Politics
choofnagle | October 22, 2007
All that stuff that the wireless industry says about being competitive is baloney! Cell phones in the US are big and stupid, and deliberately crippled to get you to pay extra for things that are natively supported in devices, like custom ringtones. And most Americans don't know any better because they've never used the higher quality phones and networks available in other countries! For a deeper dive on this, see Tim Wu's Wireless Carterphone, but for an overview of the problems, Walt Mossberg's column in today's Journal explains how the industry stifles innovation. This is an area…
pharyngula | October 22, 2007Richard Mellon Scaife, that horrible little man with an immense fortune who has been propping up institutes loudly supporting right-wing family values, creationism, and gutter-scraping attacks on Democrats, is getting a divorce. Not just any divorce — a train wreck of a divorce, prompted by Scaife's gallivanting about with a prostitute, and with scads of amusingly petty behavior. And the money involved is impressive.
Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued…
j7uy5 | October 22, 2007One of the
href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2004/02/science-policy-questions-good-bad-and.html">first
things I wrote about on Corpus Callosum was the tense and
ambivalent relationship the current Administration has with the
scientific community.
Note that the ambivalence is one-sided: it occurs entirely on the side
of the Administration. The scientific community is decided
univalent on the subject.
Now, the Center for Inquiry (publishers of the Skeptical
Inquirer) has published a paper calling for reform.
It is a well-researched and charitably-worded examination of
the…
clock | October 21, 2007E-mail I got yesterday - please spread this around ASAP:
--------------------------------
The Senate is currently considering the FY08 Labor-HHS Bill, which includes a provision (already approved by the House of Representatives and the full Senate Appropriations Committee), that directs the NIH to change its Public Access Policy so that participation is required (rather than requested) for researchers, and ensures free, timely public access to articles resulting from NIH-funded research. On Friday, Senator Inhofe (R-OK), filed two amendments (#3416 and #3417), which call for the language to…
clock | October 21, 2007Yes, you may have heard the big news that Professor Dumbledore is out of the closet. As if it was big news - it was so obvious. Watch the Far Right throw a hissy-fit about it anyway.
And yes, Jim Neal, the Democratic candidate for Senate, challenging Elizabeth Dole here in North Carolina, is also gay. Not that it is big news, either. Again, watch the Far Right throw a hissy-fit about it anyway. Who but them would care?
j7uy5 | October 21, 2007Sometimes we hear the allegation that the war in Iraq is
about oil.
That is only an approximation of the truth. Really,
it is about money. Oil at this point is merely a proxy for
money.
Certain corporations that are in Iraq stand to make a
fortune regardless of whether the oil ever is exploited. If
the place settles down enough to permit exploitation, they will make
money developing the oilfields and/or providing security. If
it does not settle down, they make money fighting the war.
They win either way.
Remember before the War, from time to time we would read about how
despots…
tqa | October 20, 2007
Google news is currently featuring a comment by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on the House of Representatives' failed attempt to override President Bush's veto of the SCHIP expansion. The comment reads in part:
"I remain committed to working with my colleagues across the aisle to reauthorize the State Children's Health Insurance Program to protect underprivileged children who currently lack health insurance. However, I cannot support legislation that will expand the welfare state, provide government health care benefits to illegal immigrants, and irresponsibly draw-down the public purse…
pharyngula | October 19, 2007I'm a bit disappointed with Al Franken. Ben Stein has donated to the Franken campaign, and he has accepted the money — come on, Al, let's see some principles. Stein is a dishonest fraud who is peddling Intelligent Design creationism in his upcoming movie, Expelled; he's a former Nixon speechwriter, and he defends Nixon. I know they might be friends in their personal life, but this is politics — Franken should stand up for his liberal ideas and courteously refuse to take money from a stupid right-winger.
Besides supporting pseudoscience in the schools, here's another reason to reject Stein.…
drorzel | October 19, 2007To the men and woman campaigning for the President of the United States:
Hey, how's it going. Boy, I bet it seems like this campaign has been going on forever, huh? All those pancake breakfasts and rubber-chicken dinners... I don't know how you guys manage it.
But here's the thing: the campaign season is really only just starting. It's October now, just over a year from the election, and this is when Americans really start to think about politics. The leaves are starting to fall, there's football on tv, and the air is crisp and cool, with a faint whiff of... desperation.
So, this seems like a…
choofnagle | October 18, 2007Over at Threat Level Ryan Single reports that all of a sudden, Senator Rockefeller, the putative custodian of legislation to give telecommunications companies immunity from privacy lawsuits, is getting lots of cash from such companies. And most of these donations come from out-of-state donors (Verizon and AT&T employees who do not live in West Virginia). Suspicious! Single reports:
Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29…
clock | October 17, 2007My little panda friend is becoming really famous. He was mentioned in a House hearing on global warming yesterday.
drorzel | October 17, 2007Separated at birth?
James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.
The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing…
denialism | October 17, 2007WaPo reports on the appointment of Susan Orr:
The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.
Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.
In a 2001 article in The Washington Post,…
tsmith | October 16, 2007Revere weighs in regarding the Ferrell case. He also mentions one ironic point regarding bioterrorism history and one of the bacteria used, Serretia marcescens, that I hadn't thought to mention.
pharyngula | October 16, 2007I just got word that there will be a vigil outside Michele Bachmann's Woodbury office, tonight at 7, with students coming in by bus from SCSU. This is to protest her opposition to SCHIP and, I presume, her support for the war. You've still got time to join them!
Her office is at 6043 Hudson Rd, Suite 330,
Woodbury, MN 55125. Give her lots of grief.
j7uy5 | October 16, 2007The Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS)
is a
major NIH-sponsored study of the treatment of adolescents with
depression, in which
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine" rel="tag">fluoxetine-only,
rel="tag">cognitive-behavioral therapy
only, combination treatment, and placebo are compared. The
study
is expected to generate a number of papers. One was published
a
few days ago in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The paper
is
not yet open-access. The study team, however, has a
href="https://trialweb.dcri.duke.edu/tads/index.html">website
with…
voltagegate | October 16, 2007Just read an article about the apparently widespread use of tropical hardwoods in New York City. The numbers are impressive:
...the market for Ipé wood drives much of the industrial logging of the entire Amazon, and has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. An emergent flowering tree, which peppers the canopy of the Amazonian rainforest in hues of pink, magenta, yellow and white, Ipe grows in the rainforests at densities of only one or two trees an acre. This means that vast areas of the forests are razed to the ground to feed the market for a single tree. It is estimated that, for…
j7uy5 | October 15, 2007Yeah. Private companies are always more efficient
that government programs. According to a
href="http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1015-06.htm">recent
study by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee:
The private Part D insurers report
administrative expenses, sales costs, and profits of almost $5 billion
in 2007 -- including $1 billion in profits alone. The administrative
costs of the privatized Part D program are almost six times higher than
the administrative costs of the traditional Medicare program.
Another tidbit:
The drug price
rebates negotiated by the…
pharyngula | October 15, 2007Tara has a real horror story: a geneticist failed to follow procedure in mailing some samples, sharing some harmless commercial strains of some innocuous and common bacteria with an artist, the kind of thing that a bureaucrat would reasonably respond to with a hand-slap and insistence that the mistake not be repeated. Except that in this case the federal government has charged in under the pretext of anti-bioterrorism laws (thanks, Patriot Act) and…
Normally, this would be an issue handled between Ferrell (and his university) and ATCC; however, under the broad definitions of mail and wire…