Politics
pharyngula | May 29, 2011I didn't get the right leg up on my financial situation from my mother. If she'd done her job right, I might be in Bristol Palin's situation. Bristol Palin, famous for being the daughter of a wackaloon politician and nothing else, was signed on to be the public spokesperson for a foundation advocating abstinence-only sex education (which is already ironic, given that the most attention Bristol otherwise got was for getting pregnant out of marriage). We now have the financial statements from that organization. We can lay out the big picture simply.
Bristol Palin's salary: $262,500
Advertising…
gregladen | May 29, 2011Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. "Richard Tokumei" is the pen name of a 'writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley" and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who hears of it in order to create needless sensation and thus, sell copies. Which, once people get their hands on, will make rather low quality toilet paper.
Monkeys On Our Backs: Why Conservatives and Liberals Are Both Wrong About Evolution includes an inexplicable mix of "correct"…
pharyngula | May 27, 2011It's amazing what religion can do. In this case, it motivated some dim old fart who ought to have been loafing about watching Glenn Beck and drowning his anger with a six-pack of Bud to go out and try to murder gynecologists. He didn't actually succeed, fortunately: he was playing with his gun in his cheap room at the Motel 6 when it went off and sent a bullet flying into the room next door…so bad-ass that he is, he called up the front desk to mention that he was worried he might have hit someone else.
Then the police came and found out what he was really up to. He didn't want to accidentally…
pharyngula | May 27, 2011I thought this was pretty funny.
But then I realized that this was the answer to the whole problem of the political assault on women by Republicans. If they don't give a damn about women's rights in the first place, we just have to reframe the whole question: Rick Perry and the whole lot of abortion-hatin', planned-parenthood-defundin', make-life-more-difficult-for-women patriarchal party-poopers are interfering with men's ability to get laid.
Put it in those terms, and I expect the party of plutocrats will turn right around. Nothing may be allowed to get in the way of a man and his sacred…
pharyngula | May 26, 2011As a young man, I often walked the streets of Seattle — it's a great city, and wonderful to explore. But then, I never walked the streets while brown. That experience would be completely different.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This country is well on the way to becoming a petty tyranny, run by small-minded bullies. There is a crime caught in that video, but the culprit isn't John T. Williams, native American woodcarver — it's the abuse of power by Officer Ian Birk.
pharyngula | May 25, 2011Kansas representative Pete DeGraaf is fighting for a bill that would exclude abortion coverage in cases of rape. He thinks the state should stay out of that problem, and it should just be something that women "plan ahead for":
Bollier asked him, "And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with pregnancy?"
DeGraaf drew groans of protest from some House members when he responded, "I have a spare tire on my car."
"I also have life insurance," he added. "I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for."
You heard the man, ladies. You should all just get organized…
pharyngula | May 24, 2011Rebecca Watson is stirring up trouble again. She points out the dire situation for women in this country.
In the first quarter of this year, 49 state legislatures introduced 916 bills that restricted reproductive rights. Here are a few that have passed, like in Texas, where women must have an invasive ultrasound that they either have to look at or have described to them in detail by a doctor before getting their abortion. Or South Dakota, where there’s now a 72-hour waiting period, and women must get counseling at an anti-choice pregnancy crisis center before obtaining an abortion. No centers…
gregladen | May 24, 2011It didn't really occur to me that anyone actually believed that the world was going to end the other day. Honestly. I had assumed that some crazy preacher made the claim, that it was being used to scam the gullible here and there, but that almost no one was really taking it seriously. But, in reading a few of the post-Rapture updates, this is clearly not the case. And, I'm sure that this is one of those things everybody else knew and that I was blissfully ignorant of.
Almost a hundred years ago, some guy named Miller came up with the idea that the world would end in 1843 or so. I…
pharyngula | May 24, 2011But only sometimes! Don't think I'm getting soft in my dotage! Anyway, for some reason, I found this mildly depressing, mildly optimistic analysis of of America's economic state by Brad DeLong surprisingly informative. Even though I'd still rather read some biology.
gregladen | May 24, 2011As documented by Dana Milbank, Tim Pawlenty has been telling us that he will be the one who "looks the American people in they eye and tells them the truth" and furthermore that Barak Obama can't do to that.
Over a period of several hours after announcing his candidacy for the office of President of the United States of America (which was reported in his local hometown newspaper, the Pioneer Press, in a small piece relegated to the Obituary section ... the only place that always tells the truth in every newspaper, I suppose) he used the word "truth" eleventy gazillion times in various…
oracknows | May 24, 2011A couple of weeks ago, the anti-vaccine movement took a swing for the fences and, as usual, made a mighty whiff that produced a breeze easily felt in the bleachers. In brief, a crew of anti-vaccine lawyers named headed by Mary Holland, co-author of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, published a highly touted (by Generation Rescue and other anti-vaccine groups, that is) "study" claiming to "prove" that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) had actually compensated children for autism.…
pharyngula | May 23, 2011I leave the state for a weekend, and what happens? The Rethuglican brats passed a vote to have a referendum to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage in Minnesota. We're about to go through a nasty long election cycle in which the sanctimonious assholes who want to dictate how you run your private life will be on the television every night, preaching at me. It is simply appalling that we're going to have to waste so much time struggling for what ought to be a basic civil right against hordes of whining, petty, hateful, smug suburbanites.
Here's the bill.
CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT…
jtoney | May 20, 2011
Online social media played a major role in the 2008 Presidential election and is already looming large in the early stages of the 2012 Presidential bid. Newt Gingrich made a dramatic statement recently about Paul Ryan's Medicare proposal:
"I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate," he said when asked about Ryan's proposal.
Such a provocative statement created a media firestorm, begging for a press release from Mr.…
catdynamics | May 19, 2011Official word on Arecibo:
So, NSF met with Arecibo people today, I am told, and the new management consortium will be putting out an official press release real soon, was waiting for the internal communication to be done.
I was asked to put up the following (lightly edited):
"Please allow me to clear up a potential point of confusion. There
should be no doubt in anyone's mind that Arecibo will continue to
be a premier facility for astronomy.
NSF will formally announce the result of the Arecibo management
recompetition on Monday. The proposal led by SRI was formulated
by a team that included…
stoat | May 19, 2011That is what The Grauniad said over the weekend.
Cabinet ministers have agreed a far-reaching, legally binding "green deal" that will commit the UK to two decades of drastic cuts in carbon emissions. The package will require sweeping changes to domestic life, transport and business and will place Britain at the forefront of the global battle against climate change.
We all know what happens to people in the forefront of battle: they get shot dead. My initial reaction is: this is a very bad idea. The cabinet apparently wills the ends, and realises it will have major consequences, but it doesn't…
drorzel | May 17, 2011As I noted the other day, we're entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being "back to school" time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college presidents about various topics related to higher education. The totally neutral post title is copied from their report.
So, what do they find about general public attitudes? The usual confused muddle:
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the…
sastyk | May 16, 2011There's a really good debate going on in the combox of my Khaki Markets Post on an issue that I've been meaning to write about for a while - to what extent is it possible for people who are seeking the same social ends to work together when they use different political means. In the comboxes the discussion is mostly over whether Progressives and Libertarians can work together on local food systems, but this strikes me as a larger - and deeply critical question.
It isn't just the libertarians and the progressives who have common ground on food systems, after all. The socialists and the…
drorzel | May 15, 2011College graduation season is upon us, at least for institutions running on a semester calendar (sadly, Union's trimester system means we have another month to go). This means the start of the annual surge of Very Serious op-eds about what education means, giving advice to graduates, etc. The New York Times gets things rolling with an op-ed from the people who brought us the Academically Adrift kerfuffle a few months back. As I wrote at the time, I am underwhelmed by their argument. In fact, I would let it go entirely, were it not for a new bit that kind of creeps me out. In this new op-ed,…
jtoney | May 15, 2011
Hilary Clinton famously said in 1992:
I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.
Ironically, daily domestic necessities such as baking and cooking have taken on a different twist in a recent partnership between Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Academy Award winning actor Julia Roberts.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves' mission, led by the United Nations Foundation, is:
...is a new public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods,…
pharyngula | May 14, 2011It's even spelled correctly. Amy Myers, high school student, has challenged Michele Bachmann "to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics".
There's no way Bachmann will take the challenge, unfortunately. There's no upside to being publicly shown to be less well informed than a high school sophomore.