Politics
clock | September 23, 2008This post (from January 14, 2005) is how I see the political/ideological landscape in the USA.
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We use the words Left and Right to describe Liberal and Conservative ideological and political leanings. The phrases stem, if I remember correctly, from the seating arrangement in the first French Parliament in the late 18th century. That was a long time ago. By now, most people realize that a straight Left/Right continuous line does not represent the ideological spectrum very well, yet the terms are still in constant use and, more importantly,…
grrlscientist | September 23, 2008tags: William Shatner, Shatner-Hasselhoff, humor, funny, streaming video
A truly evil scientist from across The Pond has launched a satirical attack in response to the Shatner Satire Wars. As a gawd-feering amerikan, I could not let that pass without bombing him into yesterday with a retaliatory counter-offensive satirical attack. To view Part 2 of this ongoing war against satire, peek below the fold [0:48]
clock | September 23, 2008This is an old anti-Libertarian screed (from December 2004) that is bound to attract trolls (and traffic)....
Much of the stuff on this blog is based on the bimodal (bipolar?) view of the world: there are Conservatives and there are Liberals, and that's it. Lakoff, Ducat, Frank and the like spend much time explaining the two, or just trying to explain the strange Conservative animals to the Liberals.
But, as I stated before, only about a third of Americans are core Conservatives and another third are core Liberals. What about the remaining third? Also, as only about a half of Americans vote,…
laelaps | September 23, 2008Apparently the #1 threat to America (as far as Beck & Norris are concerned) is poorly-paid immigrant workers screwing up their orders at the drive-thru. I guess you don't have much time to cook if you're busy publishing vapid, conservative screeds;
gregladen | September 23, 2008Forget about hacked email accounts. Apparently, a phone call between Palin and Clinton was recently recorded and released on the internet. Here it is:
jrosenhouse | September 23, 2008Over at Discover's blog, Melissa Lafsky has an interesting account of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Lorenzo Albecete, on the subject of -- what else? -- God. Lafsky writes:
Are you there God, and if so, will you please provide an emissary that can go head-to-head with Christopher Hitchens without getting spectacularly flayed?
That was the pertinent issue during yesterday's “Big Questions conversation” at the Pierre Hotel, hosted by On Faith and the John Templeton Foundation. The luncheon pitted Hitchens, the anti-theist poster child, against Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a…
jrosenhouse | September 23, 2008Be sure to have a look at Sam Harris' excellent editorial about Sarah Palin in the current issue of Newsweek magazine:
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a “higher Father” before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready…
stoat | September 23, 2008I felt sure that I'd used this as a title before. But google assures me that no-one has used the phrase, which I fund rather hard to believe. Maybe I can copyright it. Its a useful phrase. I'm sure I remember it in the context of a Ray Bradbury story. Aha!. It has been used in books, 4 times says google. Well its all bad news, linked to widow-burning. I'm not complaining about anything as bad as that.
No, I mean the trivial evils of our times, one part of which is the relentless march of policy pap in our schools. Our governors had a training evening on "Equality and community cohesion" (I…
pharyngula | September 23, 2008We have a new euphemism and a potential new regulation from the Bush administration: "provider conscience rights". What this is about is providing religious doctors with loopholes so that they can avoid responsibility for treating patients with the best possible care — so they can use religious excuses to justify neglect. You can read the press release, Regulation Proposed to Help Protect Health Care Providers from Discrimination, and of course the odious Mike Leavitt has mentioned it. This is a proposed new rule that if, for instance, a doctor with superstitious scruples is treating a rape…
gregladen | September 23, 2008A vocational college student in Finland, named Matti Juhani Saari, has murdered nine people at the college he attends in Kauhajoki. He nearly botched his own suicide but is not dead in hospital. He was a licensed gun owner, who recently posted video of himself firing his gun on the internet. Police actually looked at him but decided they could nto revoke his permit. Ooops. Details.
grrlscientist | September 23, 2008tags: Politics, Ralph Nader, Cardozo, humor, funny, streaming video
This is a silly video by Ralph Nader, who feels left out of the political process since the electorate finally sees him for what he is. So Ralph talks about dressing up as a panda with Cardozo the Amazon parrot, who lives with former Salt Lake City Mayor, Rocky Anderson, in a lame attempt to recapture his old glory days of spoiling elections and making life worse for the electorate [2:45]
Cardozo, here you are from the free flying Amazon jungle to a cage in Utah -- albeit an open door cage with a fine master. Do not feel sad…
clock | September 22, 2008This provocative stream-of-consciousness post was first posted on April 17, 2005.
In my persistent inquiry into femiphobia (fear of being perceived as feminine) as an explanation for Regressive behavior (including voting behavior) I have encountered blog comments that can be summarized in these two ways: first, that femiphobia cannot explain racism, and second, that femiphobia does not explain why African Americans tend to vote Democratic. Let me try to address these two common complaints. I apologize in advance for my usual blunt language.
As I have already discussed (hypothesis about…
clock | September 22, 2008I wrote this on January 28, 2006. Was I wrong then? Is that wrong now? Have things changed in the meantime?
Lefty Blogosphere and the Love/Hate of Hillary
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Chris Bowers on MyDD recently had a post asking why the Progressive blogosphere does not like Hillary Clinton. Here's a little bit from Chris:
Now I can explain what this all has to do with Hillary Clinton. As obvious as I thought my last point was, it is probably even more obvious by now that Hillary Clinton is, um, not exactly the most popular Democrat within the blogosphere and the…
terrasig | September 22, 2008I had to laugh, through my tears of course, that the Bush administration's bill requesting $700 billion for the Treasury Department to purchase failing mortgage assets is not even three pages long.
Where did the idea come from for such a concise funding request???
Those of us with NIH research funding received e-mails last week on the outcome of "Enhancing Peer Review," a year-long effort by the funding agency to "fund the best science, by the best scientists, with the least amount of administrative burden."
One of the outcomes garnering the greatest attention has been the proposal to reduce…
gregladen | September 22, 2008
Check it out:
I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. ... about a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up ...
After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally.
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[in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it's a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there ..., we'll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. ]
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It's a good thing I wasn't tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of…
gregladen | September 22, 2008This is from Jeff Rosenberg:
Norm Coleman has run a nasty campaign, full of personal attacks, half-truths, and ridiculous claims about Al Franken. Why would he do that? you may ask. The answer is simple: he knows that if this campaign comes down to issues, he'll lose. He was never elected for sharing Minnesotans' views on the issues, and his record in Congress has not been one most Minnesotans would approve of.
Over the past few months, I've compiled Coleman's floor votes on a number of different subjects. Now I bring you a summary of his worst votes. He wants to run from his record, but…
grrlscientist | September 22, 2008tags: socialized medicine, uninsured Americans, health care policy, election2008, politics
I have a confession to make: I am an American who has no health insurance, and I have been so ever since my postdoctoral funding ended four years ago. But I am not alone: according to the most recently available statistics, somewhere between 45-47 million Americans are living without any sort health care coverage, and every year, more and more working adults and families join the ranks of the uninsured. Shockingly, according to the Urban Institute's estimate, 22,000 Americans actually died in 2006…
gregladen | September 22, 2008Members of the Public: Now is your only chance to comment on Minnesota's new Science Standards. My suggestions: Take out the woo, dampen down the special interests, and please, consider NOT removing biology from the High School standrds!!!!!
To comment, go to this web site and read the context, the standards, and use the resources available there. And/or visit one of the public meetings listed on that site.
Overall the standards are probably an improvement on prior standards. A few questions to consider:
Looking at these standards, it seems as though High School Biology has been removed…