Politics
clock | February 10, 2009
The Conyers bill (a.k.a. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801), is back. Despite all the debunking it got last time around, and despite the country having more important problems to deal with right now, this regressive bill, completely unchanged word-for-word, is apparently back again. It is the attempt by TA publishers, through lies and distortions, to overturn the NIH open access policy. Here are some reactions - perhaps Rep.Conyers and colleagues should get an earful from us....
Peter Suber, in Comments on the Conyers bill provides all the useful links, plus some of the…
gregladen | February 10, 2009Well, that's not exactly what they are saying, but it is what they are doing. Or at least trying to do.
To stamp out voter fraud, GOP legislators have offered a proposal that would make Minnesota's voter-ID laws the most restrictive in the country. But according to their own party, no actual cases of voter fraud have been reported here. Still Reps. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, and Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, have sponsored a bill requiring photo identification for every voter.
...
Read it at the MN Indy.
Hat tip: Ana
pharyngula | February 10, 2009Would you believe that a Swedish politician has suggested that their prime minister should end all of his speeches with "God bless Sweden" (translation)? It's got to be a joke. She explicitly points to the US as a model — why any country would want to emulate the United States' greatest flaw, its ignorant religiosity, is a mystery to me.
purepedantry | February 9, 2009From CNN:
Of the 800 Americans surveyed from Feb. 7-8, 48% said the plan would help "some," and 16% said they felt the stimulus bill would help the economy "a lot." Only 16% said the bill would not help at all, and another 20% said it would not help much.
But 55% of respondents said that even the less expensive Senate plan would cost too much in spending and tax cuts, according to the survey. In addition, 30% think it's just the right amount of money and 13% said the government needs to spend even more.
In other news, the American people issued this statement to cakes everywhere: "we would…
jstemwedel | February 9, 2009
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P.W. Singer
New York: Penguin
2009
For some reason, collectively humans seem to have a hard time seeing around corners to anticipate the shape our future will take. Of those of us who remember email as a newish thing, I suspect most of us had no idea how much of our waking lives would come to be consumed by it. And surely I am not the only one who attended a lab meeting in which a visiting scholar mentioned a speculative project to build something called the World Wide Web and wondered aloud whether anything would…
catdynamics | February 9, 2009the director of the central bank does what all bad boys do
the director of the central bank was late to work this morning, late enough the protests had fizzled by the time he showed, apparently
however, the intrepid reporters at Vísir tracked him down
they had the insight, that as with all naughty boys being accused of misbehaviour, Dabbi would have gone home to mummy; where they picked up his trail and followed him from the west end to town, where he pulled into the national hospital
when a reporter tried to ask him questions, he reacted rather negatively claiming to have a doctors…
catdynamics | February 8, 2009The head of the Icelandic central bank, and former prime minister, Davíð Oddsson, has refused to resign from his post, as requested by the new prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
Farðu bölvaður frá mér brott
Forðist þig allt sem heitir gott
Yfir þig dynji hefndar hríð
Himin og jörð þér risti níð
Update: by Kristján Jónsson, the "Mountain Skáld" (1842-1869).
Rough translation:
Go away from me now and be damned
May all that is good avoid you
Snowstorm of vengeance pile on you
Heaven and earth carve you curses
A second director is also refusing to resign, while the third has done so.…
catdynamics | February 8, 2009someone has dumped the entire collection of Congressional Research Service reports to wikileaks
this incidentally totally slashdotted their servers, but being good geeks they spawned copies to pirate bay and bittorrent
primary link is here
the congressional research service provides apolitical reports to congress at the request of representatives, the reports are public, in principle, but most are withheld at the request of congress - some because they contradict policy or politics, some because of some perceived inconvenience, principle or other issue
over 6,000 new reports were released…
ddobbs | February 8, 2009The health-care system's maddening inefficiencies -- high per-capita spending with poorer overall health outcomes; tens of millions uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured; insane-making battles with insurers to get reimbursements you're entitled too -- are reason enough to spur reform.
But "The Big Fix," David Leonhardt's marvelous-but-long piece on the fiscal crisis in last week's Times Magazine, argues that these inefficiencies are a) a prime example of a vested elite's ability to manipulate the economy for its own good and b) one of the most serious obstacles to the nation's…
tqa | February 8, 2009
There is little doubt that if there is any one person serving in the United States Senate who can be identified as anti-science, it is Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe. He's called global warming a "hoax", tried to pass a novelist off as a climate-change expert at a Senate hearing, and referred to the work of the IPCC as a "corruption of science". He had Senate committee staffers issue a press release blasting Tom Brokaw's objectivity on the climate change issue. We're talking about a sitting Senator who has been such a consistent and vocal opponent of science that the president of the…
jlynch | February 7, 2009Letâs look at what the Republicans in the Senate are currently fighting against in the stimulus bill:
$40 billion in aid to state governments for education and other programs; money that economists say is a relatively efficient way to pump up the economy by preventing layoffs, cuts in services or tax increases.
$20 billion for construction and repair of schools and university facilities. Those funds would have supported many construction jobs.
Short version: the Senate Republicans (including McCain and Kyl) are not willing to help their own states out when suffering an severe educational…
oracknows | February 7, 2009Pity Andrew Wakefield.
Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound…
clock | February 7, 2009Who has power?
Elected officials: they write, vote for and sign laws, they decide how much money will be collected from whom and how it will be spent, they decide on starting and stopping wars, i.e., lives and deaths of people.
Who else has power?
Anyone who can affect the decision of an elected official, e.g., to change a vote from Yes to No or vice versa.
How does one do that?
By having money and using it wisely.
How does one use money to affect policy?
One: by directly lobbying the elected officials. Two: by buying off the media.
I understand how One works, but Two?
Elected officials…
clock | February 7, 2009If Huffington Post wants to have credibility and gain its vaunted #1 spot as the most trusted online new source, there is only one thing it needs to do - ditch the woomeisters Chopra and RFK Jr., and get in their place some people from the reality-based community.
People are sick of conservative, emotion-based, gut-feeling decision-making that screwed up the country over the past 28 years. Why allowing the Left fringe equivalents into the mix? It is them that make a lot of people untrusting of Huffington Post.
Will Huffington Post publish and defend this piece about the potential fraud…
tqa | February 7, 2009A bit later than promised, here's the clip from last night's Rachel Maddow show where she so accurately described the current Republican strategy when it comes to the stimulus bill.
Here's the high point:
Republicans may not like it but the way to create jobs fast is through spending. It matters when you're wrong. A whopping proportion of the Republican rhetoric about stimulus is wrong - total economic bull puckey. It's time to take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information.
The video's below the fold. You really should watch it.
*/
Visit msnbc.com…
pharyngula | February 7, 2009The answer is in: it's Howard Dean.
That strange sound you hear popping in the distance is the percussive explosion of wingnut crania everywhere.
I think it's an excellent choice. Dean is a smart guy who gives excellent speeches, he's a centrist-to-conservative Democrat so he's not a political extremist, and he has a lot of regional relevance.
catdynamics | February 6, 2009so the new senate version of the stimulus bill is revealed, the one that might actually pass.
It has a lot of cuts and some reduction in taxes, but with added programs that are not in the House version.
The final version does better for science than the original compromise being floated over the last day or two
data from ScienceDebate2008 folks
their summary shows:
NASA $1.3 billion - more than House version - I'm guessing $400M for science if the changes from original Senate version are equally spread
NSF gets $1.4 billion - that is substantially less than the House version and much of…
catdynamics | February 6, 2009The Congressional Budget Office has a blog.
That is an interesting way to get the information out. Quite handy.