Politics
drorzel | April 22, 2011I intended to do a big book-sales post today, but our DSL modem may be dead, so there was no Internet in Chateau Steelypips this morning, and I forgot to copy the relevant files onto a thumb drive, so it will have to wait. Maybe this afternoon.
In lieu of that, here's some other stuff on shale gas drilling in the Northeast, following on Tuesday's post:
-- It's always nice to have my half-assed writing about economic issues supported, even indirectly, by people who know something about the subject writing similar things. Thus, Felix Salmon on cost-benefit analyses of oil drilling:
Under…
pharyngula | April 21, 2011We have a weekend of reason and lunacy coming up. On the reason side, atheists will be gathering in Iowa to discuss science and a sensible interpretation of the universe, taking advantage of a holiday none of us find particularly interesting. On the other side, that holiday celebrating the magical 'death' and imaginary resurrection of a weird Jewish mystic is regarded as also a good time to come out and oppress people. As is traditional, mobs of fanatics will turn out on Good Friday to surround local women's clinics and harass and threaten the patients. Good Friday is not a good day to get a…
drorzel | April 19, 2011The New York Times had another article on the environmental impacts of shale gas drilling, which reminded me that I had intended to write something else on the subject after February's post on the fracking panel at AAAS, but never got around to it. The hook for the article is yet another study showing that the environmental questions are more complicated than just the question of how much CO2 is released in burning gas vs oil or coal, with loss and leakage during the drilling process potentially producing a lot of greenhouse gases.
This is, of course, a single study, and includes the…
oracknows | April 19, 2011I'd like to thank Buckeye Surgeon for reminding me of something I had seen and wanted to blog about but totally forgot about. Maybe it was so forgettable that I should just skip it, but as a surgeon I actually don't think so. Basically, it's a story of a surgeon making a fool of himself. I know, I know, that's such an impossibility that it's well nigh inconceivable, but it actually did happen. Perhaps what brought my attention to this sordid tale is that there is a connection to the University of Michigan, where I went to both undergraduate and medical school.
The surgeon in question is Dr.…
illconsidered | April 18, 2011How much wrongness can you pack into one short paragraph? This is from Rep. SHEILA BUTT (R-Columbia) in Tennessee, spoken in favor of a bill to "teach the controversy" in science class:
At the risk of drawing this out, which I hate to do, but I do know, as Rep. Dunn has mentioned, that I was taught things in science class in high school which have turned out not to be true. I remember so many of us when we were seniors in high school, we gave up AquaNet hairspray. You remember why we did that? Because it was causing global warming! That aerosol in those cans was causing global warming. Since…
catdynamics | April 18, 2011Dear Medical Doctors of America: the 1% does not include you.
You are the second percent and the top percent is about to dump you overboard.
Just be clear on that.
jtoney | April 16, 2011
To mark "Tax Day," April 18:
The White House website has just launched a "Federal Taxpayer Receipt" calculator that shows you where those federal tax dollars go.
As an example, I used amounts from the 2009 tax return submitted by President Obama that reported payment of $1,792,414 in federal taxes from a gross income of $5,505,409.
{Give it a try, entering the amounts from your 2010 return!}
The results:
As you see, more than 50% of these dollars are allocated to national defense and health care. Will this ever change?
stoat | April 15, 2011An unusually forthright statement by our Glorious Leaders:
it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gaddafi in power. The International Criminal Court is rightly investigating the crimes committed against civilians and the grievous violations of international law. It is unthinkable that someone who has tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government. The brave citizens of those towns that have held out against forces that have been mercilessly targeting them would face a fearful vengeance if the world accepted such an arrangement. It would be an…
pharyngula | April 12, 2011The apocalypse is near. Americans must gird their loins and prepare to defend themselves against a terrible evil. Rick Santorum has a warning for us.
"Think about how they view you," he told the crowd of Republicans. "They view you no different than the drug dealer views the little kid in the school yard. They want to get you hooked, they want to get you dependent. They want to get you relying upon them for your wellbeing. And once they've satisfied you, giving them that drug, that narcotic, then you'll be reliant on them and, by the way, you'll also be less than what God created you to be…
pharyngula | April 12, 2011The NCSE has a list of recent creationist legislation, and you've all been up to no good. I hope you are all chastened now and will strive to throw the inane rascals out of your legislatures at the earliest possible opportunity.
pharyngula | April 12, 2011Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he's not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he's a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn't have two heads, he didn't tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual…
tsmith | April 10, 2011There has been a lot of commentary this week about the GOP-led proposal to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Commentators such as Ezra Klein note the irrationality of this stance, since Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. Why wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd support this increase in contraception, and subsequent prevention of abortions?
What's missing in this rationale is that many on the far right perceive most forms of contraception *as being equivalent to abortion.* So by their logic, Planned Parenthood isn't…
pharyngula | April 9, 2011Brace yourselves for a new onslaught of ridiculous Republican anti-woman bills. Alabama is working on bills to declare fetuses 'persons' by fiat — they'll just legally redefine humanity to be a fertilized ovum and all derivatives thereof. They'll probably get it passed, too.
I suppose if we could get enough dumbass legislators together to declare that vegetables are persons, we'd have to start treating carrots as if they were real people, like laborers and single mothers and college students and Mexicans and all those others the Republicans hold sacred. It won't make them so, though, not that…
pharyngula | April 9, 2011Bryan Fischer (if you know the name, you know lunacy will soon follow) has a plan.
Allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States, a Christian nation by origin, history and tradition, without insisting that they drop their allegiance to Allah, Muhammad, the Qur'an, and sharia law, is to commit cultural suicide. We believe in freedom of religion for Muslims like we do for everybody else. But if they insist on clinging to their religion, they will need to exercise their freedom of religion in a Muslim country which shares their values: death for those who leave Islam, the beating of wives…
catdynamics | April 8, 2011so, at these late night White House session, Reid offered a good old fashioned manly way to settle the issues: a round of poker, Texas hold'em...
Reid dealt.
Boehner drew 3-7 off-suit, and went all in.
Obama had ace-king suited.
He folded.
pharyngula | April 8, 2011On the Venn diagram of politics, the intersection of Mississippi and Republican is a very ugly place.
jtoney | April 8, 2011
"Man"
The Tennessee General Assembly overwhelming passed Bill 368 yesterday (April 7), stating:
Teachers, Principals and School Personnel - As introduced, protects a teacher from discipline for teaching scientific subjects in an objective manner.
At first blush, it sounds reasonable. Is it?
From ScienceInsider:
In addition to AAAS {American Association for the Advancement of Science}, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, and the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) have expressed their opposition to the bill.
"There has…
oracknows | April 8, 2011Yesterday, I wrote about SB 31, a proposed law in North Carolina against which uber-quack Mike Adams had mobilized his "health freedom" minions and a crank organization Citizens for Health Freedom and apparently managed to bring some pressure to bear on legislators to water down the bill. The whole incident reminded me how fragile and easily dismantled even the most rudimentary laws and regulations designed to enforce a science-based standard of care and prevent the proliferation of quacks are. Dr. Rashid Buttar, for instance, can team up with a bunch of "integrative medicine" practitioners…
jtoney | April 7, 2011
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Billionaire Donald Trump's recent announcement that he is considering running for President of the United States in 2012 has, if anything, generated a lot of media buzz. Could he apply his business acumen to become an effective national and global leader?
Meredith Vieira's interview with Donald Trump on the "Today Show" this morning provided another example of his braggadocio and revealed some disturbing and, yes, provocative {by design?} criticism of President Obama.
Mr. Trump's comments reminded me of a line from…
oracknows | April 7, 2011After having been away for four days, it always takes me a little time to get back into the swing of things when it comes to blogging. Actually, it takes some time to get back into the swing of things at work, too. Sometimes it takes starting on something not too difficult and then working my way back up to the more difficult tasks. In terms of blogging, starting out with something not too difficult often means taking on a reliable source of utter nonsense. And what better source of utter nonsense exists in the world of pseudoscientific medicine? Certainly, it's hard to find a loonier,…