Politics
tsmith | August 16, 2006DarkSyde over at DailyKos has his own post up today on the anthrax letters. He asks for "Thoughts, plots, conspiracies?", and gets quite a few in the comments, so be sure to check those out as well.
pharyngula | August 16, 2006Neddie Jingo has an appalling example of the kind of presentation used to promote our strategic plan in Iraq. Go take a look and weep—it's one of those meaningless godawful PowerPoint-style assemblages of boxes and arrows. You know what I mean: a nightmare of chartjunk that distracts everyone into contemplating the relationships of graphical abstractions on a screen rather than actually dealing with the substance behind them.
I'm actually very impressed that he managed to also put together a paragraph actually explaining what the graphic is supposed to mean, and that the paragraph makes sense…
oracknows | August 16, 2006Yesterday, on the way home, I was flipping through the AM dial. Yes, as embarrassed as I am to admit it, even now I still occasionally have a soft spot for conservative talk radio. At the risk of being shunned by my fellow ScienceBloggers (most of whom are--shall we say?--a bit to the left) and driving away half my traffic, I will even admit to having listened regularly to Rush Limbaugh for a period of several years back when I was in the lab fulltime. Say whatever you will about his views (which have tended to become more odious over the years), he was (and sometimes still is) a powerful and…
tsmith | August 15, 2006I've blogged previously about the massive effect vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV) could have. HPV is a common sexually-transmitted virus. Though most strains are harmless, a few have the potential to cause cervical cancer. Therefore, the HPV vaccine will be the first one ever specifically intended to prevent a type of cancer.
This vaccine has recently been approved by the FDA, and is set to roll out shortly. This is already expected to be a rather contentious issue as the vaccine is rolled out in the U.S. and elsewhere, as one target group for vaccination is adolescents…
pharyngula | August 15, 2006Some people seem to be outraged at the idea of people stopping the killing in the Middle East. Those people are, curiously enough, some very prominent Christians.
A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle
East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I
have ever heard. The latest gems come from people like Pat
Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting
Network, and Rev. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel. Hagee,
a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone
Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his…
tsmith | August 15, 2006 There's been quite a bit of discussion in the news lately about how safe we are (or aren't) in the light of the recent terror arrests in the UK. As we approach the 5-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, many changes have been made in the name of protecting us from terrorism. Some of them, including adding additional first responders and public health workers (and preparing them for a variety of emergency situations) are good in theory, but have been sorely underfunded. Other measures, unfortunately, are little more than theater as Revere suggests, including the current focus on your…
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2006Here's a nasty case of a child custody case that has been fought over whether or not the mother's involvement in the Church of the Subgenius makes her an unfit mother. The Church is of course a parody on organised evangelical religion (save yourself for eternal slackness! Justify your sins!). It appears that parodying religion is sufficient cause to have a knockdown dragout court case on child custody in America these days.
Unfortunately, the fact that the judge (appropriately named "Judge Punch" - is there a Judge Judy nearby?) called her a "pervert," "mentally ill," "lying," and a…
jlynch | August 14, 2006From AP:
X-ray machines that screen airline passengers' shoes cannot detect explosives, according to a
Homeland Security Department report on aviation screening.
Findings from the report, obtained by The Associated Press, did not stop the Transportation Security Administration from announcing Sunday that all airline passengers must remove their shoes and run them through X-ray machines before boarding commercial aircraft. ...
In its April 2005 report, "Systems Engineering Study of Civil Aviation Security -- Phase I," the Homeland Security Department concluded that images on X-ray machines don…
pharyngula | August 14, 2006Kung Fu Monkey has a great Daily Show clip—the last few lines from the foreign correspondent are especially biting.
j7uy5 | August 14, 2006A few days ago I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/08/changes_in_the_drugapproval_pr.php">made
note of an article in the NEJM, about proposed changes in the
process for FDA approval of new medication. (
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/6/618"
rel="tag">A Proposal for Radical Changes in the
Drug-Approval Process, by Alastair J.J. Wood, M.D.)
At the time, it wasn't possble for me to do justice to the
paper. It still isn't but at least I will be able to make a
couple of points.
I've taken some shortcuts in this post, not explaining some of the…
j7uy5 | August 13, 2006I was
href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2006/01/soup.html">really
worried about Iran after the State of the Union Address this
year. Although not many people shared my opinion, I thought
the most important aspect of the speech was the propaganda aspect, and
I thought that the biggest theme was to lay the groundwork for a war
against Iran.
The rhetoric seemed to be heating up for a while, but has since faded.
My thought on this, is that we would not be able to attack
Iran without instituting a military draft. I think the
Administration has noted, correctly, that the American…
clock | August 13, 2006First, go to Well-timed Period and Pharyngula to get all the neccessary information about Plan B, what it is, what it isn't, and how it works. Then go to Bitch PhD and buy a T-shirt (for which you need to know what you are talking about because you WILL be asked).
clock | August 13, 2006Shakes has the quickest, clearest summary (with good additional links) about what happened at Heathrow last week, how media lied to you yet again, and who picked the timing and why. I hear that my cousin was at Heathrow at the time and ended up flying four hours too late, but I have not heard from him directly to get any jiucy tidbits.
clock | August 13, 2006In Jeebus can't see through the walls of the Ramada, Amanda adds some excellent commentary on my guest-post over on Echidne.
I know I have already linked to Cracks In The Wall, Part I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality yesterday, but here it is again if you missed it, especially now that Cracks In The Wall, Part II: Listening to the Leavers is also up. Very worth reading.
pharyngula | August 13, 2006She's full of advice for terrrarists on how to circumvent our administration's restrictions on an entire state of matter. Now in addition to confiscating our toothpaste, the security people at the airport are going to make us pee into a chromatograph before they let us on the plane.
Let's just end the slow, lingering buildup and cut straight to the final requirement. Before we can fly, make us all strip naked, take a diuretic and laxative and purge ourselves, and then shackle us to our seats before takeoff.
jlynch | August 13, 2006Bruce Schneier writes:
None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 -- no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews -- had anything to do with last week's arrests. And they wouldn't have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn't have made a difference, either.
Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads,…
clock | August 12, 2006Sara Robinson on Orcinus: Cracks In The Wall, Part I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality
Amanda: Sometimes a cigar is just an arbitrary social custom and You might not be trailer trash if you think Jeff Foxworthy is funny
Lance Mannion: A joy forever
Publius: POLITICIZE TERRORISM
Mr. WD: Violence and Beauty
Tekanji on Alas, A Blog: Modesty and raunch culture: two sides of the same sex-negative coin and Ampersand on the same spot: Beyond Marriage
Berube: Leftover business V
Neil: You're Invited to Our Party! Bring Friends!
pharyngula | August 12, 2006Hold it. In the recent terrorist arrests, the British were able to do their job while supporting the rule of law, and the US pressured them to rush the arrests for political gain?
It's amazing how this administration is so good at turning even great successes into spotlights into their own incompetence and corruption. David Neiwert's new substitute teacher does a fine job of exploring the psyche of the Republican clown show—coasting by on dogma, authority, and a black & white view of the world seems to work well for getting elected, but man, it sucks as a way to run a country.
evolvingthoughts | August 12, 2006PZ Placeholder at Pharyngula is reporting that evangelical churches in Kenya want to shut down the rich human fossil exhibit at the Kenya national museum. He's concerned that a rich heritage of all humanity will be Talibanised (remember the Buddha statues in Afghanistan?). From what I know of African religion, churches there tend to be more conservative than western churches, but I doubt Kenya will accede to their requests. Despite Arap Moi's previous dictatorship there, it's now a democratic nation not based on religion.
More encouraging for me is that the current Australian federal science…
j7uy5 | August 11, 2006
In 1969, after yet another arrest, Flint native
href="http://www.umich.edu/%7Ebhl/bhl/refhome/jls/John.htm">John
Sinclair was sentenced to 9.5 yrs in prison. The
egregious disproportionality of the sentence led to rallying cries of
FREE JOHN SINCLAIR!
Last December, I went to a pub in Ypsilanti, to see the guy play his
music. Outside, there were these free-newsletter dispensers.
I saw the juxtaposition, felt moved by the irony, and snapped
a picture.
Seed
Magazine is cool. The most recent issue
(September 2006; not online yet) has a one-pager on a topic similar to
the FREE…