Politics
oracknows | September 11, 2010Once again we come to another September 11. It's hard to believe that it's been nine years since that horrible day. On this day, I generally don't do any new posts. Also, traditionally I do two things. First, I post the following video.
This video was shot by Bob and Bri, who in 2001 lived in a high rise a mere 500 yards from the North Tower. On this eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I think it's important to post this again. It is the most prolonged and continuous video of the attack that I have seen, and, as such, It is difficult to watch.
That's why it's so important to…
pharyngula | September 10, 2010My lukewarm support for this president is cooling fast. First he's making absurd excuses to kowtow to the easily inflamed sensibilities of Islam, and now, apparently, he's forgotten that this is a secular nation.
Obama said he was proud the country had rallied around the idea that we can't be divided because of religion or ethnicity - and hopes that is something that can continue.
"We are all Americans, we stand together," Obama said. "I think it is absolutely important now for majority of Americans to hang onto that thing that is best in us: a belief in religious tolerance. We have to make…
pharyngula | September 9, 2010You know, I'm something of an expert in the public desecration of sacred objects, and I'm seeing the same madness going on right now with Terry Jones and his plan to burn copies of the Koran that I saw in the response to throwing a cracker in the trash — only amplified to a ludicrous degree. People just aren't getting it; they're so blinded by an inappropriate attachment to magic relics that they're missing the real issues.
I publicly destroyed a communion wafer once (OK, a few times). There was a simple reason for it: a few Catholics had responded hysterically to a student who didn't swallow…
sa smith | September 8, 2010Im a voracious reader. Always have been. We didnt have cable or a lot of cool toys or anything growing up (dont feel sorry for me. we did get a NES when they came out, and a Tandy 2000) but Mom would always take us to the library for a new book at the drop of a hat.
But I dont read a lot of books.
I do occasionally pick up something different, but normally I read the same books over and over and over and over and over.
The 'worst' are 'The Three Musketeers' and 'The Martian Chronicles'. I have read them both at least a hundred times (and its my moms copy of 'Martian Chronicles', doesnt…
drorzel | September 8, 2010The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment:
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers -- all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who…
pharyngula | September 6, 2010What are they thinking? The protesters complaining about that violent, militant religion of Islam building a mosque/community center in New York are now towing about a pair of deactivated missiles at their rallies. I guess Christians are trying to send a message that they're friendly and non-threatening.
I've been doing it wrong for so many years. When I was protesting the Iraq war, maybe it would have been a more effective demonstration if we'd rented a tank and put a sign on it, "Honk if you hate war". When we protested that biological warfare work going on at the Dugway Proving Grounds,…
jrosenhouse | September 6, 2010Recently i have been browsing through a book called What About Darwin?, which is a collection of quotations from various worthies regarding -- surprise! -- Charles Darwin. One that jumped out at me was a statement from Calvin Coolidge. This is from a letter he wrote to his father:
I see [Oliver Wendell] Holmes [Sr] is dead, the Autocrat of the Breakfast table on whom the years sat so lightly and who had only just declared that he was 85 years young. No one but [William] Gladstone is left of those great men that were born in 1809. Darwin is gone, the great expounder of evolution, a…
illconsidered | September 6, 2010Here is a very good TED talk by Johan Rockstrom about human pressures, environmental constraints and possible futures.
pharyngula | September 6, 2010Gregory Koger is an ex-con and a revolutionary communist…and none of that should matter in the slightest. He's also a person who was beat up, handcuffed, maced, arrested, and now faces the prospect of a three year jail sentence for the crime of holding up his iPhone to take pictures of police harrassment. Koger is the young man who was documenting Sunsara Taylor's protest of the behavior of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (which, by the way, ought to change their name to drop the first word), and who, oddly, was manhandled and arrested for taking videos of the event, while Taylor…
drorzel | September 4, 2010Speaking of teacher evaluation schemes, as we were, Doug Natelson draws my attention to a new proposal from Texas A&M:
[Frank] Ashley, the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System, has been put in charge of creating such a measure that he says would help administrators and the public better understand who, from a financial standpoint, is pulling their weight.
A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external…
drorzel | September 3, 2010Via Thoreau, a story at Free Range Kids about "zero tolerance" policy run amok, this time from someone who moved to the US as a kid and ran up against the modern school culture in a bad way:
Once again, I came from a culture where you were made fun of if you forgot your pocket knife on a school trip. Then I entered a post-Columbine/Zero Tolerance hell. I hadn't used or even removed my knife from my bag while in school, but I did use it to cut a twig on my way home from school one day, and was apparently seen by one of my classmates. The next day, I was called into the principal's office where…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times's investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using "Value Added Modeling," which basically looks at how much a student's scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and Kevin Drum has some reactions of his own, along with links to two posts from Kevin Carey, who blogs about this stuff regularly. Finally, Crooked Timber has a post about a recent study showing that value-added models aren't that great (as CT is one of the few political…
pharyngula | September 1, 2010I've been in a bit of a fog for the last few weeks, and am just now catching up on the noise about the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque", and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in Hitchens. He rightly points out that most of the opposition is base, stupid demagoguery and racism, but then he offers his own reasons why the construction is problematic. They are that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the building, holds odious and undemocratic views, and that encouraging Muslims leads to their attempts to impose their rather unpleasant moralistic views on their neighbors.
Which is all true.…
pharyngula | August 31, 2010Prime Minister Harper has come up with a bizarre goal: he thinks so highly of the US's Fox News that he wants to create a similar propaganda organ up North. Incredible — isn't Canada supposed to learn from our terrible mistakes?
Here's an idea: sign this petition. It can't hurt. But then, the plan was certifiably crazy from the beginning, so I don't know how much a cry of horror will help. Is there also a petition to have Harper committed anywhere?
catdynamics | August 30, 2010Virginia County Circuit Judge Peatross set aside a subpoena by Cuccinelli, Virginia's Attorney General, seeking the record of Prof. Michael Mann while he worked at the University of Virginia.
The ruling said the AG had failed state what was suspected to be false or fraudulent, but leaves the option for Cuccinelli to refile a new supoena.
UVa likes
Cuccinelli apperntly intends to refile the subpoena as soon as he can think of something suitable fishy to randomly allege.
h/t kos
NYT story
WaPo story
pharyngula | August 30, 2010The New Yorker has a very well written article on Francis Collins and the recent upset in stem cell research, but it feels terribly premature. It's a stage-setting piece to an act that hasn't been resolved yet.
The part about Collins is familiar ground for those of us who were peeved at his selection to be head of the NIH — he's a folksy evangelical Christian with a fabulous scientific CV. But it's the context that's most important.
Here's the deal: during the Bush years, many restrictions were imposed on embryonic stem cell research by a reactionary right-wing congress and executive.…
esiegel | August 29, 2010They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up. -Martin Niemöller
Most of you reading this know me. How you know me may vary; some of you know me as a scientist, some as a science writer, as a professor, or maybe just a friend or acquaintance. But before I was any of those things, I was born a citizen of the United…
oracknows | August 29, 2010Yesterday, I expressed my displeasure over a truly idiotic press release by the Center for Inquiry over the "Ground Zero mosque" entitled The Center for Inquiry Urges That Ground Zero Be Kept Religion-Free. I happen to know that a lot of supporters of CFI were very unhappy about the press release as well, because apparently the president of CFI, Ron Lindsay, is feeling the heat. Because I wrote to him complaining, I received the following mass response:
Thank you for providing us with your comments concerning the recent press release issued by the Center for Inquiry on the Ground Zero…
The Center For Inquiry on the "Ground Zero mosque": Incompetent satire or abandonment of principles?
oracknows | August 28, 2010I hadn't planned on blogging at all today, much about on this particular topic. As some of you may have noticed, I'm trying to cut back on the blog habit, particularly on the weekends. Gone are the days when I'd foolishly try to emulate P.Z. Myers and have several posts up in a day; lately most days there is only one post up. Moreover, over the years, I've drifted away from writing about religion, except when it explicitly intersects with science, in particular medical science. In fact, the whole creationism/evolution kerfuffle, which I used to write about quite frequently, has become an…