Politics
pharyngula | September 27, 2010Be depressed. The reports are in, and American education sucks and is hurting our economy.
Stagnant scientific education imperils U.S. economic leadership, says a report by leading business and science figures.
Released Thursday at a congressional briefing attended by senators and congressmen of both parties, the report updates a 2005 science education report that led to moves to double federal research funding.
Nevertheless, the "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" review finds little improvement in U.S. elementary and secondary technical education since then.
"Our nation's outlook has…
pharyngula | September 27, 2010Minnesota should be embarrassed to have two organizations targeting our elections with the goal of blocking the possibility of gay marriage. The Nincompoops Opposing Marriage (NOM) is campaigning for the Rethuglican candidate for governor, Tom Emmers, while the Catholic church is sending out DVDs whining about gays. But they're both following the same playbook: they're making these pious, earnest appeals that it's only fair that the issue be put to a vote, and they're sounding exactly like the creationists, who make similar pleas for their pseudoscience.
What they so blithely ignore, though,…
pharyngula | September 25, 2010It's one of the oldest, most ridiculous canards creationists use: "Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?" And here's Christine O'Donnell thinking it's a valid argument.
I think she was also about to claim that Darwin retracted his theory, before she got cut off…and that's another creationist lie.
Maher also misses the point in his answer. This isn't an issue of evolution being too slow at all; it's a creationist misconception that evolution is directed towards a goal, and that that goal is humanity. Monkeys are evolving into monkeys, not people.
Maher is also astonished that…
pharyngula | September 23, 2010Believers get another phenomenal reward: if they have student loans, they can all be forgiven by working for a non-profit, which includes most churches. I can approve of the idea of rewarding people with debt forgiveness if they dedicate themselves to charitable works, but most priests are more interested in spreading the useless noise of the gospel rather than helping real people, and most churches do not deserve their status as a charity — and if they do, they ought to open their books to the same level of scrutiny as a secular non-profit, and they typically don't.
Say, why don't we forgive…
aardvarchaeology | September 23, 2010Immediately after the Swedish election the SD anti-immigration party made a major proclamation advocating policies copied from 1930s Germany - pertaining to the public funding of the arts.
Since the end of the war, the driver of a car is no longer known as an Autoführer, "car driver" in German. He's an Autofahrer, a "car rider". Other words have proved impossible to rehabilitate. A prominent one is völkisch, meaning "national", "ethnic", in some situations "folksy". The Nazis loved folksy culture, music with a lot of tuba and Glockenspiel, traditional songs, leather shorts, hats decorated…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2010Jerry Coyne has an important post up responding to this awful essay by Peter Doumit, posted at the BioLogos website. Doumit's essay has nuggets like this:
Divine revelation comes in two forms: the Word of God (including both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition) and the Work of God (including the natural, physical world and the laws that govern it). Both are equally valid forms of truth, as they stem from the same Source. And since truth can never contradict truth, a truth revealed in one cannot ever be in conflict with a truth revealed in the other. Once this is fundamentally understood,…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2010If you are looking for some popcorn reading, have a look at this post from John Farrell, over at HuffPo. He takes John West of the Discovery Institute to task for parroting ye olde “Darwin was a big, fat racist!” canard. Here's the conclusion:
So, what is one to make of these ceaseless ideological attacks on Charles Darwin? Apparently, having failed at the Dover Trial to get their revised "intelligent design" philosophy into public school science classes, the Discovery Institute now resorts to the only strategy they have left to undermine science and science education: smear the…
pharyngula | September 21, 2010All you have to do is look at their official state party platforms. The platforms are typically wish lists forged at multiple levels: I've been involved a little bit with our local Minnesota DFL, and anyone can show up and propose an addition to the party platform, which means you've usually got a few pie-in-the-sky items suggested…and those all get voted on at the local convention and then at the state convention, and the wackier or excessively improbable items get winnowed away in the voting. If you look at the Minnesota DFL platform, for instance, you find a rather idealistic document that…
catdynamics | September 20, 2010The intertoobz have exploded over the unfortunate Dr Henderson's bemoaning of the impending Bush tax increases, and the hardship of getting by in todays society for two income families
We watch in awe as netizens arise to dissect the issue, and munch popcorn as the show goes on:
Todd Henderson's original tirade
in which he shows some misunderstanding of what constitutes discretionary spending, financial planning and marginal tax rates.
He must have known for several years that Bush's tax increase was coming in 2011. Shouldn't live on the edge like that...
(Hm. He may have taken it down, or…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2010Sweden held a general election yesterday, and it did not go the way myself and other lefties would have liked. Parliament has 349 seats, and 175 is thus a majority. Before the election, the various right-wing and centrist parties held 178 seats. Now they hold 192. But the conservative voters have not only become relatively more numerous: they have also diversified in their sympathies, propelling the brown fringe of the right-wing block into Parliament in the shape of a new populist anti-immigration party, the Swedish Democrats.
The Swedish conservatives are basically like the US Democrats.…
pharyngula | September 18, 2010A reader, who apparently did some work for Iran some years ago, now regularly gets missives from the Iranian embassy, and he forwarded this one to me. It's about Iran's official response to the proposed Koran burning in Florida.
I've checked out the email headers and can verify that at least it came from the purported source and there is an Iranian embassy at that address, but I can't vouch for the full legitimacy of the email.
Subject: Supreme Leader's Message
Dear Sir/Madam
Please find attached the text of the message of the Supreme Leader of the
Islamic Republic of Iran on the…
catdynamics | September 17, 2010Krugman is is on fire today, as he has been for a while, this time talking about the tax cuts.
But, even he makes an essential error that all the democrats seem to be making.
It is not about Bush's tax cuts, or keeping Bush's tax cuts or Obama raising taxes.
Bush, for whatever reasons, proposed and got passed tax cuts that expire this year.
That is it.
They will be no more. Any changes in the tax code beyond that are not Bush's.
So, at the end of this year, there will BUSH'S TAX INCREASES.
That is the status quo, as set in law and signed by President Bush.
If your tax increases next year, it…
pharyngula | September 17, 2010The Mississippi is a mess. I live in the agricultural, rural upper midwest, and one of the nasty surprises lurking beneath the rich green fields is that the rivers are ugly stews of fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides from agricultural runoff. We have data that it hurts people, too: premature births and birth defects show seasonal fluctuations that peak for children conceived in the spring and summer, when the chemicals are being sprayed into the air and are dribbling into the streams. The villains are agribusiness and overproduction and the corn ethanol boondoggle and horrors like the…
catdynamics | September 16, 2010There are some things to be said for staring at scatterplots and times series plots
Calculated Risk, in case you hadn't heard, is one of the best economics and finance blogs on the Net.
Bill at CR is a demon for generating plots:
This one is Business Outlook Survey - question is, of course, what is the instantaneous second derivative.
Or look at Government Employment - Fed, State and Local, and now, with Education sector excluded!
There is the Infamous Employment vs Recession chart
and
why you should go to university... (click to embiggen)
- modulo opportunity costs of course
CR…
pharyngula | September 15, 2010A teabagger has won the Republican primary for the senate in Delaware…and now everyone is predicting that Christine O'Donnell doesn't have a chance in the election. She's too crazy, they say, she's a fringe kook, and she can't possibly get elected…but then, she got elected in the primary, didn't she? Let's not get cocky. Especially since she doesn't like that sort of stuff. Here's a 90s video where she is talking about her major concern at that time: she opposed masturbation.
I really like that last line of hers. This is why she doesn't like masturbation.
If he already knows what pleases…
pharyngula | September 15, 2010A transgendered woman is running for political office?
In Oklahoma?
Against crazy church lady Sally Kern? This Sally Kern?
It's no secret that I have a personal belief, I believe it's a belief of most Christians, that the Bible teaches homosexuality is a sin just like gluttony is a sin... There are things that are going on today that would make my grandmother blush and there were things that when my grandmother was alive that were going on that that would have made her grandmother blush. So as we get farther and farther away from biblical principles, more and more things are accepted. And…
pharyngula | September 14, 2010Please, fellow godless folk, stop trying to claim Obama as one of us. He isn't. He goes to church sometimes, he has a religious history, he's happy to use Christian metaphors, he hasn't claimed to be so much as an agnostic. He's a liberal Christian who is not obsessed with religion. Take his words at face value; I find it annoying when people look for signs that he's a hidden member of our little clan. It is so conspiracy-theory.
Maybe it's a science thing: use Occam's Razor and make minimal assumptions, and use the simplest explanation to see if it is sufficient to explain a phenomenon. And…
drorzel | September 14, 2010Via Tom, the folks pushing for a Stephen Colbert rally on the Mall in DC (because if a clown like Glen Beck can do it, why not an actual comedian?) have found a uniquely useful way to try to boost their signal: encouraging charitable donations:
See, anyone can join a reddit or Facebook group or sign a petition. It takes, like, one minute and doesn't demonstrate much effort. So the rally movement has been looking for ways to show that they're serious, that they're willing to lift a finger to make this happen. And an idea has just been hatched: pony up some cash to one of Stephen's favorite…
gregladen | September 11, 2010This is Al Qaeda day because it is on this day nine years ago that Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization that had been doing battle with the US for some 8 years or so, finally won the War against the West, resoundingly defeating George Bush by successfully completing the most terrorizing event to have been carried out ever. To this day, the United States is little more than a deer caught fearfully in the headlights of Osama bin Laden's Cadillac SUV as he drives about the desert playing with his guns and religion.
Sadly, the defeat was not so much a success of bin Laden, as it was a collapse…