Politics
evolvingthoughts | June 14, 2007
Cardinal-Imam George Pell, who threatened Catholic politicians with excommunication indirectly (and exclusion from the sacraments directly) if they voted in favour of stem cell research being permitted in a new Bill, is liable to being held in contempt of the NSW Parliament, just as his west Australian counterpart, Archbishop-Imam Hickey has been. This appears to be a coordinated campaign by the Catholic Church, as commenters noted similar actions in Scotland and Wales in my first post.
In other news, the Catholic Church is opposing Catholics getting involved in Amnesty International, in…
drorzel | June 14, 2007As several of you know very well, Kate and I were married five years ago in Massachusetts, near where her family lives. Which, of course, means that our marriage was totally cheapened and rendered meaningless by today's vote against an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the state constitution.
Or-- wait, let me check-- no, no it wasn't. Nope, pretty much still happily married, and happy to be married. And probably happier than ever to have been married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Some horse trading was apparently required to get the votes lined up, but the Legislature eventually managed…
jlynch | June 14, 2007George Monbiot ends his "debate" with Alexander Cockburn (see here and here) with a paragraph that more-or-less encapsulates how I feel:
I have followed Alexander Cockburn’s writing for many years and I have admired it. His has been an important and persuasive voice on many progressive issues. But I can no longer trust it. I realise that he is blinded by a conviction that he remains right whatever the facts might say. In his determination to admit nothing, he will cling to any straw, including the craziest fulminations of the ultra-right, and he will abandon the rigor and scepticism that once…
evolvingthoughts | June 14, 2007
New Scientist is reporting that a case in Austria (not Australia - we share a love of beer, but that's about it) is set to decide if chimps have rights. They already do in Spain, and in New Zealand (which was, I think, the first country to enact rights for chimps).
They do not have rights in Australia, or America, or most of the world apart from these few countries that have what I consider are sensible and inescapable laws. Why do I think so?
Chimps, and indeed most of the great apes if not all of them, share an enormous genetic heritage in common with humans; they are capable of…
hrynyshyn | June 13, 2007Barack Obama has finally decided that coal isn't any particular god's gift to humankind after all. It wasn't easy breaking with his black-seam mining allies in downstate Illinois, but it looks like he's decided green votes are more plentiful. About time. I was beginning to wonder whether he really is ready for prime time. I'm still not convinced, but...
In the early hours of this year Obama re-introduced the absurd Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007, a desperate attempt by the coal industry to hop aboard the "let's break American's oil addiction" bandwagon. Never mind that producing…
pharyngula | June 13, 2007Why is the reality-based community ignored? Because the other side, the Jesus-loving wingnut loons, is committed to defending idiocy, while the Democrats have a complete lack of any guiding principle, other than to get elected. Nick Coleman has another perfect example, not that there's any shortage of them, in the defeat of a sensible bill here in Minnesota.
In a last-minute piece of strong-arming that went almost unnoticed, Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty forced DFL leaders of the Legislature to drop a comprehensive and moderate sex-education proposal from the $14 billion education bill that…
oracknows | June 12, 2007The first day's testimony for the Autism Omnibus has been posted, and Autism Diva has the scoop.
I haven't had a chance to peruse the PDF file of the testimony, but what the Diva reports is plenty damning. Maybe I was wrong to be so pessimistic in my earlier post. Dr. H. Vasken Aposhian's testimony is even lamer than my post suggested. On the other hand, the emotionalism in this trial still worries me, as does the uncritical press coverage concentrating on the plaintiffs' "feelings" and only mentioning in a single sentence or two, down near the end of the article or report, that--oh, by the…
jlynch | June 12, 2007
Interesting map matching the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] of US states to those of countries worldwide.
[Seen here, via here.]
jlynch | June 12, 2007
"[M]ost of our prisoners would love to be in a facility more like Guantanamo and less like the state prisons that people are in in the United States." Mike Huckabee (R Candidate for President)
Makes you just wish that Huckabee could be held indefinitely somewhere without charges or evidence.
grrlscientist | June 12, 2007tags: constitution, humor, streaming video
This biting political piece by Bill Maher has been around for a little while but it is but it is definitely worth watching. "I email myself a copy of the constitution every morning in the hopes that they [the Feds] will open it to see what it says." [6:11]
clock | June 11, 2007Skeptical Alchemist has the whole story.
Sign the petition to prevent the drilling.
jlynch | June 11, 2007Awhile back, Mark Hoofnagle took on what he termed "the lunatic ravings" of Alexander Cockburn in The Nation. In his piece, Mark noted that Cockburn wrote:
Not so long ago, [Martin] Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a construct now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith or doctrine. Among them was the graph described above so devastating to the hypothesis.
To which Mark replied:
Ah, papers! But wait. Where are these papers published? Where are the citations? Where is the peer review? How can we possibly…
voltagegate | June 11, 2007It's true. Ecosystem analyst Dr. Rand Knight is running for senate in Georgia:
From 2004 - 2006 Dr. Knight served as a Scientist for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS). Dr. Knight was part of a team that worked with the National Science Foundation and Congress to develop a continental-scale research platform for discovering, understanding and predicting the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species in urban and wild ecosystems. Rand Knight is a member of the…
pharyngula | June 11, 2007George W. Bush is having private conversations with an invisible friend. Back in 2003 he met with the Palestinians and told them all about it.
Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"
Let's…
pharyngula | June 10, 2007Oh, crap. Tristero throws me into despair with this sad quote.
Science is a gift of God to all of us and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure," said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arguing for the bill's passage. "And that is the embryonic stem cell research."
And here I've got a "Pelosi '07" bumper sticker on my car. How could she say something so idiotic? None of the Democrats are meeting my minimal standards for competence so far.
I know we have a fair number of nerds here, so I thought one way to illustrate the situation in American politics…
grrlscientist | June 10, 2007Where in the brain does déjà vu originate? Why it happens more frequently with increasing age and with brain-disease patients? Basically, the brain generates memories near its center, in a looped wishbone of tissue called the hippocampus. But a new study suggests only a small chunk of it, called the dentate gyrus, is responsible for "episodic" memories that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart. The dentate gyrus is a region within the brain that notes a situation's pattern -- its visual, audial, olfactory, temporal and other cues for the body's future reference. So what…
clock | June 10, 2007The article is here in the NYT Magazine (apparently free access to all!), but before you read it (and you SHOULD read it), read the analysis by DHinMI on Next Hurray, which points out the binary thinking, ignorance of US history, and the underlying Compulsive Centrist Disorder of Matt Bai, so characteristic of the inside-the-Beltway crowd that has never been exposed to the real world.
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2007As Tara writes at Aetiology, it's interesting that the Rwandan government, which might be excused for letting for a little blood lust taint its criminal justice system, what with the slaughter of 800,000 people on their minds, has voted instead to abolish the death penalty. Yet here in America, capital punishment remains on the books in 38 states. I have little new to add, offer these thoughts, which I wrote more than a year ago in an attempt to give the subject a local take, back in pre-ScienceBlog days. My thesis was an is that a scientific approach to justice is incompatible with state-…
tsmith | June 10, 2007Rwanda abolishes the death penalty:
Rwanda's parliament voted late on Friday to abolish the death penalty, a move that should clear the way for suspects in the 1994 genocide to be extradited back to Rwanda.
You might think that survivors of such a horrible genocide would want to see those who victimized them put to death, but the president of a group of survivors says otherwise:
Survivors of the slaughter welcomed the decision, noting that the death penalty had existed in Rwandan law before the genocide.
"It didn't deter people from picking up machetes to slaughter their fellows - that's…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2007tags: horseshoe crab, Limutus polyphemus, red knot, Delaware Bay
Horseshoe Crab, Limutus polyphemus,
a living fossil.
Image: Pier Aquarium, Florida [larger].
In a controversial ruling, a Delaware Superior Court judge partially rolled back the two-year ban on the horseshoe crab harvest by limiting it to males only. The decision was a reaction against John Hughes, secretary of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, who was actually doing his job. However, according to the judge, Hughes had already decided to enact a complete moratorium on horseshoe crab harvests…