Politics
jtoney | August 2, 2011This piece was co-authored with Sir Harold Kroto.
New legislation suggests a more appropriate name for the U.S.A.: The Unenlightened States of America.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced the "Defending Childhood" campaign, focused on violence prevention, offering an opportunity for us to reflect upon sectarian violence, religious indoctrination and ethics and education. In the 40 years since the April 20, 1971 Supreme Court decision of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the landscape of American education has changed beyond its original goal of racial…
pharyngula | August 2, 2011A member of the Australian parliament, Fred Nile, has been pushing an interesting cost-saving measure. You know how Australian schools are saddled with chaplains and religious instruction? Well, he wants to keep that nonsense and kill the ethics classes that students can take as a secular alternative.Seems backwards to me, but then he is presumably a Christian, and so is perverse and backward by nature.
So Charlie Fine wrote an op-ed defending the ethics courses. Fine is 11 years old, and smarter than a member of parliament.
The facts show that only 33 per cent of the world is Christian, and…
pharyngula | August 1, 2011Newt Gingrich has 1,325,842 followers on twitter.
Who cares, you might be asking. The criteria for being popular on twitter are rather different than the criteria for being a competent statesman; if twitter mattered in that way, Ashton Kucher would be president. It's irrelevant. But Gingrich is unhappy because his vast appeal is unappreciated by the media: "I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn't count because if it counted I'd still be a candidate; since I can't be a candidate that can't count."
Wow. Gingrich believes having lots of…
jtoney | July 31, 2011
The interactive Google map tells a tale of horror:
The Syrian army began an assault on Hama in the early morning. This video shows heavy fire. At least 116 people have been killed and dozens more injured. There are reports of some soldiers defecting.
Will more lives be lost as this unfolds?
The Google map is updated regularly and is important for the world to see, and someday to understand.
Note from Twitter from a BBC State department correspondent:
@breadesign breadesign
@BBCKimGhattas there is a #RamadanMassacre hashtag which is getting pictures out
Syria - Sunday 31/07/2011
Videos and…
jtoney | July 30, 2011
Why is a local employee at Doctors Without Borders in Bahrain being targeted?
Doctors without Borders is highly respected as an organization that protects human rights throughout the world. I learned of this incident from the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights:
I am not familiar with this case but am concerned about due process and the presumption of innocence.
The Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights (BYSHR) expresses its concern regarding the targeting of a local employee and the office of Doctors Without Borders' " Médecins Sans Frontières"
On the 27th of July 2011,Mr.Hassan…
pharyngula | July 29, 2011Hedges has been totally nuts for the last few years: he's got this crazy irrational hysteria about atheists that makes him utterly unhinged whenever he writes about us. His latest is of a piece with his mania:
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as…
pharyngula | July 28, 2011Jon Stewart of the Daily Show did a marvelous job of showing how right-wingers were desperately straining to get out from under the taint of Breivik's clearly extremist nationalist/rightist/Christian/anti-Muslim ideology. They're clearly in denial.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
In the Name of the Fodder
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor & Satire Blog
The Daily Show on Facebook
But here's another case. The Discovery Institute, under the name of that wretched 'scholar' John West, has gone through Breivik's manifesto…
pharyngula | July 28, 2011It takes real effort to purge yourself of parasites, and Australia's got 'em: rabbits, cane toads, and now…chaplains. In a nation that prides itself on its secular government, Australia has this bizarre and inappropriate relic, the National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP), which somehow manages to suck large sums of money out of the government to pay to infest the schools with useless little leeches whose sole purpose seems to be the indoctrination of nonsense into the brains of children.
Being subject to individual State and Territory education policies, since its introduction, the NSCP…
jtoney | July 27, 2011
The three bands I will never take off.
"Input band" to Utøya, the joy I had when I got this Thread
WWAUFD - What Would AUF do, a band we had at the National Convention. A proverb I think about all the time
Hospitals band - j I studied the tape yesterday, and noticed that I have the number 3 on the tape. As I now associate with, we had three who swam together and were picked up by boat, me-girl and boy.

How is Emma doing?
On Monday, I shared a compelling personal account of the tragedy at Utøya, from an 18 year old Emma Martinovic, county leader of the AUF in Western College, the…
drorzel | July 27, 2011Kevin Drum is puzzled by default panic:
If we run out of money, the federal government will stop paying some of its bills. That's bad, and it will quite likely have a negative effect on the economy. Corporations are right to be apprehensive about this.
But that's all that will happen. Treasury bonds will continue to roll over and interest payments will continue to be made. That means there's no reason to sell Treasurys; no reason they can't continue to be used as collateral; no reason that access to capital should dry up; and no reason that companies will need more cash.
At least, that's how…
pharyngula | July 27, 2011Excellent news: the tide is rising against the Vatican in Ireland. More people are speaking out, the newspapers are publishing pictures of the pope labeled "persona non grata", there's a simmering resentment everywhere. It's leading to comments like this one, which sees a secular Ireland coexisting with religious sentiment, but no longer with the long arm of the Vatican meddling with the state.
Such sweeping changes could occur in what was once Catholic Ireland: the state could become as secularist as France, with all allusion to the Almighty officially excised. Yet even in France, the holy…
jtoney | July 26, 2011
In the United States, if you have been convicted of a crime and are later exonerated, you may be faced with fewer benefits than those guilty of a crime after serving a full prison sentence. According to the Innocence Project:
...the exoneree may lack a source of income, a means of transportation, health coverage and a stable home.
HOWEVER:
If Anders Behring Breivik is convicted of the crimes from the massacre at Oslo - the murder of at least 68 innocent lives - he may face a very different fate. By some standards, he may be rewarded with the following conditions:
Given the numerous…
pharyngula | July 26, 2011It's sad. The terrorism in Norway was by a right wing nationalist extremist of the pale-skinned, Christian variety, and it's like we broke our home-grown right-wingers' small, feeble, crumbly hearts with that news. But have no fear! They are dogged and single-minded, and they will find a way to blame the desired targets of retribution one way or another! Latest case: Pat Buchanan. He regrets that the terrorist was a cowardly, murdering punk, but we are supposed to recognize that Breivik may be right.
But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat…
catdynamics | July 26, 2011Sometimes correlation is causation:
"Laurie Leshin, deputy associate administrator of exploration systems for NASA, will join Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as dean of the School of Science. " (RPI news)
Coincidentally:
"...Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division and Laurie's husband, also will be leaving government to join RPI as the associate vice president for research." (spacref.com)
That leaves Astrophysics without a director, as the 2012 appropriations are coming up.
This would not be a fun time to step into the position, with the threat of…
sastyk | July 26, 2011On Friday, in a move that shocked, truly shocked America, President Obama said that food stamps were more important than Defense. Since this sort of prioritization is one of the fundamental differences between the US extreme right (aka Republicans) and the US center-right (also known as the Democrats), the fact that this caused an uproar among Republicans should also stun you. Republicans warn us that slashing America's defense budget until it is only double the next largest nations will cripple us, Democrats call the Republicans meanies, and everyone ignores the point.
The point is that…
stoat | July 26, 2011Misc stuff. I think I'll press "publish" now to distract you. Oh look, there's a badger...
Early Warning with some interesting speculation and pointers re the possible US default. The "only someone batshit crazy would do that; oh f*ck, these teabaggers *are* batshit crazy" is fun. But I like the idea that even a brief default - assuming they came to their senses and caved afterwards - would add some tiny amount to US interest rates forever after. Are they really that crazy? Or will the big money have a quiet word in the right ears?
Timmy again, this time pointing out (well, it was the point…
pharyngula | July 26, 2011Lawrence Krauss has written an excellent defense of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble which is currently under threat of cancellation. I was really down on the space shuttle the other day, but that's because I think it was a failure at doing its job of enabling exploration and discovery — the Space Telescope is a fabulous tool that works, and I want NASA to focus more on cost-effective, powerful methods of exploring the universe.
Lawrence Krauss also criticized the space shuttle, and urges us to send more robots into space. Uh-oh. Cue ominous music as Neil deGrasse…
jtoney | July 26, 2011
Smiley 16-year-old Marianne Sandvik is still missing on the island. Source.
As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.
Patrick Buchanan
The emerging faces and the stories of the victims from the massacre at Oslo highlight how this tragedy has robbed Norway, and the world, a part of its future. Blame is being assigned broadly and, sadly, is being used for political posturing.
When I read Pat Buchanan's essay "A fire bell…
stoat | July 25, 2011My morning blog-reading threw up Well, no Mr. Chakrabortty, no wherein Timmy is characteristically blunt about the failings of politicians. You don't have to agree, this is only the lead-in to my own view. The problem with Timmy's analysis is that no, most politicians aren't idiots, they are quite clever. Or at least some of them. But they do stuff up a lot of things very badly.
So I'll put up my own view, which is more Darwinistic: you should do what you're good at, and free competition will select those who get it right. In an idealised free market this happens for businesses: those that…
jtoney | July 25, 2011
SAVED LIFE: Emma Martinovic swam for their lives from the killer's bullets. Foto: Marius Arnesen / Scanpix / Ap / TV 2-montasje Behind her she saw friends get slaughtered. Photo: Marius Arnesen / Scanpix / AP / TV 2-mounting
I wanted to share a compelling personal account of the tragedy at Utøya, from 18 year old Emma Martinovic, county leader of the AUF in Western College, the Labour Party's youth organization.
This is not for the faint of heart - it is provided word for word after editing out the Norwegian text. {Note that Google Translator misses a couple words .}
Have decided to…