Politics
tqa | October 2, 2007
Several Democrats in the House of Representatives unveiled a revolutionary plan today that would radically change the way we are paying for the war in Iraq. Their shocking plan has been strongly condemned by Republicans around the country, and the Democratic leadership has responded - in classic fashion - by hiding under their desks and praying for it to go away. Their radical solution? We should do what we did during World War II and Vietnam, and add a surtax to the normal income tax to cover the (financial) costs.
Republicans were quick to attack the very concept of not making our…
denialism | October 2, 2007Have people seen the coverage of these Blackwater hearings?
The police officer, whom CNN is identifying only as Sarhan, said the Blackwater guards "seemed nervous" as they entered the square, throwing water bottles at the Iraqi police posted there and driving in the wrong direction. He said traffic police halted civilian traffic to clear the way for the Blackwater team.
Then, he said, the guards fired five or six shots in an apparent attempt to scare people away, but one of the rounds struck a car and killed a young man who was sitting next to his mother, a doctor.
Sarhan said he and an…
pharyngula | October 2, 2007I wrote of my fondness for salmon the other day, and now I learn of a strange and rather satisfying coincidence: Larry Craig was an enemy of the salmon.
The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.
Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from…
clock | October 1, 2007If anyone shows this to my son, he'll lead a revolution. Like those wonderful, patriotic, thinking students at Boulder High School, who penned their own, most excellent version of the Pledge of Allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to the flag and my constitutional rights with which it comes. And to the diversity, in which our nation stands, one nation, part of one planet, with liberty, freedom, choice and justice for all.
Kudos to them! Watch the movie:
j7uy5 | September 30, 2007In the most recent debate among Presidential hopefuls in the
Democratic Party, there was an exchange regarding the so-called
"ticking bomb" question. The question itself, and the way it
was handled, reveals shortcomings in the way we evaluate our candidates.
TIM RUSSERT: I want to move to another subject, and this involves a
comment that a guest on Meet the Press made, and I want to read it as
follows: “Imagine the following scenario. We get lucky. We
get the number three guy in al-Qaeda. We know there’s a big
bomb going off in America in three days, and we know this guy knows
where it is.…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007According to Pullitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the answer is yes.
oracknows | September 30, 2007Here's another item I saw at the local Barnes & Noble last night. I almost bought this calendar, so amused was I by it. In retrospect, maybe I should have bought it.
I don't recall ever seeing a calendar like this before. Not for Bill Clinton, and not for Ronald Reagan. It's a testament to just how badly our current President has screwed up. It even includes a page for the first 20 days of 2009, right up to the very end.
grrlscientist | September 29, 2007tags: Smithsonian Institution, National Zoo, museum, funding crisis
What's wrong with this picture: America is spending billions and billions of dollars to bomb the snot out of Iraq, but we can't even spare a fraction of that cost to fix our premier museum and zoo??
According to a news story that appeared in today's Washington Post, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Zoo are rapidly deteriorating due to a lack of funds to repair and update the facilities and to hire enough security guards to protect this nation's historic treasures.
Deteriorating Smithsonian facilities have…
j7uy5 | September 28, 2007The government is finally moving the legal system into the 21st
century, with wiki-based laws. The idea is that the people
are
the customer, and the customer should have a say in the rules.
This is, oddly, a government-sponsored revolution.
Of course, this would not be possible in a government where
corporations have sway over the legal process. It could only
happen in a true democracy, not a fascist state.
href="http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9079">New
Zealand to Pioneer Wiki-based Laws
Daily Tech
September 28, 2007 4:55 AM
New Zealand will allow citizens to…
evolvingthoughts | September 27, 2007
There's been a lot of media spin and unthinking objections to the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US. He was called the "modern Hitler", for example. This strikes me as both unthinking and dangerous. Ahmadinejad is his own kind of threat and problem, and comparisons to past dangerous individuals don't resolve or enlighten anything. As Time Magazine clearly noted, he has no power over the things that he is being demonised for, and is incompetent and hated internally for the things he does.
But it seems to me there is a wider issue here than the internecine politics of an…
oracknows | September 27, 2007I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for the mercury militia.
Think about it. They've been claiming for the past several years that the mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in childhood vaccines is a cause of autism. If you believe Generation Rescue, A-CHAMP, SAFEMINDS, and various other activist groups, vaccines are the root of all neurodevelopmental evil, culminating in what to them seems to be the most evil of evil condition, autism. Yet, in study after study in the new millennium, no correlation has been found to implicated their favorite bête noire thimerosal, which serves as…
clock | September 26, 2007Back in July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires all the NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public within at most 12 months subsequent to publication.
The equivalent bill has passed the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this summer and will be up for vote in the Senate very soon! In advance of this important vote, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a Call for action:
As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access…
oracknows | September 25, 2007Before moving on to discussions of alternative medicine (don't worry, there'll be one in the morning), I couldn't resist one last dig regarding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim in his appearance at Columbia University on Monday that there are no gays in Iran...
Sorry Mahmoud, but there was an Iranian contestant in the International Mr. Gay Competition.
Adding insult to injury, Mr. Gay Iran didn't win the International Mr. Gay Competition. Nathan Shaked from Israel did.
(Via Andrew Sullivan.)
oracknows | September 25, 2007Andrew Mathis gives his perspective.
And an excellent analysis it is, too. One brief excerpt:
...I have to wonder exactly where a man who runs a police state gets off asking a question like this. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran does not allow religious freedoms outside those recognized by the Qur'an. People are thrown in jail -- routinely -- for opposing the government. When government opponents visit the country, they are jailed. I say this without qualification: Every single country that has a law against Holocaust denial is a more free country that Iran. EVERY LAST ONE.…
jlynch | September 24, 2007The following is posted on behalf of Naomi Oreskes:
On September 3, I was contacted by Mr. Schulte, who asserted that statements made in my response - specifically that "The Schulte piece misrepresents the research question we posed," that "the piece misrepresents the results we obtained," and that the "piece misrepresents my own interpretation of the severity climate question" - inaccurately describe his paper. Mr. Schulte also contacted the Chancellor of my university, describing my work and behavior in highly unflattering terms.
My understanding of the contents of Mr. Shulte’s paper was…
jrosenhouse | September 24, 2007Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University earlier today. Judging from this clip, it looks like he made a fool of himself. According to the New York Times, it seems something vaguely evolution related came up:
He then gave a speech that meandered from science and religion to creation of human beings and the misuse of wisdom. But it was during the question-and-answer session that he was confronted about some of his most controversial positions.
I haven't found a transcript of his precise remarks, but somehow I think I can guess what he said.
The right-wing…
denialism | September 23, 2007Chris Mooney has been nice enough to help promote our effort, and points us to some more helpful information about the Office of Technology Assessment. Now would be a good time to go over what the OTA did, how it was set up, and why I think it would be rather easy to set it up again as a non-partisan scientific body. To help people understand why this office was important, let's go through a history of the body, much of which I've culled from Bruce Bimber's "The Politics of Expertise in Congress".
Founding and Mission of the OTA
The OTA was founded in 1972 to counter more political bodies…
pharyngula | September 22, 2007Hmmm. Estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq range from $4.4 to 7.1 billion per month. If I assume about $5 billion, it looks like we're throwing away about $7 million per hour in that effort; so it looks like a little bit more than a half-hours worth of bloody war costs us $4 million. So let's just stop for about 40 minutes, OK?
What was the point of that calculation? The government is threatening to shut down the Arecibo Observatory unless they can cough up $4 million dollars for its operating budget for the next three years. Wow.
The National Science Foundation, which has long funded…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2007
On Friday I assessed an essay by a masters student on the evolution of reciprocity and altruism (she cleverly introduced a notion of benevolent behaviour rather than "altruism" in social contexts, to avoid confusion with genetic altruism.
Then today my various feeds identified this rather excellent essay (more of a review paper, really) on strong reciprocity (the idea that we humans will behave reciprocally even if there is no individual payoff) by Benoit Hardy-Valée, of the University of Toronto. In this paper, he challenges what he calls "The Collective", a group of conservative…