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stcynic | September 21, 2006Found this via Volokh. A white supremacist family that includes the singing duo Prussian Blue has moved from Bakersfield, California to Great Falls, Montana because Bakersfield wasn't "white enough" for them. When their new neighbors found out who they were, they handed out flyers around town with the message "No Hate Here" on them. The family complained to the police, saying this was harrassment. The police explained that the neighbors were just exercising their free speech, much like that family exercises theirs to preach hate. Touche. I thought the flyers were rather well devised:
"This…
tqa | September 21, 2006A senior science reporter at the journal Nature, Declan Butler, put out an urgent request for bloggers to help draw attention to the plight of the Tripoli Six - five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician that are on trial accused of deliberately (as agents of Israel and the United States) infecting 400 Libyan children with the HiV virus while working at a Libyan hospital. An independent scientific review conducted by highly respected French and Italian researchers found no evidence of deliberate infection, but their review was discarded because it disagreed with the conclusions of…
razib | September 20, 2006Declan Butler is urging everyone to get the word out about the Bulgarian and Palestinian medics falsely accused of infecting children with AIDS. I've known about this story for a while, and like a lot of tragedies it has bubbled in the background. The reality is that even doing good in a nation like Libya can get you trapped in the capricious net of dictactorial fiat, and how they maybe be facing execution. Get the word out! Not only are six innocent lives hanging in the balance, but what sort of chilling message will this send to professionals out to do some good in the world where they…
stoat | September 20, 2006News just in... California is suing its own governor over his Hummer... no, of course not. But California sues carmakers over global warming.
California sued six of the world's largest automakers over global warming on Wednesday, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have caused billions of dollars in damages. The lawsuit is the first of its kind to seek to hold manufacturers liable for the damages caused by their vehicles' emissions, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. It also comes less than a month after California lawmakers adopted the nation's first global warming law…
tqa | September 20, 2006As you may have seen over at Pharyngula, we've got some creationists running for the school board out here. That's not a good thing, but a few different events over the last couple of weeks have given me a lot of hope for this state.
Right now, I'm not very worried about the anti-evolution school board candidates - at least not the two that have made their positions known (Henry Hoeft and Brian Kessler). Right now, they are two of the fifteen candidates running for three "no departmental residency" seats on the board. The field will be narrowed from fifteen to six after the primary election…
stcynic | September 20, 2006Moderate Republicans are pushing a bill that would stick to the substance of the Geneva Conventions and Bill Frist says he and other White House allies will filibuster it even though it has majority support.
With Congress scheduled to adjourn in nine days, delaying tactics such as a filibuster could kill the drive to enact detainee legislation before the Nov. 7 elections, a White House priority. Bush faced still more problems in the House, where GOP moderates Christopher Shays (Conn.), Michael N. Castle (Del.), Jim Leach (Iowa) and James T. Walsh (N.Y.) publicly threw their support behind…
purepedantry | September 20, 2006Check out this story ala Shelley about a drunk man who bit a panda. "Hey, pandas are not for biting buddy."
stcynic | September 20, 2006Here's a great clip from the Daily Show about Bleu Copas, one of the many gay Arabic translators to be booted out of the military for being gay at a time when the military admits there is a major shortage of people with that specialty. The clip includes uber-nutball Paul Cameron rambling incoherently about gays. He goes on about soldiers being raped, and about how gay translators might be distracted from finishing a translation if a "reasonably attracted man" was "in the vicinity".
purepedantry | September 20, 2006I was kind of wondering when they would start something like this. For the uninitiated a Wiki is an online text that anyone can edit. It has links within it to other articles forming a web on constantly changing information -- sort of like an encyclopedia only better. The most famous Wiki is Wikipedia -- which I think is a wonderful resource, but since it is based on the premise that anyone can edit it can sometimes have notable errors.
Anyway, some professors from the University of Georgia are trying to applying the idea to textbooks:
So, what's this Global Text Project about?
It's an…
stcynic | September 20, 2006In the interests of expanding my audience and appealing to the hip hop generation, I have translated my blog into Snoop speak using the Gizoogle translator. The results are here.
cortex | September 20, 2006Thomas Friedman's take on energy policy grows more urgent by the day. In his latest column (Times $elect), he aims at American agricultural subsidies for sugar farmers. If I could eliminate one government subsidy or tariff - here the effect is equivalent - this would be it. Not only are we paying farmers to make us fat - the last thing our food needs is more sugar or corn syrup - but we are preventing the importation of cheap ethanol and hampering the development of impoverished tropical countries, whose sugar farmers can't compete with artificially cheap American sugar. It's not often that…
nisbetmc | September 19, 2006
For readers who are interested in learning more about the communication battles over science policy, I gave the following talk to the American Institute of Biological Sciences back in May, and now AIBS has posted a video of the lecture, complete with an interactive version of the powerpoint slides. My friend Chris Mooney leads things off with an introduction, and then I take over with a "big picture" overview, complete with polling and media data I have gathered over the past few years. Many of the themes written about at this blog are discussed in depth as part of the talk. Chris thinks…
tqa | September 19, 2006...the South shall rise again. If they get better intelligence, anyway.
Senator Saxby Chambliss (the Vietnam-era "bad knee" 4Fer who sleezed into his seat by attacking Max Cleland's patriotism in 2002) just provided us with a prime example of his own credentials as a patriot. A Confederate patriot, that is:
When sources first contacted HOH, they thought they remembered Chambliss say, "We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we'd be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln."
In fairness, I should probably mention that Chambliss' office claims that this is a…
stcynic | September 19, 2006You don't even need a comment on this story. It stands all by itself.
At a closed door meeting of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said that with better intelligence the South would have won the Civil War, today's Roll Call is reporting...
According to Roll Call's source, Chambliss said, "We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we'd be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln."
A spokesperson for Chambliss said the story wasn't correct and that what the Senator actually said said was, "If Gen. JEB Stuart had had better intelligence, we'…
drorzel | September 19, 2006I'm vaguely relieved that I didn't make the Top Five in the Nerd-Off. Just to prove that I'm still plenty nerdy, though, here are a few links:
First, a new(ish) physics grad student blog, Tales from the Learning Curve, by Jen Fallis. I noticed her blog a while abck when she ran into everyone's favorite troll, but I haven't gotten around to linking her because I'm lazy. Sorry.
Of course, every silver lining has a cloud: Dylan Stiles is shutting down his blog. As Derek Lowe notes, it's probably the right thing to do, but I'll miss his irrepressible chem-dork posts.
Finally, via RRResearch (via…
stcynic | September 19, 2006You gotta love this article in Slate about the failure of government anti-pot propaganda.
Since 1998, the federal government has spent more than $1.4 billion on an ad campaign aimed primarily at dissuading teens from using marijuana. You've seen the ads--high on pot, stoners commit a host of horrible acts, including running over a little girl on a bike at a drive-through. Or a kid sits in the hospital with his fist stuck in his mouth.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the arm of the federal government that funds research on drug…
j7uy5 | September 19, 2006Now we learn that the keys that open Diebold voting machines are widely available on the Internet. These people are fools. The nutty thing is this: Diebold also makes ATMs. Are their ATMs constructed with such shoddy security? Probably not. What does this mean?
stcynic | September 18, 2006Man, Orin Kerr is working John Yoo like a speedbag right now. In his latest post at Volokh, he finds yet more evidence of Yoo's utter hypocrisy in defending the Bush administration's attempts to expand executive power. He provides this transcript of a portion of a talk Yoo gave at the Cato Institute in 2000:
First, I think, in order to achieve their foreign policy goals, the Clinton Adminisitration has undermined the balance of powers that exist in foreign affairs, and have undermined principles of democratic accountability that executive branches have agreed upon well to the Nixon…
stcynic | September 18, 2006If you want to see how perfectly meaningless the phrase "politically incorrect" (a phrase that actually was useful for the first couple weeks after it was invented) has become, check out this post by wingnut extraordinaire Debbie Schlussel. She's talking about a new Monopoly game which replaces their old iconic metal figures with ones more relevant to today and she writes, "Remember the classic race car? It's been replaced by a politically correct Toyota Prius." When you can describe a car as politically correct, you've reduced the phrase to nothing but a pointless epithet that means "…
stcynic | September 18, 2006Came across a link to this article by David Horowitz about "indoctrination" on college campuses (which really means "they're teaching things I don't like on college campuses"). He claims that the article is about "the active suppression of conservative ideas", and I know of a few genuine examples of that happening (the number of conservative speakers hounded off campuses and not allowed to speak is quite high, which I think is inexcusable). But listen to some of his examples of what he consders "active suppression":
Another form of ideological suppression conducted by faculty ideologues was…