Politics
sa smith | June 7, 2010The key to my obnoxious cheerfulness are my expectations. They are very low. I expect nothing from anyone. Thus when they fail miserably (say, the BP clean up) Im not disappointed. And, when people accomplish even the most menial tasks, Im happy.
That being said, the Oklahoma City Council actually approved, 8:1, an OKC Gay Pride Parade.
:-D YAAAAY!!!
Wow, gay pride parade in OKC! What a time we live in!... But what about that one dissenter. Whos that one "NO!" vote...? That fellows name is Brian Walters. Im sure you all have NO IDEA why he voted against it:
The reason I voted no on…
palmd | June 7, 2010I'm not sure what to write about this, but I feel a need to write something. There has been an interesting and infuriating discussion going on at Jason and Zuska's blogs.
Jason, whose posts on learning and cognition rock, started the discussion with an examination of a small amount of scientific literature on pornography. He's young, so he might not be aware of the extensive literature going back at least 25 years, including writings of Dworkin, MacKinnon, and many others. There's a lot of it, some of which I've read, but not for a very long time.
He starts by wading into a deep swamp…
grrlscientist | June 7, 2010tags: BP Fails Booming School 101, Gulf oil spill, political commentary, humor, outrage, political commentary, teaching, oil spill boom, Gulf of Mexico, BP oil spill, British Petroleum, streaming video
BP Fails Booming School 101, creating an environmental disaster and is failing to take the lead in cleanup. BP claims they "are prepared" to deal with such things as an oil spill -- if they are so prepared, then why is this happening? This video shows that, contrary to BP's lies about their preparedness, they actually are NOT prepared AT ALL. Unfortunately, our federal government is also…
drorzel | June 4, 2010Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the shared heritage of Western civilization, so most of it is pretty predictable. I was surprised by one thing in their list of commonly assigned books this year, though:
What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses),…
grrlscientist | June 4, 2010tags: BP's Spilling Fields, oil spill, Gulf of Mexico, humor, comedy, social commentary, BP oil spill, British Petroleum, Jon Stewart, Wyatt Cenac, streaming video
"BP gave up on getting the oil out of the water a LONG time ago. Now the challenge is to get the water and dead shrimp and stuff out of the oil."
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Cenac - The Spilling Fields - Oil Leak Containment Ideas
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Tea Party
Watch the entire episode.
esiegel | June 3, 2010"Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great." -Comte DeBussy-Rabutin
As many of you know, I'm not around for the rest of the week/weekend, as I'm off competing in the USA Beard & Mustache Championships!
But I wouldn't feel right without leaving you something to tide you through to next week, so here goes.
Image credit: ©2012-2013 ~Hitman35mm, via DeviantArt.
As unbelievable as it may sound, 100 years ago, this is what we thought the entire Universe was. Our collection of stars, known as the Milky Way, operating under Newton's Laws of…
catdynamics | June 3, 2010A pair of papers just out show a mysterious absence of acetylene on Saturn's moon Titan.
Combined with a net flux of molecular hydrogen to the surface, this provides a tantalizing hint that there might be biochemistry taking place, with methane as the working fluid and hydrogen and acetylene as the primary energy source in a reductive metabolism.
Such a metabolic cycle was suggested five years ago by Chris McKay at NASA Ames.
The data, from NASA's Cassini Mission shows two hints of peculiarities.
C2H2 - acetylene is missing from the mix of nitrogen, methane and hydrocarbons seen in Titan's…
oracknows | June 3, 2010It occurs to me that I haven't written about this topic in quite a while, but a recent event makes me think that maybe now's the time to revisit this topic. I'm referring to Holocaust denial. Newer readers may not know that part of what got me involved in online discussions back in the late 1990s was Holocaust denial. Indeed, a lengthy post about how I discovered Holocaust denial was one of the earliest substantive posts on this blog, popping up a mere month after I started blogging, which just so happened to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. That post…
drorzel | June 2, 2010Sean Carroll is miffed about a science-and-religion panel at the World Science Festival:
The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners -- Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies -- as well as two scholars of religion -- Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with any of those people, but there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we're right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could…
pharyngula | June 2, 2010What did America do to deserve this? Nancy Pelosi exposed her vacuous brain at a conference.
At a May 6 Catholic Community Conference in Washington DC, Speaker Pelosi openly touted Jesus Christ, "The Word Made Flesh", as the inspiration for her public policies. CNS News reports a couple of her more powerful statements:
"And that Word," Pelosi said, "is, we have to give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the Word. The Word. Isn't it a beautiful word when you think of it? It just covers everything. The Word."
"Fill it in…
drorzel | June 1, 2010Thinking from Kansas, Josh Rosenau notices a correlation in data from a Daily Kos poll question on the origin of the universe:
Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of Republicans agree (38 think it's more recent, the rest are undecided). I've said it before and I stand by it: conservative Republicanism is incompatible with science.
But looking at the finer details tells us a lot. The only group - gender, race, or region - with anything like the Republicans'…
jrosenhouse | June 1, 2010On most issues my politics are decidedly left-wing, but there is one big exception to that. That exception is Israel. On the subject of Isreal I get very right-wing.
When I look at Israel I see a Western-style democracy that has achieved extraordinary things in just sixty years. Their universities and technological achievements are among the most impressive in the world. They have achieved a standard of living for their people that puts the surrounding, mostly despotic, Arab regimes to shame. This they have done while facing relentless terrorism and threats to their existence from…
cevans | June 1, 2010As NASA's Space Shuttle program winds down -- Endeavour's final mission is slated for later this year, then that's it -- let us take a moment and remember the Shuttles. Sure, they had a tendency to explode into balls of fire. Sure, they were expensive, risky, and besieged by problems. But now is not the time for criticism: 25 years of American engineering, 132 missions, and over 20,000 orbits of this planet are nothing to shake a stick at. It is in this spirit of recognition that Universe presents a very subjective chronology of the Shuttle's greatest moments. Onward!
Gene Roddenberry, Star…
grrlscientist | May 30, 2010tags: BestiFlokkurinn, Besti Flokkurinn, politics, Reykjavik, Iceland, social observation, Jón Gnarr Kristinsson, ferrets, humor, funny, satire, offbeat, streaming video
"We are the best" -- this satirical video is made by Iceland's Best party, endorsing comedian Jón Gnarr Kristinsson for Mayor of Reykjavik in 2010. Among his campaign promises? Iceland's very own polar bear, wow! (Nevermind that the last polar bear was a self-delivered visitor that was shot almost immediately after it stepped onto land)
Jón Gnarr Kristinsson speech at the end looks eerily of Hitler, then I discovered that…
pharyngula | May 30, 2010Look at this: BP knew about problems at that burning oil rig 11 months ago. They screwed up with bad decisions in the short interval immediately before the explosion, but documents have come to light showing that they were worried about "loss of control" months before the disaster — and what they did in response was to ask for delays in testing (which they got), and then they fudged the tests by using a lower pressure.
This is basically criminal misconduct. But hey, what's the point of getting upset over 11 deaths and a mere environmental catastrophe? We need the oil. Let's just help the oil…
grrlscientist | May 29, 2010tags: Former NYC Mayor Giuliani, Ferrets, and Freedom, politics, NYC, NYC Life, social observation, pets, ferrets, humor, funny, satire, offbeat, streaming video
Here's another set of videos for today's Silly Saturday. These videos take a closer look at the battle between former NYC Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and the ferrets (and ferret owners) of NYC after he banned them as pets. Shortly before 911, Giuliani was awarded the dubious title of "most hated Mayor in the United States," although I am not sure it was due to his position on ferrets as pets.
In 1999, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani hosted a…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010
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When Jessica Palmer gave a talk at the "Unruly Democracy" conference last month, she gave what appears, from her after-the-fact blog post excerpted here, to have been a semi-contrarian take on blogospheric civiility:
What I did endeavor to convey in my brief talk was the difficulty of blogging on interdisciplinary borders, where science meets art and the humanities. My big concern? While individual blogs often have communities who are internally civil and share norms and history, when you move from blog to blog, those norms and history break down. There are no universal norms in the…
grrlscientist | May 28, 2010tags: Inside a School for Suicide Bombers, Taliban, brainwashing, mind control, suicide bombers, propaganda, religion, cults, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy takes on a terrifying question: How does the Taliban convince children to become suicide bombers? Propaganda footage from a training camp is intercut with interviews of young camp graduates. A shocking vision.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in…
drorzel | May 27, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on DIY U
"Eleemosynary institutions have real and serious flaws, but they exist to empower the weak. They are necessary to empower the weak. If you rend them asunder, you will expose the weak to the predations of the strong. This is so fundamental that I'm surprised it even needs to be brought up. If it weren't scandalously unethical, I'd propose an experiment: take two sets of kids who barely got through a weak school district. Send one set to the local community college, and tell the other set it's free to educate itself under digital…