Politics
pharyngula | February 24, 2011I oppose the death penalty, but there are people who challenge my commitment to that principle, and Donald Rumsfeld is one of them. He was on the Daily Show, and I had to watch that evil man with clenched teeth and clenched fists. Here's part of the interview; the rest is available on Salon.
The Daily ShowTags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
He shouldn't be on the Daily Show. He should be facing the people of Iraq, and then we'd see how persuasive his folksy chortling would be.
oracknows | February 24, 2011Blame Comcast, I say.
Blame Comcast for the fact that I don't have a typical pearl of Orac-ian logorrheic majesty for your edification this morning. And there's so much that requires such a pearl to be thrown at it, too, in particular a study claiming that cell phone radiation alters brain metabolism in the areas where the cell phones are typically held. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow; that is, if something else doesn't catch my attention--and if my Internet service has decided to work long enough to let me do it. Yes, the reason there's no Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful, laid down this…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011Little Dougie (aka Ian Murphy) has hit the big time: he punked the Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, by calling him up and pretending to be über-Rethuglican puppet master David Koch…and Walker believed him and babbled like a little kid on Santa's lap. It's a self-aggrandizing embarrassment, with Walker bragging about how he was Reaganesque, that he was pitting stereotypical blue-collar workers against the unions, and how he has a baseball bat in his office that he'd use to enforce his demands with the Democrats. It's dreadful stuff, and when caught with his guard down it's very clear that…
gregladen | February 23, 2011If you live in Georgia, and have a miscarriage, you will be investigated, if recently introduced legislation is passed. The bill proposed ...
... by House Republican Bobby Franklin would make abortion the legal equivalent of murder and require miscarriages to be investigated by authorities.
...
Franklin's bill would classify the removal of a fetus from a woman for any reason other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus as "prenatal murder." Physicians indicted for alleged "prenatal murder" would have their license suspended until they were found innocent of the crime.…
oracknows | February 23, 2011Hard as it is to believe, it's been nearly a year since I first learned that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case regarding the legitimacy of the vaccine court. The long version can be found here, but the short version is that last March SCOTUS agreed to hear a case regarding the constitutionality of the law that set up the Vaccine Court back in the 1980s. As you might recall, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed in 1986 in order to establish a no-fault compensation system for children who suffer vaccine injury. The NCVIA was necessary because a flood of lawsuits in the…
pharyngula | February 22, 2011Lies and threats, that's what Gaddafi is reduced to now. I won't shed a single tear when he's deposed, but I will hope that he isn't removed by impaling his head on a stick. He has just given a blustering speech. I think he's doomed.
Although I wish there were less chanting about Allah, I do think it's great that the people of the Muslim world are rising up. Is this another 1848?
gregladen | February 22, 2011UPDATE: Was Gordon Hintz recently placed under arrest on sex-crime related charges? (see below) And, did news of this arrest become disseminated only moments ago because of his speech in Madison?
Whoa ...
Citizens of Wisconsin: If you are not all as mad as this guy, you don't really get what's going on.
The Wikipedia page seems to think so:
Gordon N. Hintz is a Democratic Party member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, representing the 54th Assembly District since his election in 2006.
Mr. Hintz also placed 2nd in the 2003 National Air Guitar championships under the pseudonym, "Krye Tuff…
drorzel | February 22, 2011I grew up in Broome County, NY, down by the PA border, and my parents still live in scenic Whitney Point. Broome County is one of the areas affected by a huge environmental controversy, because it sits on top of the northern bit of the Marcellus Shale formation, which contains huge amounts of natural gas. For years, this has been deemed too difficult and expensive to extract, but gas prices and drilling technology, specifically hydraulic fracture drilling where they pump large amounts of water down the hole to break up the rock and let the gas escape, have moved to a place where it's…
pharyngula | February 22, 2011With friends like these…Mudcat Saunders has some advice for the unions in Wisconsin.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, David "Mudcat" Saunders, a longtime Democratic political strategist known for his work with blue-collar voters, had a different take. Rather than worrying about floodgates bursting open, he argued that the best public relations move for the Democrats would have been to simply let Walker's bill pass and then demonize it.
"Sometimes the best punch you can throw is to let somebody throw theirs first," Saunders said. "I would have debated it forever, as long as I could…
oracknows | February 22, 2011Over the years, I've said it many times. Competent adults have the right (or should have the right) to choose or refuse any medical treatment they wish for any reason. It doesn't matter how ridiculous the reason might be. If a competent adult believes that magic water (i.e., homeopathy) can cure him of cancer, we can try to persuade him that such a view is at odds with reality, but in the end personal autonomy and the right to self-determination mean that there will be a few people who will refuse effective medication in favor of quackery. A major force in motivating people to choose…
esiegel | February 20, 2011"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." -Abraham Lincoln
Democracy is hard. There's a reason I became an astrophysicist and not a politician, and it's rare that I talk about politics here. But every once in a while, I see something happening that's so egregious that I have to stand up and speak out for what's right in this world. Bob Marley would likely…
pharyngula | February 18, 2011One bright spot in the country right now is the sight of union workers rising up and peacefully protesting anti-labor Republican policies, and some Democrats finally growing a spine and resisting as well.
I feel a little better about this. I'm not going to be content until those Rethuglicans are thoroughly marginalized politically, however; they've been wrecking my country since Nixon.
pharyngula | February 18, 2011We have an informal request here at scienceblogs that everyone avoid putting profanity in our article titles, since those may appear on everyone's site, and some people find it objectionable. Fair enough; unfortunately, in this case, all I could think of to put up there was a paragraph's worth of obscenities. So I left it blank.
House Rethuglicans have just voted to deny all funding to Planned Parenthood.
As part of their stated mission to focus on jobs (specifically, the job of preventing women from getting healthcare), House Republicans this afternoon voted 240-185 to bar federal funding…
gregladen | February 18, 2011Two local stories you might be interested in from my neighborhood.
First, a girl high school wrestler advanced yesterday but was beaten today in the state tournament in Iowa. Why is this interesting? Well, first, this is not a girl wrestling on a girl's team. It is a girl wrestling on the regular team which happens to be traditionally boys. Second, she advanced yesterday when one of the favorite to win, a boy, refused to wrestle a girl, apparently because he things the sport should be reserved for boys. (I dunno ... in his case, maybe wrestling really is a gay sport? Who knows?)…
pharyngula | February 18, 2011It's state representative Mike Beard. Republican. Christian. Moron.
He thinks we don't have to worry about natural resources.
God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.
Nuclear war and the death of a few hundred thousand people? Whatever. Get over it.
How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible. But, can we recover? Of course we can.
No, he's not from the same district as Michele Bachmann…
pharyngula | February 17, 2011So I guess they can't be all bad. Yesterday, I chastised Michio Kaku severely for stepping out of his expertise as a physicist to say something stupid about biology. James Kakalios agreed with me, and sent along a little essay about the subject that also makes the point that expertise is important.
In Defense of Elites
James Kakalios
Following the recent mid-term elections, the consensus of many pundits is that this past November the American public sent a strong message of "anti-elitism." The good news is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Americans are certainly not anti-…
pharyngula | February 16, 2011This week's Nature has a substantial and fairly even-handed article on the unease Templeton funding causes. Jerry Coyne is prominently featured, so you know it isn't an entirely friendly review.
Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
They also quote scientists who found the…
gregladen | February 16, 2011Youth for Tolerance, Invisible Children, Save Darfur coalition, Million votes against farc ... Who are these organizations connected to? There is a long list of them. Who is the US State Department working with? MTV? NBC? We need to keep an eye on them. We can't tell if they are right or clean or left or dirty. Are they front groups? There is a long list of them. You need to do your own homework but don't use a Google search. It seems like Google may be in bed with the government. Why is Google being kicked out of all of the other countries of the world? Is Google just a shill for…
catdynamics | February 15, 2011The American Physical Society just woke up to the budget threat...
To cut a long story short, the US Government has no budget for 2010-2011.
It has been operating under a continuous resolution since Oct 1, and this expires in March.
The House, which originated budget resolutions, generally, wants a high profile cut.
$100 billion in round numbers.
But, not in Social Security, Medicare, debt service, or Military.
So, the $100G is going to be cut out of the $500G discretionary budget.
But, we're half way through the fiscal year, so almost half that money is already obligated,
so we're looking…
oracknows | February 15, 2011As most of you know, most of the basic and translational biomedical research in the U.S. is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unfortunately, the NIH budget has been stagnant for the last five or six years. That's been bad enough, leading to a decline in funding success rates for applicants for research grants to a low level that we haven't seen in nearly 20 years. Worse, even though FY2011 started October 1, the federal government still doesn't have a real budget. It's operating on a continuing resolution. While this plays havoc with all government agencies, it's particularly…