Politics
drorzel | August 12, 2009Tobias Buckell had some heart issues a while back, and the stress of Worldcon aggravated things a bit:
By Sunday morning, I was feeling completely sapped, and not getting enough sleep. I tried to nap before the pre-Hugo ceremony, but felt like I'd hit a brick wall by the time I'd walked over. I had to duck out of the Hugo ceremony briefly to lay down. By the end of the night my pulse was racing a bit, so I went back to the hotel to sleep. When I woke up my pulse was even higher.
After checking it several times, I decided it was high enough that I would follow standing orders to check into an…
oracknows | August 11, 2009...leave it to the Investor's Business Daily to kick it up a notch to thermonuclear as an anonymous editorialist tries to criticize President Obama's health plan by invoking the dreaded British NHS:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
I realize that many of you saw this quote over at Ed Brayton's blog, but the searing stupidity of the above statement just stands out so much that I had to add my little snark too. Can…
palmd | August 11, 2009It seemed inevitable. Crowds more akin to brownshirts than concerned citizens have been disrupting health care town hall meetings, depriving their fellow citizens of their right to be heard. It was only a matter of time before the intimidation become more overt.
Today, a protester showed up outside a venue where the President is appearing. His sign was disturbing enough: "It is time to water the tree of liberty!" To refresh your memory, he is paraphrasing a famous Revolutionary-era quote which says that to water that tree it is, from time to time, necessary to spill the blood of tyrants…
oracknows | August 11, 2009While I've let myself get sucked into commenting on health care politics (well, not exactly "sucked in"; I was pissed off enough at the "Obama = Hitler" analogies that I enjoyed skewering some of the idiots making them), there's another issue that's popped up that I can't resist commenting on in my usual inimitable fashion. It comes from, of all places, this blog's favorite den of quackery propaganda, NaturalNews.com and from, of all places, one of our favorite wingnut politicians, a man who's been a tireless promoter of quackery in Congress for many years now.
That's right, Ron Paul's back,…
tqa | August 11, 2009
Why, exactly, do Democrats want to kill the elderly with their health care? It's a question that's baffled billions since at least last week. Politicians, philosophers, theologians, and comedians have all been at a loss to explain the motivation for the proposed geriatric genocide. Fortunately for us all, there is one who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.
In his latest column, Cal Thomas exposes our motivations for wanting to pass a "health care" bill that will allow us to whack granny. He comes up with an answer that's so simple, so glaringly obvious, that I'm honestly surprised…
ddobbs | August 11, 2009Massive feature finished, should be in print this November ... but more on that later. By way of returning to blogdom, a few of the few notables I've had time to read lately:
Effect Measure, usually quite restrained about predictions, joins quite a few others in predicting the swine flu will hit us pretty hard this fall. (The U.S. has already had 6,506 hospitalized cases and 436 deaths, despite it not being flu season. And while we've been tracking health-care debacles debates and pondering Palin, the flu has been hitting the southern hemisphere pretty hard.) Now, not later, when you're sick…
catdynamics | August 10, 2009more occasional link fodder from the recent past
'cause y'know, linking is an inherent good
Jay Bookman reports on a editorial in the IBD which notes: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K..."
"...where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,"
Stupid blighters, the IBD.
Don't they know Stephen is a fellow of Caius...
Actually, good thing he got that dual appointment at the Perimeter Institute on this side of the pond, eh.
That way the Canadians can step in as…
oracknows | August 10, 2009
Remember the Hitler Zombie? He doesn't show up all that much anymore. The reason is not because a lot of brain dead Nazi analogies aren't being used to demonize political opponents. In fact, If I had a mind to, I could probably populate this blog with nothing other than people whose brains have obviously been eaten by the zombie, leaving so little intellectual firepower left that they actually believe that comparing President Obama to Hitler makes sense. Mainly, the reason that I don't do Hitler Zombie bits so often anymore is that the monster has chomped so many brains, producing so much…
ejohnson | August 10, 2009
For many Americans, it is difficult to imagine what going to the doctor would be like under a government-sponsored health care system. But members of the military and their dependents have firsthand experience with such a system under the US Department of Defense TRICARE program. On The Questionable Authority, Mike Dunford describes a recent trip to a military medical center, noting the efficiency and lack of paperwork required. On The Scientific Activist, Nick Anthis compares Mike's experience with his own in the UK. Both Mike and Nick are quick to point out that socialized medicine is not…
revere | August 8, 2009We're communicating through the marvel of the internet, you and I. Obama figured out how to use it to advantage and McCain didn't. Maybe it's a generational thing. At any rate, at this moment in history, any party that doesn't learn from history is bound to be history. Any Party like the Republican Party. Their preferred mode of communicating is via the Echo Chamber of far right talk radio and websites. Democrats have figured out how to use technology more creatively -- creative in the sense of creating people who agree with their positions. Instead of scaring the living crap out of people or…
jrosenhouse | August 7, 2009Time to wrap up my discussion of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book Unscientific America. In Part One I focused on the main themes of the book, arguing that it was superficial in its analysis of the issues and that its proposed solutions are impractical and unlikely to be effective. In Part Two I focused specifically on Chapter Eight of the book, which argued against the activites of the New Atheists. I argued that M and K's treatment of the arguments was inadequate, and manifested on a small scale problems that afflicted most of the book.
In this final part of the review I wanted…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2009As pointed out here many times before, archaeology is a bad career choice as the labour market is tiny and ridiculously overpopulated. I mainly keep tabs on the academic subset of this labour market. But via Alun I've received news that UK contract archaeology, the business where you remove and document sites that get in the way of land development, is in poor shape because of the economic recession. The Institute for Archaeologists announces that one in six jobs in contract archaeology has been lost since the start of the recession, with more losses likely in the near future.
In Sweden,…
catdynamics | August 6, 2009Google maps has a foreclosure map, of the entire United States.
h/t CR
map, which is apparently not entirely current, shows houses in foreclosure, owned by banks, or under notice of default.
It is awesome yet frightening.
View Larger Map
for example...
oracknows | August 6, 2009Further tweaking of the crank conspiracy theory that is the "birther" movement:
Obama Debunks Birther Conspiracy - watch more funny videos
If President Obama is a Cylon, maybe he was born in Kenya and Hawaii.
bioephemera | August 6, 2009The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…
tqa | August 6, 2009
Yesterday, I took the kids to the doctor for their school physicals. I wouldn't normally subject you to an account of the day-to-day minutia of my personal life, but given the current debate about how we should handle health care in the United States, the details might be of interest.
We arrived - without an appointment - at a medical facility that we had not been to before. We did not have medical records with us, and the only paperwork of any kind that we had brought were the forms that needed to be filled out to enroll the kids in sports programs. When we checked in, the only thing I…
emjohnson | August 5, 2009Japanese artists' depiction of the horrors at Hiroshima.Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped "Little Boy," the first of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare, on the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima. In an instant flash of light an estimated 140,000 people were either incinerated or suffered an agonizing death that lasted several days. The standard mythology is that President Truman dropped the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (three days later on August 9) in order to avoid having to send half a million American soliders to their deaths in a…
emjohnson | August 5, 2009However, Orly Taitz does have one thing absolutely right. "Who cares about Ann Coulter?"
grrlscientist | August 5, 2009tags: potable water, safe drinking water, LifeSaver Bottle, streaming video
Too much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. In this video, engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it -- inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. An amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009. [10:05]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
pharyngula | August 5, 2009One of the many disgraceful acts of brigandage our country committed in Iraq was the hiring of mercenary thugs through a company called Blackwater. Unwilling to risk the political fallout from openly discussing and recruiting the number of soldiers necessary to actually carry out their grand plans for invading another country, the previous administration instead threw buckets of money at Halliburton-KBR and outsourced the military to profit-seeking, murderous killers-for-hire who did more to harm than help the war effort. As we ought to have expected, the Blackwater unsavoriness is getting…