Politics
drorzel | December 3, 2010Lance Mannion has a good post on the fake outrage of the moment in sports, where Derek Anderson, the terrible quarterback of the godawful Arizona Cardinals, was caught on camera maybe laughing with one of his receivers during their drubbing by the not at all good San francisco 49ers. When questioned about it at a press conference afterwards, Anderson blew his stack at a reporter, then stormed out of the room.
The whole thing is pretty farcical. As Mannion notes:
Listen. Soldiers under fire laugh. Sailors going down with the ship laugh. Pilots watching engines fail laugh. Firefighters,…
drorzel | December 2, 2010The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I've mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter in North Carolina over the summer, covering science topics, and writes about his dissatisfaction with the journalistic template:
I had one editor who required that I give him my story pitches using six words or fewer. But the message wasn't even simply to shorten; it was to make it punchy…
pharyngula | December 2, 2010Who needs expertise and knowledge? In the bold new world of the Teabagger Republicans, all you need is a sense of privilege and outrage, and you too are qualified to do rocket science and brain surgery…or, at least, to complain about rocket science and brain surgery. Here's the latest brilliant idea from a Republican congressman: the National Science Foundation provides easy access to their database of grant awards online, so let's sic a mob of uninformed, resentful, anti-science gomers loose on the field of already extensively vetted (by qualified people!) awards and have them seek out…
pharyngula | November 30, 2010This kind of says it all.
That's the story we can expect to see played out every day for the next few years.
illconsidered | November 30, 2010Although I just play the role of a scientist on the internet, my father actually is one. As well as being a medical doctor, he is a retired professor of biophysics. I am telling you this because he has recently co-authored a book on a subject that might interest readers of ScienceBlogs: fluoridation of human water supplies. The book is entitled "The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There" and you can read a detailed review of that book here [PDF].
At my request, he has written up a guest post…
gregladen | November 28, 2010The following is an accurate account of a recent conversation in which illegal, and possibly dangerous acts against the Federal and State governments were planned.
"I'm glad you guys could come over for dinner," said our host, as we shared the task of moving dishes and serving plates, silverware and glasses from the dining room table to the kitchen.
"Get out of here, no need to help cleaning up," he continued, shooing the three of us away from the kitchen and into the living room, where we distributed ourselves on various pieces of furniture.
I had known Bill years ago in school, and we…
pharyngula | November 28, 2010Today, Wikileaks begins releasing a huge collection of US embassy cables, and we're about to discover the degree of skullduggery that's been going on.
The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.
This document release reveals the contradictions between the US's public persona and what it says behind closed doors - and shows that if citizens…
pharyngula | November 25, 2010So North Korea is rattling the sabre again, and I'm hoping some serious, mature people on our side will step up and act responsibly…but I'm pretty sure we won't find those people on the Republican side. So far, their responses range from the stupid to the evil.
Here's Sarah Palin babbling away on the Glenn Beck show (Can you guess that this is the stupid part of the range?)
CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? [...]
PALIN: But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies. We're bound to by treaty -
CO-HOST: South Korean…
drorzel | November 23, 2010I've probably gotten a dozen pointers to Gregory Petsko's open letter in support of the humanities, addressed to the President of SUNY-Albany, over the last couple of weeks (the link is to a reposting of the letter at Inside Higher Ed; it was originally on Petsko's own blog). I haven't linked to it or commented on it here, mostly because while I'm broadly sympathetic with his position, after the second use of "[Famous Writer] said [interesting thing] which I'm sure your department of [humanities field] could tell you about, if you hadn't eliminated them," my reaction had shifted significantly…
illconsidered | November 23, 2010The wheels continue to fall off the Wegman Report.
"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.
Further down:
Allegations under review
"The matter is under investigation," says GMU spokesman Dan Walsch by e-mail. In a phone interview, Wegman said he could not comment at the university's request. In an earlier e-mail Wegman sent to Joseph Kunc of the University of Southern California, however, he called the plagiarism charges "wild conclusions that…
drorzel | November 23, 2010Kevin Drum posted an anti-rant about the TSA, which argues that the new scanners and pat-downs aren't an outrage because they really mean well:
I'm not trying to defend everything TSA has put in place. Some of the stuff they do, like the penknife and nail clipper bans, really is stupid. And maybe backscatter scanners don't work. I'm certainly open to the idea. But honestly, most of what they do is pretty easy to understand: they're trying to make it so hard to get weapons and explosives on board airplanes that no one bothers trying -- and the few who do can't pack a big enough punch to do any…
gregladen | November 22, 2010The recount process for the Minnesota Gubernatorial Race starts this week. The national political significance of this recount is simply not as great as the Senatorial recount two years ago. That recount determined the balance of power in Washington, sort of. It also determined the insertion into the Senate of someone clearly destine by his own abilities and energy to be one of the great ones, Al Franken, and the removal of someone clearly shown by his own actions to be one of the embarrassing ones, Norm Coleman.
But the outcome of this year's gubernatorial race in Minnesota is not…
oracknows | November 19, 2010The other day I had a bit of fun deconstructing a shockingly bad post by a blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism named Dan Olmsted. In his post, he criticized the progressive movement for not "getting" autism. It was one of the silliest bits of whining I had ever seen, in essence a crybaby crying because "his people" weren't paying attention to his book.
Shockingly, yesterday Olmsted was able to find a post from a "progressive" who was willing to drink deeply of the anti-vax Kool Aid without realizing that he's doing so and agree with him. For instance, let's take a look at…
illconsidered | November 18, 2010November 17 marked the one year anniversary of the hacking of CRU mail servers and the release of thousands of emails between climate scientists.
Though irrelevant to the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change, the event was significant in the public relations sphere. I have not found the time to do a proper memorial write up though I think it is important to reassess and reframe the controversy with the benefit of hindsight. But as luck would have it, a young climate blogger named Kate at Climate Sight has written a piece as well laid out and written as I could ever have hoped to…
drorzel | November 15, 2010The other night at dinner, SteelyKid kept demanding that we sing. As there's only so many times you can sing the alphabet in a row, I decided to mix it up a little, and sang her the first verse and the chorus of "The Wild Rover" (these lyrics are close to the ones I know, and here's a YouTube version).
After I finished, she smiled and started babbling, and it quickly became clear that she thought it was about Grover the Muppet. We've got a bunch of old Sesame Street clips that we play for her on the computer, in which Grover waits on an angry blue Muppet.
Thanks to that, I got this idea stuck…
oracknows | November 15, 2010Every so often on this blog I get in the mood to take on a post on the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. Over the three years of its existence, I've seen some truly bizarre posts, ranging from one blogger blithely discussing how he took his daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery to treat her autism to rants against journalists who have the temerity to point out that the scientific evidence out there does not support the idea that vaccines cause autism to attacks on perceived enemies of the anti-vaccine movement in which these enemies have their heads crudely Photoshopped into…
catdynamics | November 11, 2010No, I don't think that is a good idea...
Xtra Normal: make your own, use carefully...
One Professor's Fantasy
So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities
Ok, Eng Lit is just weird, but I get it.
drorzel | November 11, 2010I usually have ESPN on as background noise in the morning, but I turned it off today because their increasingly fulsome tributes to Veterans Day were getting on my nerves. I'm all in favor of honoring the sacrifices made by members of the military, but a little decorum would be nice at the same time.
It occurs to me, though, that what we really need is not yet more extravagant orations of thanks on Veterans Day, but rather a "Pre-Veterans Day." A day when we think about the men and women of the armed forces before they've had to make terrible sacrifices for the country. This would, ideally,…
pharyngula | November 11, 2010This is a message from Simon Singh:
This week is the first anniversary of the report Free Speech is Not for Sale, which highlighted the oppressive nature of English libel law. In short, the law is extremely hostile to writers, while being unreasonably friendly towards powerful corporations and individuals who want to silence critics.
The English libel law is particular dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows…
pharyngula | November 10, 2010The cartoon is amusing.
Wouldn't it be nice to have something in between the raving insanity of Beck and Limbaugh, and the mannered, fearful timidity of, say, almost every Democrat currently in office?
Maybe it would help if pundits stopped reacting to everyone who criticizes the wimp on the left as if they were the firebreathing freak on the right.