Politics
tlambert | September 21, 2009Tim Blair disputes Charles Johnson's estimate of the size of the September 12 rally. Johnson wrote:
Here's the Washington DC Metrorail service information for Saturday, September 12, 2009:
September 12, 2009: Metrorail: 437,624
Comparable Metrorail Ridership 1 Year Ago: 362,773
The difference between these two figures is -- 74,851.
Oddly enough, this almost exactly matches the unofficial estimate given by a Washington DC Fire Department spokesman, who estimated the crowd at 60,000 to 70,000 people.
Blair writes
comparing September 12, 2008, to September 12, 2009, won't yield reliable…
pharyngula | September 21, 2009The state of Texas is considering striking the name of Neil Armstrong from the social studies standard. I hate to be the voice of restraint here, but I don't think it's as bad as it sounds. The reasoning given is completely bogus (because Armstrong wasn't a scientist? Give me a break), but the action is not unreasonable. The state should not be in the position of dictating the niggling details of instruction — they should be laying down the law on the broad picture of what is taught, but not how it was taught.
So what the curriculum should do is say that the social studies classes for that…
emjohnson | September 20, 2009
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the third of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
In my earlier pieces "Bonobo (Re)Visions" as well as "Bonobos and the Politics of Human Nature" I pointed out how conservative pundits were eager to jump on any criticism of this species because it fit their ideology of nature as "red in tooth and claw" (to use the line from Tennyson). In his response in eSkeptic Frans de Waal…
catdynamics | September 19, 2009So, having established that Obama is NOT truly beholden to the financiers, what may happen to settle the financial world and straighten the economy.
No, really, he is not: no more than he is beholden to, say UC or Harvard.
I mean it is not like his administration is stuffed with academics from those venerable institutions... er, well, you know what I mean.
But, clearly, with his #1 contributor, UC, having been sorted, we now have a guide for what we may do about the financiers.
We furlough the banksters!
Brilliant!
Seriously.
Note that in academia, the furloughs increase as you go up the…
emjohnson | September 19, 2009Buffalo News / Adam Zyglis
"As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth."
- William Hazlitt, "On Patronage and Puffing", 1822
pharyngula | September 19, 2009Print the pledge and ask all your teabagger/libertarian friends and family to sign it!
The Teabagger Socialist-Free Purity Pledge
I, ________________________________, do solemnly swear to uphold the principles of a socialism-free society and heretofore pledge my word that I shall strictly adhere to the following:
I will complain about the destruction of 1st Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 1st Amendment Rights.
I will complain about the destruction of my 2ndAmendment Rights in this country, while I am duly >being allowed to exercise my…
emjohnson | September 19, 2009Bonobos often adopt a "missionary" posture during copulation (photograph by Frans de Waal).
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the second of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As I wrote earlier in Bonobo (Re)Visions, Ian Parker's "exposé" in The New Yorker was beautifully written but wrong on many levels. Now the straw man who Parker claims to have torn down, primatologist Frans de Waal, answers his…
drorzel | September 19, 2009Josh Rosenau is thinking from California about the role of analogy and metaphor in arguments. This follows from a series of posts arguing with Jerry Coyne et al. about the usual science vs. religion stuff. The analogy thing comes in because in the first post, he made reference to Slacktivist's excellent post about vampires and crosses, saying:
Vampires don't exist, and slacktivist makes it absolutely clear that he knows this. But telling stories about vampires is a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in. These aren't truths that science can independently verify, but…
razib | September 18, 2009The Nightmare Of Regulatory Reform:
...the SEC and the CFTC, two agencies that have fought hard to stay apart while the products they regulate grow more and more intertwined. Both Republicans and Democrats agree the two should become one, but former House Financial Services Committee chairman Mike Oxley says the chances of that happening are about as good as him beating Tiger Woods.
This is obviously public choice theory at work. But more generally an inspection of history shows that institutions tend to go through phases, as if they have a life history like organisms. The Chinese dynastic…
catdynamics | September 18, 2009It is often noted on the Intertoobz that President Obama has a number of financial institutions in the top 20 list of "institutions whose invididual members donated to Obama's campaign".
So, the bankers bought Obama?
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, UBS AG, Morgan Stanley
these come in at #2, 6, 7, 12, 17 - collectively well over $3 million in donations.
But... hold on:
#1 is University of California - $1.5 million
#3 is Harvard University - $850k
#10 is Stanford University - $600k
#16 is Columbia University - $500k
the big universities raised about as much as the financial…
jstemwedel | September 18, 2009Yesterday Dr. Isis put up a post that seems to have bugged many of the people who subsequently posted comments on it.
I have no idea whether the commenters on the post intended to convey it, but here's what's coming across to me as a reader of the exchange:
Dr. Isis notes something that makes her (as a self-identified brown person) feel uncomfortable.
A whole bunch of self-identified white people turn up to say, "The reverse situation has happened to me, and it doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. Stop being so sensitive."
Or, "It would take too many words to accomplish the same…
revere | September 17, 2009It's been a hard year or two. First Miriam Makeba. Then Odetta. Now we've lost another one, Mary Travers, the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary. Mary died Wednesday of leukemia in Connecticut. Even before Mary, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow formed one of the iconic sixties folk groups in 1961, Mary sang back up for Pete Seeger. And for half a century, Peter, Paul and Mary we're there when we needed them. Every major demonstration or event. Always. They were there.
Political songs were a mainstay but so were love songs and children's songs. So here's Mary, in later years, singing one of the group'…
drorzel | September 17, 2009Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author's opponents.
pharyngula | September 17, 2009Frank Schaeffer was on fire in this interview with Rachel Maddow, prompted by a bizarre NJ poll that showed 35% of the conservatives in that state believe Obama is the anti-christ. Heh, "We have a village idiot in this country, it's called fundamentalist Christianity". Gold star for Schaeffer!
He's right. Those are minds that are lost, and we have to move past them.
gregladen | September 16, 2009A couple of weeks ago, I published a very controversial post titled "Maybe We Should Have Elected a White President After All" about the ongoing, possibly growing racism in connection with Obama's presidency. The idea that a lot of the anti-Obama, including anti-health care reform, rhetoric and action was racially motivated was understood by some and rejected by others who seem to not want to see any significant racism in the mix. This was parallel to the head in the sand reaction to my earlier post on the the arrest of Skip Gates in Cambridge Massachusetts last July.
There are those of…
ddobbs | September 15, 2009OK. Animals first, then everybody else.
(Other) Animals
Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place Your Bids
Jellyfish numbers rise My son and I saw this last year when we were at the EuroScience conference (highly recomennded) in Barcelona (ditto). The beaches had warnings of whole rafts of these. Determined to get wet in the Med, I dipped my toes.
Forget Apple, Here's the Real Snow Leopard
Everybody else
Top soldiers denounce torture.
Earlier Model of Human Brain's Energy Usage Underestimated Its Efficiency Covered heavily, but maybe you missed it.
Alison Bass, whose book "Side Effects" just…
emjohnson | September 15, 2009Apparently so. It turns out that in nine states and Washington, D.C. insurance companies are not prohibited from dropping coverage for patients with a history of domestic abuse. The Women's Law Project documented this in detail in their 2002 Supplement Report entitled "Insurance Discrimination Against Victims of Domestic Violence" (pdf here) and in their 2008 report "Nowhere to Turn: How the Individual Health Insurance Market Fails Women" (pdf here).
According to WLP's 2002 Supplement:
Since 1994, 41 states have adopted some form of legislation prohibiting insurance discrimination against…
gregladen | September 15, 2009Most Americans are seriously pissed at Joe Wilson's "YOU LIE" blather.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans interviewed in the Sept. 11-13 USA Today/Gallup poll say they oppose what Wilson did, while 21% say they support it.
Over half of those asked claimed to follow the story somewhat to very closely.
Not surprisingly, there were party differences in people's opinion, but not to the degree one might expect. (Remember, these are people being asked in a poll, not showing up at a rally and being featured on TV).
For Republicans, the break down was 39:52 support:oppose
For Democrats, the break…
esiegel | September 15, 2009Yesterday, I read something in international news that made me so mad I needed to share it with you:
That's right; my home country, the United States, will not distribute this film. There was no problem for the movie Expelled, a poorly argued anti-evolution flop that grossed just $7,598,071 despite appearing on more than 1,000 screens. And this new biopic, Creation, is much more about Darwin's life and personal struggles (which were real, by the way) than it is about evolution.
I have no information about the quality of this movie other than that reviews on the internet tell me it's pretty…
j7uy5 | September 15, 2009There is an interesting parallel between the fight over rural
electrification, in 1935, and the current health insurance debate. (HT
href="http://dangerousmeta.com/site/comments/newwestnet_if_you_read_nothing_else_today/">dangerousmeta)
href="http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/how_fdr_enacted_his_public_option/C37/L37/">
href="http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/how_fdr_enacted_his_public_option/C37/L37/">How
FDR Enacted his "Public Option"
By Bob Simmons, Crosscut.com, Guest Writer, 9-13-09
...President Roosevelt had decreed a public option in 1935,
putting the federal…