Politics
pharyngula | August 1, 2007OK, I don't know quite what to make of this: it's a site called The Atheist Conservative. I know there's no obstacle to being both godless and conservative, but this one is 'round-the-bend freaky far-right Bush-lovin' conservative. I don't know how an atheist could write a review of Ann Coulter's Godless that contains gooey dollops of praise for Coulter — that book was one flaming bonfire of stupid. But hey, if there are conservative atheists out there with tears running down your cheeks because you're reading this pro-atheist site by a crazed liberal, maybe you'll be happier over there.
Oh,…
j7uy5 | July 31, 2007
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/Carmona-CTAGlobalHealthdraft.pdf">This
report (PDF 260KB file) is what set off the controversy over
the former Surgeon General of the United States. It is a
draft report, entitled The Surgeon General’s Call
to Action on Global Health 2006. It was written by
the former Surgeon General, Dr.
href="http://www.hhs.gov/about/bios/sg.html">Richard Carmona.
In this post, I will review the history of Dr. Carmona's service as
Surgeon General, outline the controversy, and end with a discussion of
of some recent criticism of the controversy…
oracknows | July 31, 2007I was going to write about a recent study that purports to claim that smoking pot causes schizophrenia that's been making the rounds lately. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it), this week's host of the Skeptics' Circle, Mark Hoofnagle, beat me to it.
Can you say, "Correlation does not necessarily equal causation"?
The reporters who hyped the study and the investigators who enabled them should repeat this 100 times. Maybe it'll sink in.
oracknows | July 31, 2007A couple of weeks ago, inspired by a somewhat drunken encounter two weeks prior, against my better judgment, I waded into the evidence supporting the contention that secondhand smoke is harmful to health, increasing the risk of heart disease and lung cancer in workers chronically exposed to it. In response to a list of quotes going around the Internet claiming that relative risks less than 2 are so unreliable that they may be ignored (conveniently enough, most relative risks reported for exposure to SHS are in the 1.2 to 1.3 range), I pointed out what a load of dishonest quotemining the list…
evolvingthoughts | July 30, 2007
Sorry to bother you all with internal Australian politics, but this has to be discussed. Now the minister for immigration is saying that the Australian Federal Police intercepted a chat room conversation in which Haneef was told to leave Australia by (they say) his cousins before his knowledge of the bombing plot was uncovered.
Kevin Andrews also says that critics are soft on terrorism. And here's the nub of the matter. We aren't soft on terrorism - that is a (excuse my French) fucking stupid thing to say. Does Andrews really believe we critics want a bombing in Sydney? We aren't soft on…
oracknows | July 30, 2007If you want to know how clueless our current President is about healthcare and the uninsured, just check out this quote from a speech he gave recently:
The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.
Isn't that one of the biggest problems with health care in our nation? Patients without health insurance flood the emergency rooms, which by law have to treat them regardless of ability to pay, leading to higher costs all around for unreimbursed care, for…
oracknows | July 30, 2007I've been a bit remiss about reporting an update on the Tripoli Six, six foreign health care workers who were falsely accused of intentionally infecting children at a hospital in Libya with HIV, leading to their being convicted and sentenced to death. The evidence against them was crap, and scientific analyses showed that the strain of HIV in question had been in the hospital before the arrival of the Tripoli Six. After a lot of international wrangling between Bulgaria, the EU, and Libya involving diplomacy and more than a bit of money, the Tripoli Six are free. The arrangement involved the…
hrynyshyn | July 30, 2007Are we ScienceBloggers just wasting our time when it comes to politics? While I'm sure that none of us are operating under the delusion that anything we write has a significant influence on the outcome of pivotal events like presidential elections, could it be that the scientific, rational approach to running this country is completely irrelevant? Do Americans, by and large, actually distrust intelligence and reason to the point where they prefer their candidates be ignorant and simple-minded? In other words, was George W. Bush more than an aberration?
Ten days ago on NPR's All Things…
oracknows | July 30, 2007Saturday, I thought that I knew what I'd be writing about for Monday, which, I've learned from my two and a half years of blogging, is a great thing when it happens. A certain Libertarian comic had decided that he wanted to argue some more about secondhand smoke and indoor smoking bans, starting a few days earlier with a rather specious analogy (which was handily shredded by you, my readers) and then finishing by annoying me with a comment and a post that implied that I didn't "care about the little guy." It looked like great fodder for a post to start out the week and a chance to apply a…
pharyngula | July 30, 2007
Tom Tomorrow has a list of things he's been wondering about, but it's actually a list of things I suspect but would rather not have confirmed.
denialism | July 29, 2007We already knew from former Surgeon General Carmona's testimony that this was happening, but now the WaPo brings us
a specific example of science being squelched by a political appointee. It's not only inappropriate, but just despicable.
A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health…
pharyngula | July 29, 2007If you're considering purchasing some supplies for home repair from one of the mega-chains, you might want to consider their advertising policies. Archy makes a good case that you should shop at Lowe's—they don't support barking mad reactionary freaks.
Of course, it's a bit irrelevant to me, since I don't have either one near me. Instead, we've got four or five small locally owned hardware stores. Their owners might be sympathetic to Bill O'Reilly, but they don't have enough money to buy air time on his show.
pharyngula | July 28, 2007Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it's great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier tiers of the political arena, and that good wholesome sparring in the primary is going to help them both out, no matter who wins the nomination. Why, though, should this Minnesotan care? Aside from having lived in Oregon for 9 years (and loving it!), it was brought to my attention that there's a…
j7uy5 | July 27, 2007This
is a follow-up to my
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/07/this_is_what_they_are_hiding_1.php">post
from yesterday:
I'm not sure what "GOP fingerprints..." are, but I gather it was
important
to avoid them.
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/voter-caging.JPG">
The image is from a PDF of a fax, then reduced to fit. Click on it if
it is hard to read. Better yet, go to
href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml" rel="tag">Truthout
and get the link to the PDF (RNC emails). Then read the
transcripts of interviews with fired US…
j7uy5 | July 27, 2007This
is why some in Congress are issuing subpoenas and talking about
contempt citations. This is why...
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/AR2007062201291.html">William
Mercer
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052700896.html"
rel="tag">Sara Taylor
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/washington/16elston.html?ex=1339646400&en=1257150980027b82&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss"
rel="tag">Michael Elston
href="http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/06/monica-goodling-resigns/"
rel="…
evolvingthoughts | July 27, 2007
A short note - it looks like Haneef has been cleared of all charges and the political pressure on his arrest and detention has been criticised by civil rights lawyers. Good news, but I really hope further action is taken against the AFP and the politicians. Keep an eye open to see if he is still deported by the immigration minister's draconian act of revoking his visa.
j7uy5 | July 25, 2007
Today the US House of Representatives voted to pass
href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-2929">H.R.
2929:
To
limit the use of funds to establish any military
installation or
base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of
United States Armed Forces in Iraq or to exercise United States
economic control of the oil resources of Iraq.
US. Representative
rel="tag">Barbara Lee introduced amendments to
this effect in 2005, and it went nowhere. She tried to
accomplish the same thing with various amendments in 2006, with no
success. In 2007,…
grrlscientist | July 25, 2007tags: nuke Iran, humor, Jon Stewart, streaming video
This video nearly got me thrown out of the library because I was laughing so much -- and to think that we were a sixth rectal polyp away from World War III! [3:06].
jstemwedel | July 25, 2007The news today from Inside Higher Ed is that the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill. You may recall that in May 2006, a faculty panel at the university found that the tenured ethnic studies professor had committed repeated, intentional academic misconduct in his scholarly writings. You may also recall that the close scrutiny of his writings was sparked by an outcry at some of the political views he voiced (especially that the September 11th attacks were an instance of "chickens coming home to roost").
The mix of factors here -- a movement to remove a…