Politics
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2010
Good news for Swedish metal detectorists! And for us Iron Age scholars who want the finds, the sites and the free expert labour these amateurs are eager to provide us. And also for any small-finds nerd who would like to have a labour market (who? me?), communicating with the detectorists and classifying their finds.
The European Commission has ruled that the Swedish restrictions on metal-detector use contravenes EU rules for the free mobility of goods. If Sweden doesn't take measures towards legislative reform within two months, the issue will be referred to the EU Court of Justice.
As I've…
illconsidered | October 11, 2010File this one in the "sad but true" department: Donald Duck learns what Glenn Beck is really about.
And apparently he was not happy about it!
pharyngula | October 11, 2010The insanity is continent wide, my fellow North Americans. A fringe group in Canada is calling for Christian Governance, and you know you can't believe them when they make claims like this:
Judeo-Christian political theory is unique in its hostility to totalitarianism. Christian governance, and Christian governance alone, is anti-tyrannical.
But if they're so opposed to tyranny, why is Christian Governance dismissing gay rights, women's right to choose, and insisting that non-Christians shouldn't be allowed representation in government? They sound like a gang of tyrannical control freaks, if…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2010Recently I wrote about some policies advocated by the Swedish anti-immigration party (SD) regarding public funding of the arts. I remarked that the party's suggestions show that their members do not have much education regarding the arts or public debates in the field during the past decades. "They are after all a party for the blue-eyed, blue-collar, disappointed, rural, jobless man."
One of the comments to this intrigued me. Said Robert Pearse,
As opposed to the consciously multi-ethnic, university-educated, self-satisfied, city-dwelling, rich?
My, I haven't seen such a display of elitism…
illconsidered | October 9, 2010It seems that substantial evidence compiled by John Mashey has helped lead to an investigation into Edward Wegman's possible academic misconduct in the production of his very prominent report to Congress [PDF] on the Hockeystick.
See DesmogBlog for background, USA Today for the story, and Deep Climate for the details.
I will only add a couple of brief comments. Firstly, although the media buzz will be largely about the plagarism charges (and the apologists will focus there as well - copied doesn't mean wrong), there is much more to John's detailed evidence than this. Citations were not just…
drorzel | October 8, 2010With Halloween coming up, some scary stuff seems appropriate:
Boo!
(The explanation of where this comes from.)
pharyngula | October 7, 2010I was mystified why Chief Teabagger David Koch would invest so much in a Smithsonian exhibit on human evolution — usually those knuckledraggers object to people putting their ancestry on display. An explanation is at hand, though: his big issue is denying the significance of global climate change, and the exhibit is tailored to make climate change look like a universal good.
There are some convincing examples of the subterfuge being perpetrated. There is a big emphasis on how evolutionary changes were accompanied by (or even caused by) climate shifts, which evolutionary biologists would see…
pharyngula | October 7, 2010It's so easy to find candidates who are unqualified for office. I wish it were easier to find good candidates. I was sent the campaign page for this Republican bozo in New Mexico, and one of the important issues he addresses is the atheist effort to outlaw prayer.
Christians are just sick and tired of turning the other cheek while our courts strip us of all our rights. Our parents and grandparents taught us to pray before eating, to pray before we go to sleep. Our Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. Now a handful of people and their lawyers are telling us to cease praying.
God…
pharyngula | October 6, 2010Do something, Virginia. Your attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, is on an absurd crusade against Michael Mann and the University of Virginia. His previous attempt to defame Mann with accusations of fraud was recently shot down in the courts, but now he has thrown another pile of accusations at him, all just as pointless.
The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not…
pharyngula | October 6, 2010Now you know who not to vote for: Bill Brady. Brady favors teaching creationism in the schools.
It's always helpful when the ninnies declare themselves like that. Although, it's also true that he declares himself a Republican, which nowadays is also grounds for voting against him.
However, I also take exception to the newspaper article. This is not right:
"My knowledge and my faith leads me to believe in both evolution and creationism," he said. "I believe God created the earth, and it evolved."
Creationism generally teaches that the Bible is historically and scientifically accurate, and…
drorzel | October 6, 2010Via Steve Hsu, a GNXP post about the benefits of elite college educations, based largely on a graph of income vs. US News ranking. While the post text shows some of the dangers of taking social-science data too literally (the points on the graph in question are clearly binned, so I would not attribute too high a degree of reality to a statement like "The marginal benefit of getting into the next highest ranked school is actually higher the higher the rank of your current school. In other words, Yale grads should really really want to go to Harvard"), the apparent effect is pretty significant…
pharyngula | October 4, 2010I would never have guessed this one. The Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to Robert G. Edwards for his pioneering work in in vitro fertilization. It surprises me because it's almost ancient history — he is being rewarded for work done over 30 years ago. It's also very applied research — this was not work that greatly advanced our understanding of basic phenomena in biology, because IVF was already being done in animals. This was just the extension of a technique to one peculiar species, ours.
I don't begrudge him the award, though, because the other special property of his research was that…
oracknows | October 4, 2010If there's one thing that burns me about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) clinical trials, it's how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success that it is unethical to subject patients to risk with close to zero potential for benefit. Perhaps the most egregious example of such a clinical trial is the Gonzalez protocol in pancreatic cancer, a cornucopia of woo and quackery including up to 150…
gregladen | September 30, 2010And let's start with some inspiration, fear, and loathing:
Bwahahaha!!! Patriotic Amerikans don't Demonize Fox Nooz!!!
Can Obama Pull a Victory in the Midterm?
Will the Tea Party Sink the Republican Party?
Here's what it looks like when a Democratic politician commits .... politics:
pharyngula | September 30, 2010So I've just told you to avoid underestimating college students, but I guess you shouldn't do the same with Republicans, especially Breitbart-style Republicans. Their latest embarrassment is yet another piece of work from James O'Keefe, the young mastermind who dressed up as a pimp and dishonestly edited a videotape to make ACORN look like it supported prostitution, and then also bungled a break-in to bug Sen. Mary Landrieu's Louisiana office, and is now continuing his career as a professional idiot and thug with a flopped attempt to catch a CNN reporter using her sexual wiles to bamboozle…
tlambert | September 29, 2010The Australian sure can't take criticism. Tim Dunlop gently mocks them for their latest temper tantrum where they outed an pseudonymous blogger who dared to criticize the media. See also John Quiggin.
Note to excitable journalists working for The Australian reading this - the title is a reference to the The Australian's editorial stating that The Greens "should be destroyed".
oracknows | September 29, 2010It's grant crunch time, which almost always means that a lot of stuff happens that I don't have time to write about and that the week after I submit it (i.e., next week) usually nothing interesting happens to write about and I'm left posting LOL Cats or something like that. Be that as it may, sometimes something happens that goads me to the point where I have to comment, although reality keeps me from my usual logorrhea. Who knows, maybe that's a good thing.
In any case, yesterday Brandon Thorp (who also works for the JREF) teamed up with Penn Bullock to write a disturbing report on just how…
pharyngula | September 29, 2010Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite political writers, and he's perfect for scrutinizing the Tea Party movement — he's a gonzo swashbuckler who specializes in exposing the inanities of American culture, so plopping him down in the midst of the teabaggers is like opening the henhouse door for a wolf.
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their…
drorzel | September 29, 2010There's been a lot written in the last day or so about this Pew Foundation Survey on who knows what about religion. Like most such surveys these days, they have a really easy online quiz version that you can take and marvel that anybody missed any of these questions.
My first thought was to just tag some of the better reactions for the Links Dump, and leave it at that. The auto-posting feature has been broken for some time, though, and my Internet access will be spotty for the next several days, so it's easier to do a quickie post pointing out the more worthwhile posts on the subject that…
pharyngula | September 29, 2010Anderson Cooper nailed Andrew Shirvell. Shirvell has been on a long-running crusade against a fellow named Chris Armstrong, creating a blog called "Chris Armstrong Watch" (always a bad sign), picketing his house, monitoring his facebook page, making wild accusations that Armstrong is abusing his power, etc., etc., etc. Shirvell is the perfect picture of insanity. He's so out of control that he was invited to appear on CNN, presumably because crazy haters make good copy.
Shirvell acknowledged protesting outside of Armstrong's house and calling him "Satan's representative on the student…