Politics
stcynic | June 5, 2006Crooked Timber has an astonishing chart comparing the incarceration rate per capita in the US to that of other nations in the world. The US rate is 738 per 100,000. No other nation in the world is above 540 and the vast majority of nations, even ones with terrible human rights records, are far less than half our rate. We beat, by a longshot, nations like Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Iran. And despite that fact, we have higher rates of violent crime by a sizable margin than virtually any nation in the civilized world.
drorzel | June 5, 2006Via bookslut, an interview at AlterNet with Tamara Draut, author of Strapped, a book about how hard young people have it today. The basic thesis of the book and the interview is that twenty- and thirty-somethings these days are in a uniquely bad position, because of the rising cost of college and relatively stagnant wages.
My reaction to this is sort of equal parts "There but for the grace of God go I" and "You people are doing it all wrong." The picture Draut paints does, indeed, sound pretty bleak, but it doesn't really fit my experience very well. This is really a fundamental problem with…
jlynch | June 5, 2006Here in Arizoma there's a bill running through the senate (HB 2583) to make it mandatory for all classrooms (including tertiary level) to display a 2 ft by 3 ft Stars and Stripes - I guess we've solved all the other important problems. You can read about it here. While I have no real problem with this (as long as the universities don't have to pay for this - a fear shared by ASU's student government - and we're not forced to start every class with some sort of ritual), I do see the reasoning behind this as being, frankly, idiotic. Witness:
"The flag represents everything that is good about…
pharyngula | June 5, 2006Isn't this so symptomatic of Republican stupidity?
…the FDA released an internal memo showing that one high-ranking FDA official was sincerely worried about adolescents forming "sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B." Seriously.
The evidence, which may not be relevant to the Bush administration, shows no link between access to Plan B and risky sexual behavior, worse yet "sex-based cults." How Bush-appointed "scientists" come up with such nonsense is a mystery.
If the administration said, "We're morally opposed to emergency contraception," we could at least have a reasonable debate…
tsmith | June 4, 2006Janet has already mentioned this, but I know I have a number of artistic readers here, so take note:
Teaming up with leading editorial and strip cartoonists, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) today announced an editorial cartoon contest to draw attention to political interference in science. Science Idol: the Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest will bring together aspiring cartoonists to compete to win a number of prizes, including an all-expenses paid trip to meet the celebrity judge of their choice. A second contest for professional cartoonists will run concurrently with…
pharyngula | June 4, 2006Barbara O'Brien is doing a guest post for Glenn Greenwald, and she's chosen to talk about religion—you can guess what her position is from the opening paragraph.
…sometimes I find myself defending Christians from the religion haters among us lefties.
I confess. That's me, religion hater. Go ahead and read the whole thing. It's interesting. It argues that we should tolerate Christians (I'm all for that), and that some Christians have very sensible secular views, and that some American Christians have been responsible for social progress. Sure thing! No argument!
However, nowhere in the…
oracknows | June 2, 2006Back in October, Jamie McCarthy and I castigated Bill O'Reilly for implying that at Malmedy in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge U.S. Airborne troops had massacred Nazis soldiers who had surrendered when in fact the Malmedy massacre was perpetrated by SS troops to whom U.S. soldiers had surrendered. Naturally, after ragging on him a bit, we wrote it off as yet another example of Bill O'Reilly's self-confident ignorance. I figured O'Reilly had simply mixed up historical facts in his eagerness to defend the abuses at Abu Ghraib by pointing to supposed atrocities committed by U.S.…
razib | June 2, 2006It is no secret that John Derbyshire is a friend of mine. I am sure most SB readers would find such a connection abhorrent, nevertheless, any man who picks up Mark Ridley's Evolution at my recommendation is a friend :) The goddess of evolution should not just be admired and given due respect, one should strive to understand her. In any case, it is easy to stand by Darwin's legacy amongst fellow travellers, but over the past year Derb has been defending the scientific consensus over at NRO in the face of a wall of reader hostility and relative neutrality from his colleagues.
With this, I…
tsmith | June 2, 2006Color me shocked: Teens who promise to wait for marriage more likely to deny sexual history
Teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active. Conversely, those who were sexual active before taking the pledge frequency deny their sexual history, according to new study findings.
(Continued below)
The research paper is published in this month's American Journal of Public Health (which is a special issue devoted to HIV/AIDS); the article is here. The meat from the abstract:
Among wave 1 virginity pledgers…
drorzel | June 2, 2006Scalzi has the proper response to the Bush Administration's latest insult to the collective intelligence.
New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent--from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.
But it's the Democrats who aren't serious about national security.
Honestly, every time I think these people have hit rock bottom, they find a way to tunnel a little deeper.
drorzel | June 2, 2006Matt Welch has a nice post-mortem for the 2001 blogging boom, in which he recalls the days when the whole post-September-11th-attacks thing seemed like it would really shake up American politics, and that weblogs were at the forefront of a grand realignment. That failed pretty spectacularly, didn't it?
It's a good piece, both recalling what things were like then (I didn't have a general-purpose blog yet, but I was booklogging, and regularly reading most of the top blogs of the day), and lamenting how far we've fallen. Sadly, I discovered this via Ted Barlow's farewell post. Another one, as…
pharyngula | June 1, 2006Do I believe that George W. Bush stole the last election and that the Republican party is run by criminals and traitors? You betcha. With his record of sloppy analysis, though, I just wish someone more trustworthy than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had authored that report.
I also don't see much in the way of productive suggestions about what to do to prevent it from happening again. If Republican operatives are in a position to commit such sweeping acts of anti-Democratic corruption, what's to prevent it from happening again this fall? What are we going to do if it does happen again?
drorzel | June 1, 2006Via sennoma (I'm not sure that link will work, as the server appeared to be down this morning), Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon:
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
You know, in…
pharyngula | May 31, 2006Yesterday was a long, busy day of driving, ferrying offspring about, and I listened to a lot of NPR. All I heard, over and over again, was talk about Henry Paulson and his new position as Treasury Secretary. Not a contrary word was spoken: I heard all about his pro-environmental stance (good, but I don't see how the Treasury Secretary's opinion on a subject outside his responsibility was going to help), and there was much vague handwaving about how he was a feather in the Bush administration's cap. There was nothing about what his position on economic issues was, which was a little weird.
My…
tsmith | May 31, 2006I'm dealing with my own little epidemic (daughter managed to catch the stomach bug that's been going around her school, meaning she has to miss her last day as a kindergartener, poor thing). I found one post in the queue that I forgot to publish earlier in the month, so today won't be completely dead. In the meantime, allow me to point you to some excellent flu posts by DemFromCT at the Daily Kos:
Flu Basics: Science And Threats (a nice introductory primer).
Flu Basics II: Politics and Players.
H5N1: A Teachable Moment, And An Open Letter. This is a very good post overall, but the most…
drorzel | May 31, 2006We had an interesting colloquium yesterday from Mark Walker, a colleague in the History department, on the subject of Peter Debye, a Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate. It seems that a book published last year on Einstein in the Netherlands included some material accusing Debye of being a Nazi collaborator, which touched off a major controversy. The University of Utrecht renamed their Debye Institute, and Maastrichty University removed Debye's name from a scientific research prize.
The main point of the talk is pretty well summarized in the piece Mark co-wrote for the German Physical Society (…
stcynic | May 31, 2006As many around the blogosphere have noted, yesterday was the one year anniversary of Dick Cheney's appearance on Larry King Live when he declared of the insurgency in Iraq:
"The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
Oops. Of course, this is the same administration that more than 2 years earlier declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. And the same administration that 3 1/2 years earlier declared that Gen. Shinseki's estimates of 250,000 troops and a hundred billion…
jlynch | May 30, 2006Don't really know what to make of this. National Review Online has unleashed its "top 50 conservative rock songs of all time" featuring such noted conservative thinkers as The Who, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, and Blink 182. By the time I read “Rock the Casbah” by The Clash (#20), the sound of Joe Strummer rotating in a grave was clear; when I read “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Iron Maiden (#29), I couldn't get my jaw to remain closed. Taking "proof texting" and quote mining to a whole new level, this is a freekin hilarious list of songs that "really are conservative". Check it out.
jlynch | May 28, 2006Apparently Bill Frist has decided that constitutional ammendments against flag-burning and gay marriage are vital to national well-being. Speaking on Faux News, Frist was asked:
HOST: Are gay marriage and flag burning the most important issues the Senate can be addressing in June of 2006?
Below the fold, I give Frist's reply and some comments.
Frist replied:
FRIST: Let me tell you what the agenda is real quick. Secure America's safety here at home. I mentioned supporting our troops overseas, making sure we pass that supplemental bill, making sure we tighten down our borders. securing America…
pharyngula | May 28, 2006Confirming my obvious un-Americanism, let me praise two things: Godlessness and Socialism. And here, watch a video that ties the two together.
(Actually, I'm not against America. I'm just for a godless America that cares about the welfare of its citizens.)