Politics
gregladen | August 29, 2009I did not go to the Michele Bachmann "town hall" meeting yesterday because of a schedule conflict (I was out of town) but there is some news. Check out the last few posts on Dump Michele Bachmann blog. There is evidence, apparently, that Bachmann supporters were bussed in to pack the room. I've heard from two other private sources, one from inside and one from outside, that there were mostly supporters inside and mostly anti-Bachmann people outside.
I expect there to be a couple of good blog posts out about this in the next day or so, and I'll point to them if I find out about them. Add…
pharyngula | August 28, 2009My home state! In a region with some of the highest percentages of godless people in the country! And they have this awful law on the books.
Washington's law specifies that a person treated through faith healing "by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner in lieu of medical care is not considered deprived of medically necessary health care or abandoned." Other religions are not mentioned.
Christian Science is not science, and it is definitely not medicine. I presume some religious lobby got this evil exemption on the books years ago, but now it's time to remove it—it's killing…
drorzel | August 28, 2009Dave Munger on Twitter drew my attention to this blog post on college costs, and I really wish he hadn't. The post in question is really just a recap-with-links of an editorial by John Zmirak, blaming the high cost of college on an unlikely source:
[W]hat if universities began to neglect this basic charge, and instead turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers -- who were impossible to fire? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted?
That is exactly what…
oracknows | August 28, 2009It really and truly saddens me to have to do this.
The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is one of the finest children's hospitals there is. Unfortunately, as I documented yesterday, the hospital has, either knowingly or unknowingly, lent its good name to the metastasis of the quackfest known as Autism One from its primary site in Chicago to a metastatic deposit sullying one of the finest cities in our fair neighbor to the north, Toronto. The metastasis is a secondary quackfest known as Autism One Canada, and, unfortunately, the SickKids Foundation and the Dalla Lana School of Public…
catdynamics | August 27, 2009Is it like standing unarmed in front of a column of tanks?
Or is it more like following someone blindly off a cliff into a pool whose depth you do not know?
Iceland knows.
Kaupþing was the largest of the Icelandic Investment Banks.
It grew by 500% in years, on paper at least.
They were inspired.
By the Spruce Goose, apparently.
Though I have to admit, the use of The Agent from the Matrix as a metaphor has some accuracy, despite the apparent lack of irony.
The Space Science/Cure Cancer metaphors are cute. Inaccurate, but cute.
Hoocoodanode it'd all come to a bad end.
I don't think the…
drorzel | August 27, 2009One of the most remarkable things I've ever seen was the posthumous rehabilitation of Richard Nixon about fifteen years ago. Here was a man who resigned as President before Congress could throw him out, whose whole term in office was characterized by an all-consuming arrogance and a contempt for the law that wouldn't be matched for at least thirty years, and yet all the news-network obituaries somehow managed to airbrush that out, and talked about his greatness as a statesman, etc. It was bad enough that Hunter Thompson's over-the-top anti-eulogy was actually kind of refreshing.
The only…
j7uy5 | August 27, 2009The health care reform process is getting extremely ugly.
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story">
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story">Healthcare
insurers get upper hand
Obama's overhaul fight is being won by the industry, experts say. The
end result may be a financial 'bonanza.'
LA Times
By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger
August 24, 2009
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090823_this_isnt_reform_its_robbery/">…
pharyngula | August 26, 2009Kentucky had a law on its books requiring the department of homeland security to honor the Christian god, claiming that "The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God."
Note the past tense, "had".
The silly law has been struck down as unconstitutional. Good for Kentucky!
drorzel | August 26, 2009Janet is currently exploring the implications of the California university furloughs. If you haven't been paying attention, California is so grossly dysfunctional that the state government has had to order all employees-- including university faculty-- to take 9% of their work time off as unpaid "furlough" days, in order to cut costs enough to have an approximately balanced budget.
Janet's comments, and the stories about the impact on scientists reminded me of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995, when I was a grad student working at NIST.
That shutdown was the result of a game of "chicken"…
gregladen | August 26, 2009The Democratic Party represents true diversity and has elements in it that are as conservative as any Republican on some issues, as well as libertarians and even quasi-anarchists who are willing to bite the bullet and "show up" to have some kind of influence. The Republican Party, in contrast, strictly polices itself and drives anyone with differing opinions into the swamp. A "differing opinion" is one not endorsed by Rush Limbaugh.
Read more at qm.
bcohen | August 26, 2009Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: What place did science play in the EJ issues of the communities you've studied? We've talked about tensions between expertise, technical knowledge, and lived community experience in other conversations. It's a vast subject, in fact, and I shouldn't cast this question so tidily. But for Noxious New York, where did scientific practices fit?
JS: Science played a large part in the story I told in New York City, a story…
pharyngula | August 26, 2009I hadn't even realized he was still alive, but William Calley has apologized. What a strange thing that is…
There is no doubt that Calley was a bad man and a weak man — he was the lieutenant who led the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968 — but at the same time, he was one of the pawns in a game dictated at the highest levels of American policy. Why was he convicted of a war crime, while Nixon and Kissinger were given a free pass? How can we still be in denial that our actions in Viet Nam were a shameful stain on our honor?
We became the bad guys, the villains in black hats, in…
pharyngula | August 26, 2009Sad news: another Kennedy has gone. Despite his reckless personal life, I liked the policies he stood for, and he was an excellent senator — may we have many more Massachusetts liberals to take his place.
I have to add that there is one thing I find really repellent about that NY Times obituary. It's the end, where Edward is compared to his brothers, John and Robert.
"He was the survivor," Mr. Ornstein continued. "He was not a shining star that burned brightly and faded away. He had a long, steady glow. When you survey the impact of the Kennedys on American life and politics and policy, he…
grrlscientist | August 26, 2009tags: Barack Obama Town Meeting, Jon Stewart, health care reform, comedy, humor, funny, streaming video
In this video, The Daily Show host, Jon Stewart muses "Mr. President, I can't tell if you're a Jedi -- 10 steps ahead of everything or if this whole health care thing is kickin' your ass just a little bit. Why is this so hard?" He rants. "Why can't you guys just stay on message? Remember the Bush team? Little bit of discipline, little bit of repetition. They sold us a war nobody wanted and nobody needed."
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Heal or No Heal - Medicine…
jstemwedel | August 25, 2009In case you hadn't heard, the State of California is broke. (Actually, probably worse than broke. This is one of those times where we find ourselves glad that our state does not have kneecaps.) As a consequence of this, the California State University system (one of whose 23 campuses is my own fair university) is now dealing with a $585 million reduction in funding. (At my own fair university, the cut is about $40 million.)
None of the options for addressing the budget cuts are wonderful. They have included yet another round of student fee increases and layoffs of significant numbers of…
pharyngula | August 25, 2009Maine recently legalized same-sex marriage —hooray and all that, but we don't get to be complacent about it now. There is a proposition on the ballot for November, Proposition 1, that would revoke marriage equality, and as you might expect, conservative forces are gearing up to promote this bill. Greta Christina has some suggestions for how you can help defeat this hate bill…and explains why you should.
bcohen | August 25, 2009Part 1 | Pt. 2 (below) | Pt. 3
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Part 2 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Let's do this: I know we already brought up environmental justice before, but could you define it in your terms for the readers? In your use and experience, does it differ from environmental racism, does it differ from, say, an anti-toxics activism that some link to Love Canal and Lois Gibbs?
JS: That is a huge question in the book. I define environmental justice as the social movement that emerged in response…
grrlscientist | August 24, 2009tags: cultural observations, Bill Maher, atheism, human behavior, humor, funny, streaming video
Yet another brilliant series of cultural observations from Bill Maher. Why doesn't this guy run for president?
oracknows | August 24, 2009The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It "evolves" very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or "autistic enterocolitis," most recently late last year, it was not a problem to the anti-vaccine movement. Neither was it a major problem to the movement when multiple studies similarly failed to find a link between mercury in the preservative thimerosal that used to be in most childhood…
emjohnson | August 24, 2009"They say rather than cursing the darkness, one should light a candle. They don't mention anything about cursing a lack of candles."
- George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops?
In Unscientific America, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (the latter of whom I consider a friend) are deeply concerned that the American system is unsustainable so long as scientific results and recommendations are not appreciated by the general public or by the politicians that represent us. And there is good reason to be concerned. In their book they cite the results of a 2008 report from the Keystone…