Politics
pharyngula | June 9, 2007Paying a pittance to old winos to get them to beat each other up for the camera is cheesy enough, but now they've sunk even lower: getting sanctimonious old Republican twits to throw punches at Democrats. Tacky, tacky.
j7uy5 | June 8, 2007Does
this...
(nuclear football)
contain one of these...?
(alcohol analyzer)
Seriously.
It never occurred to me before, but shouldn't it
be required that the President stay 100% sober at all times?
Apparently not...
This unkind photo was published by Britain's #1 quality website,
Telegraph.co.uk. It accompanies
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/08/wbush108.xml">a
story on a "stomach ailment" that troubled Bush on the last
day of the G8 summit. More
href="http://www.towleroad.com/2007/06/is_bush_off_the.html">here.
clock | June 8, 2007Why didn't I hear about this before? Why is it not in the media? On blogs?
Lindsay reports on the new book "Steeplejacking" that documents how the Religious Right, hand-in-hand with the hawkish conservative Democrats, systematically, over the past couple of decades, performed hostile take-overs of liberal churches. Whenever a pastor/priest/whatever preached peace (and tolerance, equality, need to fight the environmental problems and problems of poverty, etc), the "Institute on Religion and Democracy" would move in and, using various heavy-handed tactics, including lawsuits, remove such…
tsmith | June 8, 2007 I previously mentioned Sierra Leone when discussing the effect of warfare on the emergence of disease. Sierra Leone has long been a country divided, and suffered through more than a decade of civil war (1991-2002) and decades of instability prior to that. Since the end of the war, changes have happened, but slowly. Most recently, the good news is that their Parliament voted to increase the age of marriage from 11 to 18 as part of a new childs' rights bill. However, they stopped short from taking action on another controversial area: female genital mutilation (FGM), otherwise known as "…
voltagegate | June 8, 2007Well, for Greenpeace anyway.
Police helicopters forced down a Greenpeace hot air balloon on today as the environmental group took to the skies to try to get its message across to world leaders at a G8 summit.
[...]
The white hot air balloon had a giant yellow banner with the slogan "G8 Act Now" hanging below it, with the word "Failed" stamped across it. It was in the air for around 15 minutes before it was forced down.
"The hot air balloon was spotted immediately," said police spokesman Manfred Luetjann. "The air space is closed. They did not get very far. The two people on board were taken…
tsmith | June 8, 2007Well, this is a new low. I ran across this blog post from a few months back, discussing the Imus situation:
Anytime a person is negatively labeled because of gender or race, this affronts our shared human dignity. And we should be especially careful here, for this has not always been such an obvious evil. It took the civil rights and women's rights movements to raise our awareness, and the work is not yet finished.
Okay, sounds reasonable. So far. However, he continues:
There is another assault on human dignity at work in our midst, only this one based on geography. A whole class of…
pharyngula | June 8, 2007What if they had a debate about evolution, and didn't bother to invite any scientists? It would be unhinged and divorced from reality, and all the wheels would be spinning wildly, and they could come up with any ol' crazy crap they wanted. This must be why the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a debate on Darwin and conservatives moderated by Ronald Reagan's biographer, Steven Hayward, with John Derbyshire and Larry Arnhart defending evolution, and George Gilder and John West, two cranks from the Discovery Institute, criticizing it. Not one scientist in sight, and the account of the…
jlynch | June 7, 2007... or at least can't think critically about polling questions. Today USA Today/Gallup announced poll results on evolution. The "highlights":
"Evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life" is probably or definitely false: 44%
"Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" is probably or definitely true: 66%
15% said that they would be more likely to vote for a candidate that did not believe in evolution.
The second question is usually…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2007In the June 4, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (which is behind a paywall accessible only to ACS members and those with institutional subscriptions, I'm afraid) there's an article on how college and university labs may be impacted by the interim final regulation on chemical security issued recently by the Department of Homeland Security.
In a nutshell, that impact looks like it could involve thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single university to comply with the rules, even if the chemicals they use fall into those specified by DHS as being at the…
jlynch | June 6, 2007Ed highlights an absolutely asinine regulation (instituted by the Bush administration in 2004) that prohibits
persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States from purchasing, transporting, importing, or otherwise dealing in or engaging in any transactions with respect to any merchandise outside the United States if such merchandise (1) is of Cuban origin; or (2) is or has been located in or transported from or through Cuba; or (3) is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce or manufacture of Cuba.
In other word, you as a person "subject to the…
grrlscientist | June 6, 2007tags: satire, humor, politics, streaming video
This humorous streaming video written and directed by Andy Cobb examines the value of subpoenas, immunity, and aggressive congressional police work. [1:37]
pharyngula | June 6, 2007I passed on listening to the Democratic debates, so you can sure as heck bet I skipped the recent Republican debate. Just as well, too; the candidates got pressed on that evolution question again, and wouldn't you know it, it simply triggered an avalanche of idiocy, with Mike Huckabee leading the way. Just look at these quotes.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth," said Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister. "A person either believes that God created the process or believes that it was an accident and that it just happened all on its own."
An accident? That's the only…
voltagegate | June 6, 2007"I jumped out in waist-deep water. We had 200 feet to go to shore and you couldn't run, you could just kind of push forward. We finally made it to the edge of the water, then we had 200 yards of open beach to cross, through the obstacles. But fortunately most of the Germans were not able to fight, they were all shook up from the bombing and the shelling and the rockets and most of them just wanted to surrender."
-Sgt. Malvin Pike, E Company, disembarking at Omaha
"The sea came alive. Assault boats and landing craft were rapidly approaching the beach. A comrade stumbled out of the smoke and…
evolvingthoughts | June 6, 2007
Clerical Catholic Imam, George Pell, has done it again. Proven why secularism is a necessity, that is.
He has threatened politicians who are Catholics with exclusion from communion, which is not quite excommunication but nevertheless still pretty drastic, if they vote in favour of a secular law permitting stem cell research. Note that these Catholic politicians, who are elected to represent all Australians and not just the Catholics, are not themselves undertaking stem cell research. They are merely voting, if they choose, to allow others to do it if their conscience permits.
But the…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2007
The Fall. What can we say about the Fall that hasn't been said many times before? Well, if all you read is the text, quite a lot.
The Serpent is interesting, for a start. He talks, and so he's a magical creature. He has a human-like personality, for he is "crafty" (although I really prefer the old term "subtle", for it makes him sound like a lawyer). He talks about YHWH Elohim only as "Elohim", for a start - I don't know what meaning there is in that. It's not that the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) had become sacred, for it is spread through Genesis and you'd expect it to be elided by the Redactor…
pharyngula | June 5, 2007Now they've got Howard Dean and Wesley Clark giving talks at YearlyKos. They're so vindictive over there—you know they're only recruiting these big names to rub my nose in the fact that I had to back out of leading the science caucus. I hope Tara is pleased that she gets to take over my job.
grrlscientist | June 5, 2007tags: Dick Cheney, Roy Zimmerman, politics, streaming video
This streaming video is a song by Roy Zimmerman, who is a musician and political humorist. In this video, he chose to sing about Dick Cheney, who is supposedly the sexiest man alive [3:00].
razib | June 4, 2007I don't post much about politics since I don't believe I have value to add to the discussion, and generally politics doesn't arouse much interest for me. But I have followed the immigration reform debate closely, mostly because like Ross Douthat I'm a moderate restrictionist. Now, people might find that strange seeing as how I'm a naturalized American myself, but really I don't have much empathy for other immigrants as immigrants because I view myself much more as who I chose to be (an American) than what I am (an immigrant). During the 1936 campaign Ayn Rand was an activist for Wendell…
pharyngula | June 4, 2007So, I'm reading about this elaborate, extravagant erection to GW Bush's ego being built in Iraq—
The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush’s intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.
Rising from the dust of the city’s Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.
—sure, it's got a movie theater, a swimming pool, a mansion, and all kinds of bomb-…