Politics
sa smith | September 12, 2011Dear Discovery Institute--
GO AWAY. NO ONE LIKES YOU.
Yours in Christ--
--ERV
UUUUUUUGH.
The DI is going to be in Oklahoma, AGAIN.
To show a stupid movie, AGAIN.
Gee, I wonder if the 'movie' is going to be a bunch of assholes herp-durping about something pretty with stupid (probably stolen) computer animations with a message of 'GORSH! AINT IT PURDY! Therefore the Universe was Created 6000 years ago by the Christian deity who went on to Specially Create humans via Adam and Eve and then Jesus Christ died on The Cross for your sins and was Resurrected three days later and unicorns got…
sa smith | September 12, 2011Dear Sally Kern--
GO AWAY. NO ONE LIKES YOU.
Yours in Christ--
--ERV
Good Ol Sally Kern is in the news again, repeating the same BS that a hateful piece of shit, Fred Pope, was saying that helped drive a gay boy to suicide this time last year.
Yaaaaay...
Actual quote:
You know if you just look at it in practical terms, which has destroyed and ended the life of more people? Terrorism attack here in America or HIV/AIDS? In the last twenty years, fifteen to twenty years, we've had maybe three terrorist attacks on our soil with a little over 5,000 people regrettably losing their lives. In the…
oracknows | September 11, 2011Once again we come to another September 11. It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since that horrible day. It's become my tradition over the last few years to post this video as a reminder of what happened that day.
This video was shot by Bob and Bri, who in 2001 lived in a high rise a mere 500 yards from the North Tower. On this tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I think it's important to post this again. It is the most prolonged and continuous video of the attack that I have seen, and, as such, It is difficult to watch.
That's why it's so important to watch.
Second,…
stoat | September 10, 2011 According to the Economist:
Barack Obama socked it to the left on September 2nd, by backtracking on a new rule to mitigate air pollution. As proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)--a hate object to many Republicans--the rule would have reduced ambient ozone, a toxic gas created by power-plant emissions and exhaust fumes, to less deadly levels than America currently permits. According to the EPA, this would by 2020 have saved up to 12,000 lives and 2.5m working days and school days lost to the toxic effect of ozone on American lungs each year. It would also have cost polluters…
catdynamics | September 9, 2011A House Divided Can Not Stand...
As the American Astronomical Society tries to rally support for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which was deleted from the budget, with extreme prejudice, by the House Appropriations Committee, other players chime in, and they are not quite as enthusiastic.
Spaceref published a copy of a letter from David Alexander of Rice University, Chair of the AAS Solar Physics Division.
"...However, the cost of the JWST threatens to swamp us all and the AAS should be careful, as a multi-disciplinary organization, to balance the various concerns of each of its…
esiegel | September 8, 2011"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else." -John Burroughs
The greatest tool for astronomers of the past 20 years has, without a doubt, been the Hubble Space Telescope.
Image credit: NASA; view from the Space Shuttle.
Since its launch in 1990, it's no stretch to say more scientific knowledge has come out of this telescope than out of any instrument in history. It's taught us what the expansion rate of the Universe is, that the expansion is accelerating, has helped us understand how stars are born, directly imaged the first planets outside of…
drorzel | September 2, 2011As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann's 1493 (see also this interview at Razib's place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically incompetent, managing to nearly starve to death several times, despite being in an absurdly fertile region, and nearly running out of money on multiple occasions before they stumbled on the idea of tobacco as a cash crop (at which point they nearly starved again because all agricultural activity shifted to tobacco, and they needed to force people…
pharyngula | August 31, 2011There's a reason I really despise Libertarianism…but still find them hilariously twisted. Here's a case of a columnist defending the science of Rick Perry. You know that evolution stuff? It's not that important. Creationism is a waste of time and it makes Perry look "unsophisticated"…but so what? There's a real problem here, and it is all those liberals who've fallen for the junk science of "global warming".
It is interesting watching the nation's defenders of reason, empirical evidence, and science fail to display a hint of skepticism over the transparently political "science" of global…
drorzel | August 31, 2011A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy-- that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the "tenured faculty are greedy and lazy" explanation you sometimes hear, I'm not sure it's any more valid. In part because proponents make it difficult to see if it's any more valid.
One of the major proponents of the administrative bloat idea is Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, who is…
stoat | August 31, 2011This is my site, and one of the facilities I provide is a signal to noise ratio. You want unmoderated discussion? Go and drown in usenet, which I abandoned years ago.
In other words, I reserve the right to trim or delete junk [*]. Naturally, since they are your words, you will not see them as junk and will instantly accuse me of censorship and membership of the Sekret Kabal (though you may misspell it). If you accusations are amusing, I'll keep them and reply with mockery. If they are boring, I may delete them [*]. Although usually I'll shuffle them off to the Burrow where they slumber…
jrosenhouse | August 30, 2011I will not be actively supporting Obama's reelection next year. I will not donate money to his campaign. I will not even put a sign on my lawn. In the end I will vote for him, but only because to do otherwise would be to reward the Republicans for their appalling and unpatriotic behavior over the last four years. And if Obama loses next year to some Republican lunatic, I won't be shedding any tears for him.
I am hardly the first liberal to notice that, after a few decent legislative accomplishments early in his term, it's been one betrayal after another from our supposedly progressive…
stoat | August 25, 2011
Time to be nice about something. I was quite cynical in February, but to my surprise we did do something useful, the rebels were brave enough to overcome their lack of organistaion, and after much chaos and death it has worked; the "rebels" are now the government, Gaddafi is a fugitive from justice. The fighting isn't over but the result of the fighting is not in doubt.
However, as we managed to conclusively demonstrate in Afghanistan and Iraq, winning the war is the easy bit. Likely, everyone has learnt lessons from that. And likely, Libya is in a better starting position that either. So,…
pharyngula | August 25, 2011I don't know how we can get any plainer than this: evolution really happened and is happening.
Evolution is a simple fact. We can choose to remain ignorant of it, we can stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to think about it, we can even rail against it and shout and scream that it is not allowed to be true. But facts are facts, and will not go away just because we don't like them. We don't get to vote for our preferred method of having come into existence as a species, any more than we can choose to have been delivered by stork rather than conceived and born in the usual way.
Candidates…
pharyngula | August 25, 2011Richard Dawkins hits this one out of the park: he slams the ignorance of Rick Perry specifically and the Republican party generally. There is no excuse for the foolishness we get from Perry, or Bachmann, or Huckabee, or Palin, or Robertson, or any of the candidates who have sought validation through the Republicans — it's as if they're selecting for stupidity.
There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today's Republican party (I disavow the…
sa smith | August 24, 2011Long-time readers of SciBlogs might remember the physicians and nurses working in Libya in the late 1990s, who were accused of purposefully infecting children with HIV-1, the "Tripoli 6".
Science established that they were innocent.
Basic logic established they were innocent (not only was there no motive for intentionally infecting children, or precedent with past behaviors, but unintentional infections due to improper sanitation in hospitals is a stock-standard thing we have to deal with in HIV World, even in a time as modern as the 1990s).
But the Libyan government did not want to own up…
drorzel | August 24, 2011The new school year is upon us, so there's been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I've been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of people have been referring to a "Student Loan Bubble," such as Dean Dad, who points to this graph from Daniel Indiviglio as an illustration:
That post is a week old, which is a hundred years in blog time, and I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because it's a terrible graph. Indiviglio says:
This chart looks like a mistake, but it…
esiegel | August 23, 2011"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering." -Ben Okri
Let me take you back 20 years, to the early 1990s. Back then, the world's most powerful particle accelerator was right here in the United States: Fermilab's Tevatron.
With energies of one Tera-electron-Volt (hence Tevatron) per beam, and a beam of protons colliding with anti-protons, it was the most powerful accelerator in the world by a large margin.
And even though plans for the Large Hadron Collider were in the works (with 7 TeV per…
stoat | August 23, 2011Note the double question mark. That is because I'm quoting Can we Grow the Economy Any More? I'll let you go off and read that post now, if you like.
Done so? Good. Now for my ignorant rant:
What strikes me particularly is point 6, or a variant thereof: effectively, that we're too fat, as a society. We're so rich that it is barely worth our time picking off the parasites. By parasites I don't mean the low skilled workers, or even the discontent rioter-types - because broadly speaking, those types stay in the background and are quietly bought off. I mean the H+S zealots, OFSTED (bit of a UK-…
jdupuis | August 22, 2011It's a very sad day today all across Canada as Jack Layton, leader of the Federal NDP and Leader of the Official Opposition, has died of cancer.
A widely respected career politician -- a rarity these days -- his passion for social justice and commitment to the people of Canada will be greatly missed.
His family released A letter to Canadians which, while very focused on Canada and Canadian politics, is also very relevant beyond our borders.
To young Canadians:...As my time in political life draws to a close I want to share with you my belief in your power to change this country and this world…