Politics
jrosenhouse | September 18, 2006According to this brief from The Washington Post, Al Gore will be publishing a book next year entitled The Assault on Reason:
That is when Gore is scheduled to publish his next book. With no fanfare, he signed a few weeks ago with Penguin Press to write “The Assault on Reason.”
As described by editor Scott Moyers, the book is a meditation on how “the public arena has grown more hostile to reason,” and how solving problems such as global warming is impeded by a political culture with a pervasive “unwillingness to let facts drive decisions.”
While that may sound abstract, both the subject…
j7uy5 | September 18, 2006The
style="font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif;">
Impeach
BUSH
Yard
color="blue" size="5">Signs
color="blue" size="5">.org
site is back online. It was
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/09/impeach_bush_kerfuffle.php">shut
down for a few days because
it was hosted on a site that got the Internet bandwidth from the County
government. Now it is on a private server.
pharyngula | September 18, 2006The Next Hurrah discusses how information (and misinformation) is spread over the web, determined by tracking how a story about PETA and gay sheep circulated. A couple of interesting points are that he emphasizes that the way to persuade is to get out and make comments on other blogs—having a popular blog is not enough, I presume since the readers will typically be of a similar mindset, and you need to break through to people who might not be of like minds—and that MySpace and LiveJournal are important.
LiveJournal, I can see: I find interesting discussion going on in LJ, and the only thing…
stcynic | September 18, 2006Washington Monthly has an interesting set of essays by prominent conservatives on why they want the Republicans to lose in November. Joe Scarborough writes of the virtues of divided government during the 90s:
The fact that both parties hated each another was healthy for our republic's bottom line. A Democratic president who hates a Republican appropriations chairman is less likely to sign off on funding for the Midland Maggot Festival being held in the chairman's home district. Soon, budget negotiations become nasty, brutish, and short and devolve into the legislative equivalent of Detroit,…
oracknows | September 18, 2006Ensconced at a conference center in North Carolina near Abel's and Bora's home turf since Saturday, I appear to have missed an update on the story of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. As you may recall, he is a 16 year old who fought for the right to pursue "alternative" therapy over evidence-based medicine to treat his relapsed Hodgkin's lymphoma. Last month he and his parents agreed to a compromise with the court in which he would be allowed to pursue his desired form of quackery (known as the Hoxsey therapy) in addition to other therapies in the clinic of a radiation oncologist named Dr. Arnold…
evolvingthoughts | September 17, 2006
The more I hear of the international and national response about Steve Irwin, the more my flabber is gasted. I mean, I came to a grudging respect for the guy when I went to Australia Zoo with my kids about three years ago, and saw the show and the zoo, and it not only didn't suck but was in fact well done, both as a zoo and as a tourist attraction. But why the emotion?
On Friday last I dragged myself from my death bed (hey, I'm male, I have a cold, so pity me!) to take two visiting Canadians, Don and Claudette, to the Zoo. Upon arriving (about an hour after the last of the tickets to Irwin…
oracknows | September 17, 2006I'm still kind of scratching my head over this one. It's preaching to the converted and is not particularly illuminating.
Surely they could have come up with something better. (Via the bioethics web log.)
jlynch | September 16, 2006From the Washington Post:
After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict…
clock | September 16, 2006Publius has an interesting hypothesis about the way the torture/Geneva convention issue may blow back into BushCo face. Publius has been over optimistic before, but do you think he is overoptimistic now?
My feeling was that the split between two alternative military commission bills was a ruse - there is hardly any difference between them. By letting the McCain version win, Bush gets to do torture as much as he wants, while getting an opportunity to show public humility and going along with "the way the system works" and duping the nation that the "softer" version of the bill does not…
oracknows | September 16, 2006It may not seem like much when it comes to dealing with animal rights "activists" who cross the line into vandalism, harassment, and intimidation, but it's a start:
Three animal rights activists who organized a campaign to harass employees and clients of a New Jersey research lab were sen tenced to prison yesterday by a judge who said their commitment to social justice had morphed into frightening and sometimes violent protests outside people's homes and offices.
"The means used, the harm im posed, almost arrogantly, is serious -- and warrants serious punishment," Senior U.S. District Judge…
j7uy5 | September 16, 2006I missed this the first time around, but now I am "happy" to report
that the gender pay gap is narrowing. On August 31, 2006,
just in time for Labor Day, the US Dept. of Labor issued
href="http://www.dol.gov/asp/media/reports/workforce2006/factsheet.htm">a
report that shows a shrinking of the gender pay gap.
Here are two of the items they chose to highlight:
Although women, on average, may earn less than men for a
variety of
reasons, including differences in work schedules and career decisions
to accommodate raising their families or taking care of loved ones,
education is a great…
evolvingthoughts | September 15, 2006
I'm reading Robert Carneiro's Evolution in Cultural Anthropology (Westview Press, 2003) right now, and it's a good introduction to the debate over cultural evolution in the social sciences from Spencer to the present day. But I have some criticisms.
Carneiro's view of cultural evolution is basically Spencer's - evolution means unilinear progress. He got this via his mentors Leslie White, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service. He criticises Boyd, Richerson and Rindos for being too "neo-Darwinian":
Rindos states that as raw material to work on, "Darwinian selectionism requires undirected,…
clock | September 15, 2006This post from November 26, 2004 was my fourth (out of five), and longest, analysis of the 2004 election. With Balkans and Creationism sprinkled in. How did it stand the test of time over the past two years?
Oftentimes, an outside observer can see what a native observer cannot. The native is too deeply immersed in one's own culture, takes too much for granted, sees too many things as "normal" ("doesn't everyone do it this way?") that an outsider finds highly idiosyncratic and unusual.
I spent the first 25 years of my life in a nicest country. Life was great. I had everything I wanted, and…
j7uy5 | September 15, 2006What Congress set out to do, was to come up with ethics reform
legislation that would show that they are addressing the concerns of
the public, in the wake of numerous scandals. Reportedly,
though, both parties were reluctant to put limits or their interactions
with lobbyists. Instead, they are going to settle for a
rather anemic rule change that requires lawmakers to acknowledge the
pork-barrel earmarks they sponsor.
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401674.html">
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/…
clock | September 14, 2006I'm glad I am not the only one majorly pissed I was not invited to the secret meeting of Chapel Hill (and area) bloggers wih John Edwards (some of which were not even supporting him back in 2003 and 2004). So is Anton. He is doubly pissed and rightly so.
Ed and Pam were there, though.
pharyngula | September 14, 2006Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Republicans are capable of thinking long term—really long term. After a recent hearing, Rep. Don Young (Reprehensible, Alaska) enlightened us with a Deep Thought:
Before he left the hearing, Young, noting the presence of network TV crews, took a moment to reflect on his thoughts regarding climate change, citing the benefit of global warming -- not caused by man -- in another eon to an area that today is frozen much of the year. "We're dealing with the most northern part of the United States of America, and a most hostile climate, and we're pumping oil, and I'd just…
jlynch | September 14, 2006Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA):
"In light of the rantings that went on for 30 minutes by two colleagues from the other side, I'd like to state for the record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism; America is tired of the wrongheaded and boneheaded leadership of the Republican party that has sent six and a half billion a month to Iraq while the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. That led this country to attack Saddam Hussein, when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. Who captured a man who did not attack the country and let loose a man that did. Americans are tired of boneheaded…
pharyngula | September 14, 2006A few carnivals have popped up:
Carnival of Education #84
Skeptics' Circle #43
I & the Bird #32
Carnival of the Liberals #21
Also, Mendel's Garden #6 is looking for submissions — it will be hosted at The Voltage Gate tomorrow!