Politics
grrlscientist | May 30, 2007tags: please impeach me, impeach Bush, Iraq war, streaming video
I managed to sneak in to my local watering hole tonight where they have free wifi, so I could share this video with you. In this streaming video, Bush begs Americans for a chance to atone on for his sins on the 4th anniversary of the Iraq "cakewalk," in a satirical rendition of "Please Release Me" by Jim Terr. Yeah, it's a little bit graphic at the end, but so is Bush's tenure [2:36].
Okay, it's time for me to go home to my little birdnest in Manhattan, where I do not have wifi or any other internet access at all, bummer.
jlynch | May 30, 2007You’re either going to get this or not:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10 O RLY?
YA RLY
BTW this is true
VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
NO WAI
BTW this is false
VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
KTHX
KTHXBYE
More details here.
tsmith | May 30, 2007I blogged earlier about the Georgia man who globe-trotted while infected with XDR-TB. I wrote that post late Tuesday evening, and since then, a number of other details about his case have come to light--and they're not encouraging. In fact, this serves as a nice example of a convergence of a number of areas I've written about before--obviously, the evolution of antibiotic resistance and the terrible position it leaves us in, the politics and policies of quarantine/isolation (and how they'd be enforced), and the global spread of infectious disease, so I figured this would warrant another…
pharyngula | May 30, 2007Orac has the latest news on the Tripoli Six, the health care workers who were falsely accused of spreading AIDS in a Libyan hospital and were sentenced to death. The good news is that they aren't dead yet, the Libyan government is still wheedling for reparations, and they're showing some signs of backing off from a hard line position. Nothing's certain, but at least the negotiations are creaking along slowly in the right direction.
jlynch | May 30, 2007
According to the Global Peace Index created by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Norway is the most peaceful nation in the world and Iraq is the least. Among the 121 countries ranked, the United States came in 96th. Ireland was fourth.
The index was compiled based on 24 indicators measuring peace inside and outside of a country. They included the number of wars a country was involved in the past five years, how many soldiers were killed overseas and how much money was made in arms sales. Domestic indicators included the level of violent crimes, relations with neighboring countries and level…
clock | May 30, 2007These two articles in Colorado Springs Independent and Denver Post are just the latest in an ongoing saga about the move by the U.S.Army to expand its Fort Carson base to include an additional million acres of land full of historical and prehistorical monuments, from wall paintings to dinosaur fossils.
The Fort Carson base, as it is now, is partially a nature preserve (like many military facilities are), but expansion, apart from kicking out many local farmers by using eminent domain, will intrude into areas rich with historical artefacts, not to mention dinosaur bones and tracks, most still…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Denver Post is reporting that the US Army wants to use a major fossil site for bombing practice. The Picket Wire Canyonlands, in the Commanche National Grasslands, is included in a series of maps the Army has drawn up for increasing its ordinance ranges.
The landscape of southeast Colorado also crawls with history, but time may be running out on public access to the past as Fort Carson considers acquiring the land for war training.
This secluded valley is home to one of North America's richest dinosaurs finds - more than 1,300 individual tracks; 35 sites have yielded bones.
"The great…
oracknows | May 29, 2007Last fall, I and quite a few other bloggers wrote about the Tripoli Six. These are six foreign medical workers arrested for allegedly intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and, thanks to the ignorant hysteria whipped up against them and the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for unhygienic conditions in the hospital, sentenced to death by firing squad, despite allegations that they were tortured while in a Libyan prison to extract "confessions."
Now, five months after their being sentenced to death, the international dance by which Bulgaria and…
oracknows | May 29, 2007This is not free speech; it's vandalism:
ORCAS ISLAND, Wash. -- Vandals burned dozens of small American flags that decorated veterans' graves for Memorial Day and replaced many of them with hand-drawn swastikas, authorities said Monday.
Forty-six flag standards were found empty and another 33 flags were in charred tatters Sunday in the cemetery, authorities said. Swastikas drawn on paper appeared where 14 of the flags had been.
Members of the American Legion on this island off Washington's northwest coast replaced the burned flags with new ones Sunday afternoon.
The vandals struck again on…
drorzel | May 29, 2007A bit over a month ago, "framing" was the hot argument in these parts (see here, here, and here, and links therein), with zillions of comments about how difficult it was to understand what Mooney and Nisbet were advocating. Today, Matt Nisbet appears to endorse a suggestion made in a letter to Science, namely that graduate schools should offer formal instruction in science communication. Somewhat weirdly, this hasn't generated any comments at all.
Their suggestions are pretty clear and concrete:
From this experience, we strongly encourage other graduate programs to implement science…
grrlscientist | May 29, 2007tags: Ashcroft, Gonzales, politics, streaming video
This streaming video satirizes the Godfather by comparing it to the Ashcroft-Gonzales situation [1:03].
pharyngula | May 29, 2007You've probably all read Glenn Greenwald's withering dissection of a mock scandal ginned up by right-wing bloggers. If you haven't, you should—the short story is that the fact of a war falling into ignominious failure is driving the apologists to desperate acts of rationalization, and the latest effort to save face involved a fairly inconsequential memo from Iraq that mentioned some temporary difficulties. That memo had to be discredited—I don't quite see why, even if we were winning I'd expect occasional setbacks—and they turned to their usual tactic of peering at the profane text intently…
mixingmemory | May 28, 2007A little over a year ago, I wrote a post describing some research showing that there are cognitive barriers to understanding evolution. There I listed three specific factors:
Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we reach adulthood.
Intuitive essentialism, which causes us to believe that biological kinds have hidden internal essences which determine what they are, how they will…
oracknows | May 28, 2007Here in the U.S, it's Memorial Day, the day that we set aside to pay tribute to our men and women in uniform who have put their lives on the line to defend our nation in its wars. On this day, I'd like to present a few links and thoughts:
Here's my post about Memorial Day from last year.
Memorial Day 1942. Shorpy is my favorite picture blog. it regularly features amazing historical pictures from the first half of the 20th century.
The last full measure: 1863.
From the History News Network, here is a list of posts about the origin of Memorial Day.
Tom DePastino argues that we ought to…
grrlscientist | May 28, 2007tags: Simpsons, liberals, streaming video
This streaming outtake from a Simpson's episode about FOX news is amusing [1:13].
j7uy5 | May 27, 2007
Who
are these people, and what are they doing? They are
Democratic congresspersons, sheepishly "caving in". Not only
did they cave on the timeline for withdrawal of military and mercenary
forces in Iraq, they failed to heed this warning:
href="http://www.upi.com/Energy/Briefing/2007/05/24/kucinich_others_want_oil_out_of_war_funds/9281/">Kucinich,
others want oil out of war funds
Ben Lando, UPI Energy Correspondent
Published: May 24, 2007 at 9:58 PM
WASHINGTON, May 24 (UPI) -- U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich is championing a
somewhat lonely push in Congress to remove Iraq's oil from…
clock | May 27, 2007First, as I reported earlier, Archy persuaded PZ Myers to host a one-time carnival about the opening of the Creation Museum - and here is the carnival - a lot of good stuff to read.
I especially liked the only (so far) on-the-scene report by Martha Heil.
I also tend to prefer posts that try to take in a Big Picture and place stuff in broader historical and/or geographical context, thus, I really liked contributions by Laelaps and Greg Laden. They are optimistic, though. The view from outside, from Europe, can be much more pessimistic.
Also, some of the comments on this post remind me of my…
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2007
This is about Australian politics, for the passersby.
The wife of the present Labor leader and would-be prime minister of Australia is a successful business woman, running a company that places contract workers. After a slip in which an acquired set of contracts were substantially below what one might expect for trading off terms and conditions, and where her husband opposes such contracts in employment, she has decided, it is reported, to sell off her interest in the Australian company (there's a UK company as well, it seems).
I think this is just wrong. It is wrong on several levels -…