Politics
drorzel | August 11, 2010First Matt Yglesias and then Kevin Drum nail the current source of my occasional spasms of liberal guilt, namely the unequal distribution of the current economic troubles. They both note that the unemployment rate for college graduates is less than half that for folks without college degrees (Matt looks at total unemployment, Kevin at long-term unemployment), and Matt notes:
Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate. What's more, we have a large…
gregladen | August 9, 2010Or, more specifically, will my rep, Erik Paulsen, vote against the Recovery Act extension today which will fund, in part, Medicade and Education (167 mil in Minnesota)? We need this. But we don't meed Erik that much. If he votes against it, I may have to do something about that.
Which will probably consist of spending a bit of time working on the campaign of his hopeful replacement, Jim Meffert. Meffert supports the bill, and generally, education. Paulsen, on the other hand, does whatever Michele Bachmann tells him to do, or so it would seem.
sa smith | August 5, 2010I normally dread my drives home to visit my parents.
I mean, its pretty-- through OK and KS... but there is absolutely nothing on the radio but those crazy Christian talk shows. I can listen to them a while, for limited lulz, but eventually I get so sick of the Creationists and women talking about how its so AWESOME to serve their husbands, I turn it off and drive in silence.
NOT TODAY, BABY!!!!
Every show was freaking the fuck out over Prop H8 getting overturned! Freaking the fuck out AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
The hours just flew by as I laughed maniacally at:
WARBLEGARBLE! VAUGHN WALKER IS…
gregladen | August 5, 2010My grandfather fought against the assault on our freedoms in the form of the Kaiser's army in WW I. At one point he became gravely ill (the "Spanish flu" perhaps) and was not allowed to march forward with his unit. They were all killed.
My father fought in WW II against the Nazi's, who were one of the greatest threats against our freedoms to ever exist. He won a couple of medals, finished off his work in the European Theater, and the war ended as he was on his way to Japan, having volunteered for the invasion against the Japanese Imperialists, who were the other great threat against our…
pharyngula | August 4, 2010How dare radicals insert their civil rights provisions into the sacred Constitution — a federal judge has just declared that California's Proposition 8 is in violation of the 14th Amendment. Now it's probably going to the Supreme Court, and who knows what will happen in wacky Roberts-Scalia land, packed with Catholics.
I guess the only surefire strategy for the conservatives is to go back to whining about that awful 14th amendment. Meanwhile, California should plan on having a gay old time.
pharyngula | August 3, 2010Writing about the role of the NAACP in swatting down the endemic racism in the Republican party, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes something beautiful.
I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like "it's worth saying" and "it strikes me that..." or "respectfully..."
When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it's worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them--respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the…
drorzel | August 3, 2010There's a great post at NeuroDojo on the Heffernan business this weekend, and what the take-away ought to be:
Yeah, let's criticize that she didn't get past the first impression of science blogs. We should expect Heffernan to look before leaping - she writes for the Times, after all, which still has a certain reputation as a paper of record and quality. But let's not pretend that her impression ain't shared by anyone else.
For instance, she took heat for recommending a climate denialist blog. But that's not the first time that blog got recommended by people who ought to know better. That…
stoat | August 3, 2010
Quark Soup has a post comparing the spill to Niagara; and notes that the spill would be a cube ~93m on a side.
Checkling the share price (still hovering around 4.10, so neither good news nor bad) I see BP are starting to ask others to pay up for their shares. It will be interesting to see how that goes - through the courts, or quiet settlements?
Misc people complained at me when I previously said Incidentally, misc people have called this spill "unprecendented". That seems dubious (except in the traditional sense that 11 dead in Cumbria is headline news for days; 11 misc folks dead in road…
gregladen | August 2, 2010It turns out the American Teabagging Party is very diverse after all. They have all sorts of nutbags and morans amongst their members: Tea Party Diversity Event at Crooks and Liars.
Mn Guv Candidate picks up key endorsement from the Star Tribune.
... And, in that very same race, the Democrats hold a lead in early polls against Republican candidate Emmer.
Minnesotans: Check out MnAtheist events for the month.
gregladen | August 2, 2010That ad was made by Blue America and Americans for America (two .... American ... organizations).
The thing is, you can join in on the decision process for which Republican to feature in an ad produced by this team. But you have to donate at least a dollar for your vote to count. Like the old days!!!
Here's how you vote: just make a donation on the page dedicated to the culprit of your choice. If you click on the picture below, you go directly to their page. Because we're progressives and not conservatives, a one dollar donation equals the same single vote as a one hundred dollar donation…
pharyngula | August 1, 2010The cover of the latest issue of Time is going to shake a few people up. Aisha is a woman who fled the tyranny and abuse of her in-laws, and as a punishment, the Taliban had her husband cut off her ears and nose.
Here's where pro-war propaganda steps in: the cover is titled, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan". It's set up as if this kind of horror would be a consequence of our military leaving the country. However, the story undermines that message.
This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women's shelter in Kabul…
gregladen | August 1, 2010Steve Andrew dared to tickle the dragon's tail and now he is paying for it. The dragon in this case, is Climate Denialists in the Right Wing Media.
Andrew posted something about the recent, very alarming news that global warming seems to be cutting back significantly on the supply of oceanic plankton. The worst case scenario of this sort of process is, actually, mass extinction and everybody dies. There are less severe scenarios as well, but none of them are very much fun.
So yes, even as the climate chickens come home to roost, the denailists can't keep their bought and paid for (by the…
oracknows | July 31, 2010Two days ago, I posted my utter contempt for the idea of a science section in that cesspit of pseudsocience, New Age woo, and quackery, The Huffington Post. Part of the reason for my scoffing at the very idea that a science section in HuffPo would not rapidly degenerate into yet another outlet for more of the same.
Another aspect of the HuffPo culture that is utter anathema to good science blogging is its culture of deleting critical comments. There's even been a whole blog, Banned from HuffPo, dedicated to discussing and publicizing HuffPo's offenses against free speech. The blogger, Red Dog…
drorzel | July 31, 2010A lot of Twitter energy was soaked up Friday afternoon by a half stupid article by Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Sparked by Sodamageddon, she takes a look at ScienceBlogs for the first time, and doesn't like what she sees:
Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that's not what's bothersome about them. What's bothersome is that the site…
gregladen | July 30, 2010Both Erik Paulsen, my representative to the US congress, and Michele Bachmann, the infamous insane person who represents my neighbors a few blocks away, have elected to vote against worker's health compensation for 9/11 first responders.
And they dare to call themselves Americans!!!
According to my other neighbor, Jim Meffert, who happens to be running against Paulsen:
It absolutely sickens me that Representatives Paulsen and Bachmann were among those who turned a blind eye to the health needs of 9/11 rescue workers. These two should be ashamed of themselves. They denied critical help for…
gregladen | July 29, 2010Bloomberg? NPR? Or FOX?
You KNOW the white house wants to give it to NPR. But they will look so Librul and stuff if they do that, and they are still living in the Squeemish 90s when it comes to that sort of thing (they need to watch this).
So give them the backup they need: Click here and sign the peition!
"FOX News is a right-wing propaganda operation, not a legitimate news organization. Award the seat vacated by Helen Thomas to NPR, which has provided public interest coverage of the presidency and the White House for almost four decades."
Click here
gregladen | July 29, 2010It turns out, Sponge Bob Square Pants Roolz. But never mind that. Keep focused on the racism, it is actually important:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
He he ... she said "girlfriend."
drorzel | July 27, 2010Via Inside Higher Ed this YouTube video is pretty much a distillation of faculty reaction nationwide to higher education's response to the world economic crisis:
The IHE link gives a little more context to the video, and some of the reaction to it. The arguments here are not all well-founded-- science and engineering will necessarily receive more funding than the liberal arts because teaching and research in science and engineering are vastly more expensive than in the humanities, and many of those central administrative salaries are going to support multicultural and mental health programs…
pharyngula | July 26, 2010It's amazing: WikiLeaks has just dumped over 91,000 classified documents from the Afghanistan war on the web. Just like that, we get an actual look at what's been going on over there, unfiltered by the traditional media, and definitely not given a rosy patina by Fox News. Fox New is, of course, treating this as a serious blow to their worldview — which isn't surprising, since reality does great damage to Fox. US Government sources also condemn the release, since it exposes the failures of militarism, and militarism is what the government and its profitable contractors have committed…