom lessons.…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2009As a companion to this post, I would like to put forth Alan Grayson, a first-term representative from Florida, as a candidate for Speaker of the House. On Wednesday Grayson said:
Now, the Democrats have a different plan. The Democrats say that if you have health insurance, we're going to make it better. If you don't have health insurance, we're going to provide it to you. If you can't afford health insurance, then we'll help you to afford health insurance.
So, America gets to decide. Do you want the Democratic plan or do you want the Republican plan? Remember, the Republican plan: Don…
hrynyshyn | October 1, 2009It's not a home run by any stretch of the imagination, but the Senate's counterpart to the Waxman-Markey climate change bill (a.k.a. ACES) that the House narrowly passed earlier this year at least gets global warming onto first base. There's bad and good in the awkwardly titled Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, of course, and it still won't get us anywhere the kind of greehouse gas emissions levels than even the conservative climatologists say are necessary. The differences between the bills are worth exploring.
The sections that most pique my curiosity are devoted to emissions…
jstemwedel | September 30, 2009On my earlier post, "Dialogue, not debate", commenter dave c-h posed some interesting questions:
Is there an ethical point at which engagement is functionally equivalent to assent? In other words, is there a point at which dialogue should be replaced by active resistance? If so, how do you tell where that point is? I think many activists fear that dialogue is a tactic of those who support the status quo to co-opt them into a process that is unlikely to lead to any real change because the power is unevenly divided.
What the commenter says about the activists' fears sounds about right to me…
emjohnson | September 30, 2009Over the years anthropologists have had a good deal to say about notions of power and inequality. For example, the late CUNY anthropologist Eric R. Wolf took his early experiences working with peasants in Puerto Rico to explore these larger questions in the global system. In the opening to his book Envisioning Power he wrote:
We stand at the end of a century marked by colonial expansion, world wars, revolutions, and conflicts over religion that have occasioned great social suffering and cost millions of lives. These upheavals have entailed massive plays and displays of power, but ideas…
gregladen | September 30, 2009Here is what one Minnesotan says:
Also, find out about the Michele Bachmann Action Figure, and Michele Bachmann's spread on the latest Conservative Calendar.
pharyngula | September 30, 2009The story of Cameron Todd Willingham (via Digby) ought to be read by everyone. Willingham seems to have been a kind of Texan dumbass, an uneducated, wife-beating piece of work, but he was also the father of three children, who he, by all accounts, loved. Those kids died in a house fire. Forensic 'experts' declared the fire an arson, Willingham was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and was executed.
Only problem: he didn't do it. The fire experts were good ol' boys who were operating on folklore and fairy tales about how fires propagated; real experts have looked at the scene and since…