Politics
evolvingthoughts | March 12, 2007
No, not the methodological stuff. That's boring (which is why I have a grant application out right now on that topic).
This. A roundup and prospectus on what the degradation of biodiversity is leading us to.
Also, see the interview with Peter Raven, here.
grrlscientist | March 12, 2007According to this streaming video, what the iRack needs is .. more things.
.
tags: streaming video, satire, humor, politics
j7uy5 | March 11, 2007
There really isn't much to say about this, if you adhere to the notion
that if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at
all...
src="http://www.mlive.com/images/article/grp_news.gif"
alt="Grand Rapids Press" border="0" height="50"
width="333">
href="http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/index.ssf?/base/news-2/117359923256810.xml&coll=6">Verdict
of perjury
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Conviction
of vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby last week had little to do
with the core allegations in the CIA leak affair, but it said something
big about American law…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2007The tundra is is a special habitat where tree growth is inhibited by low temperatures and a short growing season. In the Arctic, the tundra is dominated by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen subsoil, so the only vegetation that grows under such conditions are grasses, mosses and lichens. Forests of spruce trees and shrubs neighbor these tundra areas, and the boundary where they meet is called the treeline. However, climate change has extended the summer warming season and promoted tree growth, causing the treeline to encroach on the tundra faster than researchers thought possible.
"The…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2007According to a recently leaked memorandum, the Bush Administration is once again up to their dirty tricks; they are trying to gag government scientists by demanding they not to talk about polar bears, sea ice and climate change during official overseas trips.
Despite all this clumsy politicking, the Department of the Interior is currently considering whether to list polar bears as endangered and a decision is expected by January 2008.
A leaked e-mail from regional director Richard Hannon, from the Fish and Wildlife Service to his staff warned that any future overseas trips involving or…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2007This streaming video shows how much difference one word can make to this nation.
.
tags: streaming video, humor, politics
pharyngula | March 10, 2007From Orcinus, I've learned a useful new term ("spockoed", referring to using aggressive tactics to shame the right-wing extremists) and that Michael Savage and Ann Coulter are suffering for their calumnies, which is always satisfying. There might be a little too much self-satisfaction, though: I think there's a large enough culture of right-wing extremism to keep them both profitable for a long time to come, and I suspect that knocking down one or two sleaze-artists just means new ones will rise to take their place.
j7uy5 | March 9, 2007
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030902082.html">
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030902082.html">Privatized
Walter Reed Workforce Gets Scrutiny
Army
Facility Lost Dozens Of Maintenance Workers
By Steve Vogel
and Renae Merle
Washington
Post Staff Writers
Saturday,
March 10, 2007; Page A03
The
scandal over treatment of outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical
Center has focused attention on the Army's decision to privatize the
facilities support workforce at the hospital, a move…
j7uy5 | March 9, 2007...That
is probably bad advice. Never take legal advice from someone
who is not your lawyer. The only thing worse than taking
legal advice from someone who is not your lawyer, is to take legal
advice from somebody else's lawyer.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I am going to tell you what I find
particularly galling about the
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070309/national-security-letters">FBI
"National Security Letter" scandal. Yeah, it shows
that we can't trust our own law enforcement agencies. But we
knew that already. So why do I find this issue to be…
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2007
David Hicks, the Australian held without trial or charge for five years and tortured in Guantanamo by the American military at the behest of the clearly criminal administration in the United States (there! I feel much better now) is being charged and tried for "providing material support for terrorism", a crime that did not exist when the acts he is alleged to have committed occurred.
This raises the spectre of retrospective legislation, which is a running sore on democracy for some time now.
Retrospective legislation is the passing of laws at t to cover acts made at <t.…
clock | March 9, 2007Following the Edwards lead, Bill Richardson also pulled out of the FoxNews Nevada debate effectively killing it. The current frame in the media and online is that Fox News is not a legitimate news source.
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2007
Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves.
There appear to be several phenomena that fall under the rubric of "religion".
First, and this is, I believe, a matter of our western-centric history, religion is defined as an experience. Various folk have held…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2007Scooter Libby is a "straight arrow" -- who also happens to be a convicted felon.
tags: streaming video, Scooter Libby, politics
oracknows | March 7, 2007
Believe it or not, the FCC is receiving a fair number of complaints over the Superbowl halftime show featuring His Purpleness, particularly the part where he did a bit of a phallic thing with his guitar (as if generations of rockers haven't done the whole guitar as wank-off thing since at least the 1960's--heck David Bowie used to simulate oral sex on Mick Ronson's guitar back in his Ziggy Stardust days, although I will concede that he never played the Superbowl). I mean, get a load of this complaint:
During Prince's rendition of Purple Rain, which I think is a really great song, there…
jrosenhouse | March 7, 2007I realize there's nothing Earth-shattering about documenting right-wing bias on the Fox News Channel. But yesterday's panel on Hannity and Colmes really had to be seen to be believed. To discuss the conviction of Scotter Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice they had three guests. They were right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham, right-wing pundit Robert Novak, and David Boies, who has forsaken the noble work he did defending Al Gore in 2000 to become just another right-wing pundit. He seemed content to parrot every one of Hannity's talking points at any rate.
oracknows | March 7, 2007Flea has a rather amusing response to a letter about GI symptoms in autistic children that left him scratching his head...
Don't feel insulted, Flea; occasionally, we get mass mailings from cancer advocacy groups or--much more annoying to me and unfortunately much more frequent--pharmaceutical companies that sound as though they're telling us how to treat various cancers.
clock | March 7, 2007I am still a little under the weather, but I managed to get online and read and see what I missed - what an eventful week! And a bad week for the Right. Libby is guilty. Heads are falling around the Walter Reed affair. Newt Gingrich blames the NOLA victims for not being good enough citizens to leave before Katrina. The Coulter story keeps on giving. Joe Klein keeps jumping with both feet into his mouth almost daily. Atheism taken seriously in the news. The investigations into the firings of attorneys. The new NSA spying investigation. The Right-wing frothing at the mouth...
But we…
clock | March 7, 2007At least Edwards refuses to participate. Let's hope that all the other candidates also decide to refuse to participate in that charade.