Politics
jrosenhouse | November 30, 2006Here's Bill O'Reilly expressing the latest bit of wisdom from the American Right:
The problem in Iraq is not American. The problem is the Iraqis themselves. They're not fighting for their freedom in a way that puts the bad keys on the defensive.
There is only so much the USA can do. If the Iraqi people are unwilling to challenge the bad guys, the bad guys will win -- period.
And here's Charles Krauthammer making the same point:
Americans flatter themselves that they are the root of all planetary evil. Nukes in North Korea? Poverty in Bolivia? Sectarian violence in Iraq? Breasts are beaten…
pharyngula | November 30, 2006Daniel Morgan, of Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Bloggin' was interviewed on the Florida 10 commandments monument. It would be a moment of glory if Sean Hannity hadn't been involved.
You can catch it all on YouTube.
oracknows | November 30, 2006I have to take this opportunity to express a bit of disappointment in one of my fellow SB'ers.
When I encounter a study that seems to confirm my biases, as a skeptic, I try very hard to be even more skeptical than usual, because I would hate to be caught trumpeting a weak or bogus study as evidence supporting a belief of mine. That would be very embarrassing to me. At the very least, although I might not always succeed, I usually try to be very candid about limitations of studies that I cite. Unfortunately, yesterday, Bora (via Archy) failed to heed that rule. Indeed, he clearly let his…
clock | November 29, 2006You know that Bush-apologists say crazy things. They get cited, chastized and mocked for it every day on the liberal blogs, after all. You may have also wandered, by mistake, onto comment threads on Little Green Foodballs, or The Corner, or other nasty Right-wing blogs and suspected that those people are not really 'all there'. And you may be aware that there is actually quite a large body of scientific evidence that Conservatives are Crazy and Dangerous, er, that conservative/authoritarian ideology correlates strongly with a number of (environmentally induced, i.e., through upbringing and…
clock | November 29, 2006While all this was going on I was wondering where Jason Rosenhouse would stand on all of this. He is back from a break and has two posts on the issue here and here.
Update: Chris Rowan wrote an intriguing analysis and a huge thread on the topic is still ongoing on Panda's Thumb
jlynch | November 29, 2006As part of the Panda's Thumb series debunking Jonathan Wells' latest dreck (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design), Tim Sandefur, himself a self-avowed conservative libertarian Republican, argues that Wells' work offers "no helpful contribution" to any debate about the compatibility of conservatism and evolution. Tim ends his piece:
The bottom line is this: the genuine conservatism of people like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver really is fundamentally at odds with evolution, not because of anything having to do with the free market or evolution's alleged links…
purepedantry | November 29, 2006Benjamin Zycher, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, questions of the wisdom of allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.
Actually what I don't like about this debate is that is called "negotiating" drug prices. There is no negotiation that is going to take place. What will happen is that Medicare is going to tell the drug companies how much they are willing to pay, their opinions be damned.
Anyway, he compares the formulary in the Medicare system with the formulary in the VA system (the VA system is allowed to negotiate prices). He finds that the VA system has…
purepedantry | November 29, 2006Paul Tough, writing in the NYTimes, has an excellent long article about the challenges in teaching underprivileged and minority children.
I was talking to my parents about this issue over break. I am from Denver -- though I went to school in a relatively affluent suburb. In the Denver schools, the majority of students are not doing particularly well. Denver schools have an unenviable drop out rate of about 53%. The people responsible for these sorry numbers suggest that this is because they have been presented with an insoluble situation. Most of the students are minority (a great many…
grrlscientist | November 29, 2006Oh great -- just when you thought it was safe to crawl out of your bunker, more troublke is brewing in the Middle East. According to a Saudi security adviser, the Saudi Arabian government said they will intervene to prevent Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias from massacring Iraqi Sunni Muslims after the United States leaves Iraq. This is exactly what we don't want to happen, particularly in view of the fact that Saudi Arabia is primarily Sunni, whereas Iraq is a mix of Shi'ite and Kurds with a few Sunni thrown into the mix (Hussein was Sunni, for example).
Nawaf Obaid, writing in The Washington…
grrlscientist | November 28, 2006
A view of the Earth from the space shuttle Endeavour
shows sunshine reflected off an ocean. Rising global
temperatures are increasingly melting icecaps, causing
storm havoc and flooding large areas.
Image: Corbis.
The Guardian has listed the top 100 people of all time who have done the most to save the planet.
Rachel Carson, Author of Silent Spring
EF Schumacher, Green economist
Jonathan Porritt, Government adviser
David Attenborough, TV naturalist
James Lovelock, Biologist
Wangari Maathai, Conservationist
Prince of Wales, Green royal
William Morris, Craftsman and writer…
grrlscientist | November 28, 2006This afternoon on MSNBC news, Congressional Quarterly political analyst Craig Crawford speculated that Dick Cheney may be the next to leave the administration as "neocons are heading for the hills" like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Crawford claimed the Vice President's "authority is waning, if not gone." Crawford then went on to ask; "And my point is why would he want to stick around in this environment? All I'm seeing is a man getting isolated more and more."
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tags: politics, cheney, resign
purepedantry | November 27, 2006I have a bunch of articles on politics here that I have been perusing.
Free Exchange has a post on the moral benefits of growth. One of them is that it is prerequisite to the creation of jobs that allow women to be equal. They also have a post from a bit back about Europe's emerging demographic issues with respect to paying for the welfare state.
Ronald Bailey from Reason argues that the alternative energy proposals other than solar are fine and good, but they will be insufficient to meet our energy needs of the next 100 years. Plenty of cheap solar is going to be necessary.
Roger Pielke…
pharyngula | November 27, 2006There is this woman in Colorado who's being sued for displaying a peace symbol on her home—it's very weird.
A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.
Well, it is a peace symbol, you know, so it is rather abstractly against the Iraq war. There was also this long-dead Jewish rabbi that some people call the "Prince of Peace", and I understand he's having a holiday sometime soon…I wonder if the homeowner's association will be…
grrlscientist | November 27, 2006
Orphaned image. Please contact me for proper attribution.
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tags: escher, politics, humor, sarcasm, satire, administration
grrlscientist | November 27, 2006
U.S. Marine Lt. Jeffrey Goodman and Lcpl. Jorge Sanchez drag a wounded civilian away from his burning vehicle after he was caught in the middle of an ambush in Al Aziziyah.
Image: source.
This morning on NBC's Today Show, Matt Lauer started his coverage with "Good Morning. Civil War. A bloody morning of sectarian clashes in Iraq and no sign that it's letting up."
The mainstream media (MSM) has made premature predictions before, but does the Iraq situation present a stronger case for civil war than some of the other MSM bungles? Lauer interviewed retired General Barry McCaffrey who also…
pharyngula | November 27, 2006Jesus' General is poking fun at Mitt Romney's weird religious doctrines (he's a Mormon). This isn't right. I demand that he give equal time to pointing out the silliness of Hillary Clinton's (Methodist), John Kerry's (Catholic), Russ Feingold's (Jewish), and John McCain's (whatever will get him the nomination) religion. There's goofiness galore in all of those, too, and it's unfair to leave them out.
grrlscientist | November 27, 2006
A picture of protester Malachi Ritscher from 2003.
Near a Chicago off-ramp, a mentally-gifted man who suffered from bouts of depression made himself into a living torch as a protest against the war in Iraq. It took one week for officials to identify his body and to piece together the man's motive. Was this man a martyr or a suicide?
According to Malachi Ritscher, the victim, he was a martyr.
"Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing…
pharyngula | November 27, 2006This is a troubling development, and perhaps some members of the National Science Teachers Association in the readership here know something about it. They seem to be in the pocket of the oil industry.
In tomorrow’s Washington Post, global warming activist Laurie David writes about her effort to donate 50,000 free DVD copies of An Inconvenient Truth (which she co-produced) to the National Science Teachers Association. The Association refused to accept the DVDs:
In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said…