Politics
jrosenhouse | March 18, 2012Apparently there's a rally coming up in Washington DC:
The Reason Rally is an event sponsored by many of the country's largest and most influential secular organizations. It will be free to attend and will take place in Washington, D.C. on March 24th, 2012 from 10:00AM - 6:00PM at the National Mall. There will be music, comedy, speakers, and so much more. We hope you can join us!
I'm so there!
But it gets even better. You see, the following day the American Atheists will be holding their annual convention:
The Annual Convention of American Atheists will be held March 25th and 26th, 2012 (…
jrosenhouse | March 15, 2012This article is so powerful that it pretty much defies comment. It is a first-person account of a pregnant woman in Texas who learned that her son would be born with horrible, painful birth defects, if he survived long enough to be born at all. Thanks to the vile misogynists who run the state, she was made to suffer several further rounds of emotional torture before she could avail herself of the only viable option, an abortion. All I can say is that the Republicans who support these laws are monsters. If you vote for them, then you're a monster too.
Here's the opening, but no excerpt can…
drorzel | March 13, 2012The thoroughly loathesome Rush Limbaugh is reaping the whirlwind from his latest gaffe (defined, of course, as any instance where a political figure shares his actual opinion with the public), with advertisers fleeing in droves. This has led to a good deal of chortling among the liberal types in my social media universe, but Kevin Drum finds a cloud to go with that silver lining:
And yet....there's an obvious slippery slope here. Lots of advertisers already shy away from political shows of every stripe, and this episode could begin to drive them all away. Why take the chance, even on a host…
denialism | March 13, 2012In a debate on the floor of the Georgia State house over a bill to force women to bring all pregnancies after 20 weeks to term, even in cases of dead or non-viable fetus, this Georgia representative reaches a new low. State Rep Terry England seems to be suggesting pigs and cows do it, why can't humans?
Rep. Terry England compares women to cows, pigs and chickens. from Bryan Long on Vimeo.
Aside from this genius on-the-farm reasoning of Mr England, the failures of reasoning and misrepresentations of scientific knowledge engaged in to pursue this legislation are many.
The legislation is…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2012As I write this, the lead headline over at HuffPo is, “Shock Poll: 52% of Mississippi GOP Voters Say Obama is a Muslim,” leading to this story. The shock, I would think, is that the number is so low.
oracknows | March 12, 2012I don't know what it is about the beginning of a year. I don't know if it's confirmation bias or real, but it sure seems that something big happens early every year in the antivaccine world. Consider. As I pointed out back in February 2009, in rapid succession Brian Deer reported that Andrew Wakefield had not only had undisclosed conflicts of interest regarding the research that he did for his now infamous 1998 Lancet paper but that he had falsified data. Of course, in response Keith Olbermann was totally played by the antivaccine movement, resulting in some truly mind-numbingly dumb…
jrosenhouse | March 10, 2012I watched HBO's film Game Change tonight, about the rise and fall of Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential race. It was pretty good! Which is to say that it makes Palin look pretty bad.
As presented in the film, Palin is not merely uninterested in filling the gaps in her understanding of domestic and foreign policy, but is actually incapable of learning anything even when she tries. Her decent performance in the debate with Joe Biden is presented, quite correctly, as the result of pure cynicism. When her prep team realizes that it is simply impossible to bring her up to speed on the…
jtoney | March 10, 2012"I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."
--Thomas Jefferson, 1819
Thomas Jefferson's audacious act of cutting and pasting passages from various translations of the New Testament has always fascinated me. Why did he do it?
From The Smithsonian Museum of American History: {with my emphasis}
At seventy-seven years of age, Thomas Jefferson constructed his book by cutting excerpts from six printed volumes published in English, French, Latin, and Greek of the Gospels of the New Testament. He arranged them to tell a chronological and edited story of Jesus's life, parables, and moral…
jrosenhouse | March 9, 2012Continuing with the process of getting caught up on things I should have blogged about a while ago, let's take a look at this bizarre article from Bryan Appleyard, published in The Guardian. It is a contribution to a familiar genre, in which the New Atheists are criticized for being so mean and nasty:
Two atheists - John Gray and Alain de Botton - and two agnostics - Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I - meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered…
jtoney | March 7, 2012
Here is a fascinating insight into President Obama as a young law student at Harvard, in 1991.
Barack Obama in a 1990 video at Harvard protests in favor of the cause of Professor Derek Bell and the hiring of more minority faculty members.
denialism | March 4, 2012We've discussed it before, why are costs so much higher in US healthcare compared to other countries? The Washington Post has a pointless article which seems to answer with the tautology costs are high because healthcare in America costs more. How much more? Well, we spend nearly twice as much per capita as the next nearest country while failing to provide universal coverage:
In the WaPo article they make a big deal of the costs of individual procedures like MRI being over a thousand in the US compared to $280 in France, but this is a simplistic analysis, and I think it misses the point…
oracknows | March 1, 2012I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don't believe in it because, apparently, Jesus told them not to. Anthropogenic global warming? they don't buy that, either, because to admit that human activity is resulting in significant climate change would be to be forced to concede that industry isn't an…
denialism | February 29, 2012Turns out I gave Virginia governor McDonnell too much credit after he rejected the VA ultrasound bill on the grounds the state should insert itself into medical decisions. He's gone and flip-flopped as a slightly revised version of the bill passes through the VA Senate:
The 21 to 19 vote, mostly along party lines, came a week after Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) asked legislators to revise the bill following protests on Capitol Square and repeated mocking on national television. Lawmakers amended the original bill, which mandated that women undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, a procedure that…
denialism | February 27, 2012There is a joke expression about surgeons, "sometimes wrong, never in doubt." Depending on how you feel about surgeons I've heard it begin "sometimes right" and "even when wrong." Applied to Rick Santorum, I think it has to be "usually wrong" if not "always wrong" given the serious of ridiculous distortions, lies, and made up statistics in the last week.
Starting with his claim that 62% of people that go to college religious graduate without their faith. It seems plausible. College expands peoples experiences and exposes them to new ideas, and such experiences are not going to always mesh…
jtoney | February 26, 2012
Is that Jesus looking into a mirror? A recent study shows that Christian conservatives and liberals reflect themselves upon the image of Jesus, and it's not an ordinary mirror.
Below is an excerpt from their Abstract:
The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant…
sa smith | February 24, 2012Posted without comment:
Anti-abortion "personhood" bill clears Oklahoma senate
The bill offers no exceptions in the case of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest and could mean some forms of contraception such as the "morning after pill" would be unavailable, she said.
-----
Oklahoma State Representative Gus Blackwell, whos educational and employment qualifications appear to be composed entirely of "JESUS! YAAAY! I CAN MANAGE NOT TO CONTRIBUTE ANYTHING USEFUL TO SOCIETY FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE JUST BY SCREAMING JESUS ALL DAY!!! YAAAAAAY!" just reintroduced our Blog Buddy Sally Kerns anti-…
denialism | February 23, 2012And good riddance. It sounds like the Governor saw this bill would be more trouble than it's worth.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) revoked his support for the original bill just minutes before the House began debate on it, saying that the government did not have the power to require the transvaginal procedure.
"Mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state," McDonnell said in a statement. "No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure…
jdupuis | February 21, 2012A little while back the Cost of Knowledge site started up a boycott pledge list in response to mathematician Timothy Gowers' pledge to stop contributing to Elsevier's operations by ceasing writing, reviewing and editing for them.
Here is the call to action:
Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. These are some of their objections:
They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large "bundles", which will…
drorzel | February 20, 2012This was the title of the group discussion I led at Boskone on Saturday, and since it's probably relevant to the interests of people reading this blog, I figure it's worth posting a quick recap. Of course, between the unfamiliar format and Friday's travel with the Incredible Screaming Pip, I didn't actually make any notes for this, so what follows is my sketchy recollection of what I said; omissions and misstatements are a reflection of my dodgy memory, not an attempt to distort anything.
The title is obviously a little tongue-in-cheek, because the goal is really to not wreck your career with…
jtoney | February 20, 2012Why has our life expectancy increased so much since the American Revolution?
According to Presidential candidate Rick Santorum: "Because God says they have rights."
What about the role of sanitation, nutrition, education, medicine?
This is an example of religious faith clashing with reason, with all due respect to those with faith.
From "Human Longevity: The Major Determining Factors" by Joseph A. Knight, M.D.:
Wealth, and an affluent environment, significantly correlate with life expectancy as shown by a marked increase in life expectancy over the past century due to the marked…