Politics
sastyk | February 2, 2012Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news.
GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very…
jrosenhouse | February 1, 2012By now I'm sure we are all familiar with the Jessica Ahlquist case in Cranston, RI. The New York Times provides a helpful summary:
She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years.
A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer's presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding…
pharyngula | February 1, 2012It must be tough running a charity. You've got a cause you care deeply about, and you're constantly juggling the game of having to spend money (in administration, advertising, staff) to raise money (for the cause!), and worse, of sometimes having to compromise to achieve your goals — you sometimes have to work with your enemies to get where you're going. And if you're really, really good at it, and raise lots and lots of money, it becomes easy to lose sight of the cause while becoming corporate.
So it goes with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the $400 million/year giant pink gorilla of cancer…
oracknows | January 31, 2012Here's a rare bit of good news on the regulatory front. It turns out that Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) has finally decided to retire:
So Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) is finally retiring, after two decades in Congress. He's got a notable record of craziness, having doggedly pursued President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal while knowing full well he'd had an affair himself and even fathered a child out of wedlock. He famously claimed to have shot up a "head-like object" (likely a melon or a pumpkin) to try to re-create the alleged "murder" of former Clinton deputy White House…
sa smith | January 30, 2012Im glad none of you accused me of joking or exaggerating when I told this story:
A *very* common exchange I have with the general public regarding HIV-1:
Person-- Where did HIV-1 come from?
Me-- HIV-1 is related to a virus we can find in African primates, SIV. SIV crossed over from chimpanzees to the human population to make 'HIV' sometime in the late 1800s, early 1900s. This event happened at least three times, giving us the three groups of HIV-1, Groups M, N, and O, however it most likely has occurred numerous times over the course of human evolution, it just never lead to a pandemic…
jtoney | January 28, 2012Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com
I've been following use of social media in freedom of speech throughout the Arab Spring...but something is going on in Oakland, California that deserves some attention.
About the live feed:
Global Revolution brings you live stream video coverage from independent journalists on the ground at nonviolent protests around the world. The channel officially started on September 17, 2011 with occupation of Liberty Square in downtown Manhattan, NYC and was the first livestream channel to cover occupy wall street protests. Since then…
pharyngula | January 28, 2012The miseducation committee of the Indiana legislature recently approved a bill to allow the teaching of creationism in the schools, and now the Indianapolis newspaper approves, with the usual tepid and illegitimate arguments.
Much would depend on how teachers handle the origins of life in a biology or science class.
No, it doesn't. A bill that inserts garbage into the curriculum is a bill that inserts garbage; it doesn't matter if you think it could be used to make a lovely collage, or as an exercise in recycling, it's still garbage. And if you trust teachers to do their job, let them do it…
pharyngula | January 27, 2012Indiana is preparing to promote creationism in their science classrooms. A legislative committee has advanced a bill that endorses creationism and "alternative theories" to the vote of the full senate. So it's not a law yet, but it's advancing down the path.
Here's the horrifying part: it was approved 8:2 by the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee. This is a group that is supposed to be the gatekeeper for good educational practices; you'd think their job was to screen out the random wacky garbage that individual, ideologically motivated members of the senate might poop out. But…
jtoney | January 26, 2012
Photo AP.
The release of Gov. Mitt Romney's tax returns on Tuesday highlights the Presidential candidate's wealth and the low 14% tax rate that investors enjoy, far less than the 25-35% tax rate that the average American pays for wages.
Yes, Gov. Romney's annual earnings of about $20 million indicate that his dividends and interest received in one day are close to the average household annual income of about $57,000. This should surprise no one. Let's put some perspective on this, relative to individuals with his business expertise - by some accounts, he is underpaid.
Gov. Romney…
gregladen | January 25, 2012I liked Obama's State of the Union Address, and I liked the fact that a lot of other people seemed to like it. He made strong and positive statements about energy.
Imagine what we could accomplish ... A future where we're in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren't so tied to unstable parts of the world....
Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that's built to last - an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values....
... and his comments…
jdupuis | January 18, 2012The Stop Online Piracy Act is a piece of legislation in the US whose aims are:
The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill…
pharyngula | January 16, 2012Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act. This is a bill to, it says, "ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector", where the important phrase is "private sector" — it's purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information. Here are the restrictions it would impose:
No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage…
pharyngula | January 15, 2012First we had Steven Pinker writing about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, with the thesis that we're getting more peaceful over time.
Now John Horgan has declared the potential for The End of War — that we have the ability to stop fighting and cooperate.
Horgan makes the point that human nature requires us to fight, and that many people make this fatalistic assumption that it cannot end. It's a reflection of the usual argument for futility that claims the status quo is thus because it must be so.
It's also the argument that is made to defend the inevitability of…
denialism | January 13, 2012At It's not junk Michael Eisen continues to expose the shameless actions of Carolyn Maloney to sell out science for the sake of publishers like Elsevier. As we remarked last week, it seems that very little money is required to buy a representatives favor towards your industry, even if that means acting against the public interest. Now, in her defense of the Research Works Act, which undoes the public distribution of research findings paid for by the public, her response appears to have been written by Elsevier itself.
Eisen busts her in the act.
From Maloney's letter:
First, I…
jtoney | January 13, 2012
Photo source.
Gender gaps are a persistent challenge in cultures across the globe, whether it is a gap of income or educational achievement. Is it a dream that the gap can be erased?
Researchers at Harvard, MIT and Northwestern University have just published an extraordinary study in Science reporting that this is achievable, using a case study in India.
How did they do they study?
From June 2006 to November 2007 we surveyed a random sample of 495 villages throughout the 165 village councils in Birbhum district in West Bengal as part of a large-scale study of the effects of political…
drorzel | January 9, 2012In comments to Friday's snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but I sprained my ankle playing basketball at lunch, which kind of blew a hole in my afternoon...
Looking at her posts, though, it's hard to really engage with her critique, because there's next to nothing there to engage with. In the most recent post, the closest thing to a…
denialism | January 7, 2012I'm never shocked by what Issa can do in a never-ending downward spiral of serving business interests, but it's sad that NY rep Carolyn Maloney has joined him backing a bill to sell out science. Once again the publishers are trying to destroy public access, and make everyone pay to read science you've already paid for with your taxes.
The Research Works Act reads:
No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research…
jtoney | January 6, 2012
Photo source. By Tom Briglia. Dr. Eric Brown from IBM Research preps four members of congress - Jared Polis (D-Colo.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Rush Holt (D-N.J.) - for an exhibition game against IBM's Watson on Monday.
If you had a chance to sit down with Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), referred to as the "rocket scientist Congressman," what would you ask?
I will be doing exactly that in a few weeks and am looking forward to my discussion with him on a range of topics, including science education.
Rep. Holt is not a typical Congressman. He earned academic degrees in Physics,…
drorzel | January 6, 2012On last month's post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes:
In fact, there were a lot of readers who responded to the posts saying exactly what Roach suggested: He's been out of school too long. Others questioned why a successful businessman couldn't pass 10th-grade math. (I looked at FCAT 10th-grade questions and couldn't do them myself, but math has always…
jtoney | January 3, 2012
Photo source.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), according to the latest news, may earn the top pick, or second, in the Iowa caucus today for the Republican nomination for President. His numerous public speeches are well covered, but I was curious about his academic work - after all, Rep. Paul holds a B.S. in Biology and an M.D.
I came across an article he published in 2003 in the highly respected Project Muse from the Johns Hopkins University Press, titled "Trading Freedom for Security: Drifting toward a Police State." Rep. Paul devotes fully twenty pages to explain how America is rapidly approaching…