Politics
pharyngula | September 7, 2009The White House has released the text of Obama's speech to school chidren. It's nothing deep, just a bit of rah-rah, study hard, you can do great things, yadda yadda yadda. It certainly shouldn't have freaked out all those schools that were reluctant to expose their kids to the words of our Socialist Foreign President.
There's nothing specific in it, as you might expect, and science gets a cursory mention.
You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment…
esiegel | September 7, 2009One nice new feature we've got here on scienceblogs is the Editor's Picks feature, found on the front page. While browsing it this weekend, I was drawn to this provocative article. In it, Benjamin Cohen writes of his interview with Rebecca Solnit, who says the following when asked about nuclear power as a viable solution to our energy concerns:
Well, the first problem is that they still think like big science--that there is "the answer." In fact, there are hundreds of little answers that don't include nuclear, including scaling back our consumption and travel and building better and using a…
revere | September 7, 2009Today is a federal holiday in the United States, the one we call "Labor Day." In most countries the labor movement celebrates on May 1 (May Day), but the origin of the US holiday ironically was in Canada where the fight for the nine-hour working day in the 1870s was celebrated at the end of summer. American labor leader Peter J. McGuire saw one of these celebrations and organized the first one in New York in 1882. After US soldiers and marshals put down a peaceful strike at the Pullman plant in bloody fashion in 1894, a fear of escalating labor unrest (the depression of 1893 was in full swing…
edyong | September 6, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity.
Now, May Lim and colleagues from the New England Complex Systems Institute have developed a mathematical model that can predict where such conflicts by looking at how…
revere | September 5, 2009We've said both nice things and not so nice things about Finance Committee ranking Republican on health care, Chuck Grassley (R-IA), most recently not-so-nice things. Things like calling him morally corrupt, a liar and a gold-plated hypocrite. Things like that. We know he hears us because his office complained to a colleague about it. Now, through several sources, we've gotten an email with this subject line sent around by someone in his office and containing a news article explaining why he's not as corrupt as he looks:
Questions: why do journalists and arm chair pontificators always look…
pharyngula | September 4, 2009This is the start of a big film project by Conceptual Guerilla: he's attending events by acolytes of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, teabagging (just the name is good for a giggle) parties and such, and simply recording their own words. It's a weird combination of certainty and ignorance, and as you'll see, these are ordinary people, Americans just like your neighbors and co-workers, and they're nuts.
Formally, I suppose this is going to be a documentary, but the effect is somewhere between a bad comedy movie and a psychological horror film.
bcohen | September 4, 2009I had the chance to interview Rebecca Solnit for The Believer. It's on shelves now, in their September issue. They've also put the full text of it on-line at their website. (Here it is.)
To quote the interview's intro, Solnit is the author of twelve books. She is a journalist, essayist, environmentalist, historian, and art critic; she is a contributing editor to Harper's, a columnist for Orion, and a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com and The Nation; she's also written for, among other publications, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Review of Books.
She talks…
emjohnson | September 3, 2009
Inexplicably, a UFO appears over one of Earth's remote cities. Hovering a few hundred meters above the terrified citizens, a government mission to board the craft is executed only to find the strange beings living in disease and desperation. A decision is made to save their lives and relocate the aliens to the city's outskirts. In that moment, what seemed to be a compassionate action develops into an outdoor prison reminiscent of the worst crimes of colonialism. Imprisoned, literally in the shanty town that is created for them and figuratively within a society that shuns them, the…
gregladen | September 3, 2009Dear Dr. Thein,
I am a parent of a child in the Roseville, MN School District. I am very concerned about news reports I've been hearing from elsewhere in Minnesota indicating that there are parents upset about The President of the United States addressing the students in some classrooms next week.
I am primarily concerned with the responses by the school districts to the parents. The responses I've heard have been rather appeasing to these parents. I do not think this is appropriate.
The parents in question are insane.
They are suggesting, perhaps not to school districts directly but…
gregladen | September 3, 2009A poll of facebook ... link is here ... asks "Should President Obama be allowed to do a nationwide address to school children without parental consent?"
I find the wording of that statement to be astounding. But anyway, if you are on facebook, you may want to go and vote. CUrrently, 65% say NO, 29% say YES.
OH, and people are posting this on their facebook status today:
"_______ believes that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and nobody should go broke because they get sick."
(you put your name int he blank, or whatever)
grrlscientist | September 3, 2009
Who: Toni Van Pelt, director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C.
What: free public presentation, "Lobbying for Science and Reason on Capitol Hill"
Where: University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street (and Rivington St.) [map]
When: 730pm, Thursday, 10 September
Toni Van Pelt is the director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. She will talk about her work as a lobbyist, promoting and advancing science and secularism. In her work, she asks our congresscritters to base law and policy on empirical evidence and the scientific…
hrynyshyn | September 3, 2009While most media commentators obsess over the "news" that Diane Sawyer will be replacing Charlie Gibson on ABC World News, there are at least some observers who remain more concerned with content. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne weighs in this morning on the sensationalism that has dominated coverage of public participation in the health care insurance reform debate. What we learn about the role of television is not surprising, but it does help remind us why things are going the way they are:
The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer…
ddobbs | September 2, 2009You can't make this stuff up. As PharmaGossip (among others, including the Times) reportst, a drug company pays $2.3 billion in fines to settle charges of unprecedented seriousness about practices that directly put patients at risk, and that came out of a four-year federal investigation. And some yahoo right-winger asserts this fine -- years in the works, unprecedented in scope, settling allegations rising from an investigation that started during the Bush Administration -- is really part of Obama's effort to "federalize" medicine and cut costs.
Here's the video of the DOJ's press conference…
drorzel | September 2, 2009I sort of feel like I ought to have something to say about the recent controversy over creationists on bloggingheads.tv, which has caused Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer to renounce the whole site. If you're too lazy to click through those links, the basic problem is that bloggingheads has twice invited creationists-- sorry, cdesign proponentists-- to appear on their "Science Saturday" segments in recent weeks. Sean and Carl feel that giving people from the Discovery Institute this sort of platform amounts gives them more credibility than they deserve, especially since neither of them was…
hrynyshyn | September 2, 2009While the U.S. Senate's sense of urgency on the climate change front wanes, a new campaign originating on the other side of rapidly warming pond is urging us all to get with the program by cutting our emissions sooner rather than later. This is obviously a good idea from a scientific point of view, but what are its chances of success?
The 10:10 campaign draws on the always-obvious-when-you-think-about-it, but until recently largely ignored, fact that it matters very much how quickly we reduce the carbon emissions that are trapping all the extra heat in the atmosphere and oceans. A pair of…
drorzel | September 1, 2009It's probably a good thing that I don't have full-text access to Mark Slouka's article in Harper's, with the title "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school." Just the description in this Columbia Journalism Review piece makes me want to hunt down the author and belt him with a Norton anthology:
According to the article itself, the dehumanizing element of the school system (especially universities) is actually its focus on producing businesspeople and "ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy." But "nothing speaks more clearly to…
pharyngula | August 31, 2009Kristin Maguire, chair of the South Carolina State Board of Education, has resigned from her position for all the wrong reasons. She has been a shill for the religious right, and has opposed the teaching of evolution in the public schools; she has also promoted that worthless 'abstinence only' sex education. She should have been fired for basic incompetence. But no, that is not sufficient reason to kick someone out of office in America. What gets American politicians in trouble?
You guessed it: sex. There were unverified rumors of inappropriate behavior, but what really got her was that she…
grrlscientist | August 30, 2009tags: US endangered species list, parrots, aviculture, captive breeding, position statement, Parrots International, politics
NOTE: This position statement just came to my attention. I wish I had learned about it on 10 August, since I would have shared it immediately on that day.
August 10, 2009
Public Comments Processing
Attn: FWS-R9-IA-2009-0016
Division of Policy and Directives Management
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
4401 N. Fairfax Drive
Suite 222; Arlington, VA 22203
As president of Parrots International I am forwarding the official position statement of Parrots International in…
pharyngula | August 30, 2009This is the t-shirt worn by the marching band of Smith-Cotton high school of Sedalia, Missouri.
The 'ascent of man' image is a bit irritating — it is a portrayal of a fallacious idea of directionality in evolution — but the designers had a reasonable goal in mind.
Assistant Band Director Brian Kloppenburg said the shirts were designed by him, Band Director Jordan Summers and Main Street Logo. Kloppenburg said the shirts were intended to portray how brass instruments have evolved in music from the 1960s to modern day. Summers said they chose the evolution of man because it was "recognizable…