Which his excuse for being a dick. See how he lies and cheats:
Monthly Archives: March 2011
Rand Paul: Offensive Moron
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is upset that the federal government has squelched his right to own a super-toilet, leaving him with less freedom than women, who are still allowed to have abortions. It’s an unusual comparison, but it’s meant to underline his opposition to the executive branch’s involvement in encouraging energy efficiency.
In a Senate hearing, Paul laid in to Kathleen Hogan, deputy assistant energy secretary for efficiency, for imposing restrictions and fines meant to encourage people to use environmentally friendly appliances.
Read the rest of this incredible story here.
And the people of Kentucky are, of course, idiots for electing him. And having a Creation Museum. And so on.
Watch the one-termer in action:
Wisconsin: It ain’t over ’till it’s over
What happened in #Wisconsin, and what happens next by Laura Conway:
Last night, Wisconsin State Senate Republicans stripped most public employees unions of most collective bargaining rights. After insisting for weeks that busting the unions was essential to balancing the state’s budget, they broke Governor Scott Walker’s “budget-repair bill” into two parts. One part contained the anti-union provisions, the other the items that Republicans now deemed fiscal.
Read the rest
The Uptake on Wisconsin Senate
Koch Industries Employs PR Firm To Airbush Wikipedia, Gets Banned For Unethical ‘Sock Puppets’ by Lee Fang
Last year, Koch Industries began employing New Media Strategies … ever since the NMS contract was inked with Koch, an NMS employee began editing the Wikipedia page for “Charles Koch,” “David Koch,” “Political activities of the Koch family,” and “The Science of Success” (a book written by Charles). Under the moniker of “MBMAdmirer,” … to distance the Koch family from the Tea Party movement, to provide baseless comparisons between Koch and conspiracy theories surrounding George Soros, and to generally delete citations to liberal news outlets. …
Antievolution legislation in Florida
Senate Bill 1854, introduced in the Florida Senate on March 5, 2011, would, if enacted, amend a section of Florida law to require “[a] thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution” in the state’s public schools. The bill is sponsored by Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5), who in February 2009 introduced SB 2396 (PDF), which would have amended the same section of Florida law in the same way. Before Wise introduced SB 2396, he announced his intention to introduce a bill requiring “intelligent design” to be taught in Florida’s public schools. “If you’re going to teach evolution, then you have to teach the other side so you can have critical thinking,”
“Intelligent design” legislation in Texas
“Disingenuous efforts by creationists to portray themselves as persecuted in mainstream academia for their anti-evolution beliefs are getting a boost from a Texas lawmaker,” reported the Texas Freedom Network in a March 9, 2011, post on its blog. House Bill 2454, introduced in the Texas House of Representatives on March 8, 2011, would, if enacted, provide, “An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member’s or student’s conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.” The sole sponsor of HB 2454 is Bill Zedler (R-District 96).
Republican War On Working Families
Apparently, they voted without the Dems present. Oh hell, who needs teachers and stuff anyway.
Readers, Scienceblogs is Being Attacked! Please help us out!
You may have noticed that Scienceblogs.com has been loading slowly lately. Also, in the “back end” …. where we write the blogs and stuff … the servers have been slow, and eventually, useless. Well, the crack technical team that takes care of these things have determined that we were experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoSA). I have no idea from or for what reason. Anybody out there know?
Meanwhile, the Overlords have asked us to pass on a request for help to you. The IP addresses whence the attacks originate have been blocked. But this means that you may be having problems getting to us. So ….
We’re still working … to get the site 100% accessible again, but in the meantime, we’d like to collect IP addresses from users who are still experiencing problems. Please ask anyone who has brought this problem to your attention to send their IP address to webmaster@scienceblogs.com.
e
To get your IP address you can click here.
Thank you very much.
Jamie Jones on The Anthropology Maneno
I did not have a chance to write about the Anthropology fracas that erupted several weeks ago, and I probably won’t for a while. But Jamie Jones did.
When I met him Jamie was a grad student in the Anthro department at the small eastern college I got my PhD at. He and I taught together and got along quite well, and we were both co-authors on what turned out the be in the top 20 as measured by citation frequency of papers ever published over the last century (or whatever) in the flagship journal of anthropology, which makes both of us pretty hot. Indeed, we are steeped in Ivy League authority so what we say is important.
So, I’ll tell you one Jamie story then turn the discussion over to him.
The faculty and one student, Jamie, were assembled in the Faculty Meeting Room for the usual interrogation. Jamie was explaining to the faculty what he wanted to do his PhD research on. As I recall he had been working on one project but as if often the case, he had to put that aside for one reason or another. His new proposal involved doing something with Orangutans in relation to Life History Evolution, and the way it looked it would take him a couple of years to get all the data from these slow-reproducing slow-growing elusive forest creatures.
You all know Marc Hauser, from my blog and from the news. He was on the Anthro faculty at the time, and he had this comment on Jamie’s proposal, which he interjected with great enthusiasm:
“Jamie, why don’t you just do the same exact research, test the same exact hypothesis, but use rodents! You can get a dozen generations of rat or mice data with large samples and really kick ass. Orangutans will take you forever. You should drop the primate and use rodents instead!”
Jamie paused for a moment and it was obvious to me that he was very carefully considering what to say in response. If he let Marc’s comment pass, or gain any traction, he would end up studying mice. Marc, at that time, had a lot of influence on the rest of the faculty. In fact, most of them sitting there nodding already. If, on the other hand, he openly disagreed with Marc, there might be a fight. The best option might be to make a short but cogent argument against Marc’s suggestion and hope for the best.
So he paused a little more and then said in a firm but quiet voice, with just a little bit of nervous vibrato (calculated I assume to add humility):
“I want to do this with orangs … because I’m a Primatologist.”
Touche.
Anyway, here’s Jamie:
Anthropology: A Bittersweet Love Story
For me, anthropology is the science charged with explaining the origin and maintenance of human diversity in all its forms. To achieve this end, anthropology must be unapologetically grand in its scope. How can we explain human diversity without documenting its full extent, through both time and space, and across cultures? This is the thing that drew me to anthropology, the thing that really made me…
Did Boobquake Cause an Earthquake?
I’m reminded of Boobquake because of this
Obligatory photograph related to Boobquake:
Continue reading Did Boobquake Cause an Earthquake?
Bachmann Caught … Being Bachmann
Acorn Killers Target NPR
The video comes from Project Veritas, and is another in political activist James O’Keefe’s undercover exposes (he most prominently took on ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). In the video, Schiller and NPR institutional giving director Betsy Liley are at lunch in Washington with two Project Veritas “investigative reporters” identified as Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar, who posed as “Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik.” They were allegedly interested in having their organization donate $5 million to NPR. O’Keefe’s organization says the recording was made on Feb. 22.
Huge steaming piles of commentary on this here.
Happy International Women’s Day
From the IWD web site:
International Women’s Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, International Women’s Day is a national holiday.
I remember in the 1980s passing through Nairobi on or about IWD during the Year of the Woman (a UN thing) and seeing slogans on all the busses noting that “A crime against a woman is a crime.
Kenya has lots of misogyny and many women there are treated very badly. On the other hand, there are piles of women in elected and unelected major positions of power, as there are in many African countries. There is a real effort at some levels to support Gender Equity.
At a recent meeting of the Minnesota Atheists, PZ Myers pointed out the dismal state of women as speakers (or writers/bloggers) in the Skeptics community. Stephanie Zvan has written about this as well, as have some others, in recent days. At that meeting, Mike Haubrich suggested that organizations like Mn Atheists should consider doing what the Minnesota DFL does: Have a full-on gender-equity policy. When delegates are elected, half are women. Period. It is not hard, there are lots of women involved (at least there are these days) so there are plenty of nominees. As any man who knows his history can explain to you, Gender Equity policies such as this work.
My point: Kenya and Zaire were way beyond the US in having women in power as far back as the mid 1980s. There are fewer women in Congress today than at various times in the past in the US. So WTF?
What is Feminism?
Courtney Martin examines the perennially loaded word “feminism” in this personal and heartfelt talk. She talks through the three essential paradoxes of her generation’s quest to define the term for themselves.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster.
These masses of ice are now contributing more new meltwater to the world’s seas than all other melting ice combined.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.
The nearly 20-year study reveals that in 2006, a year in which comparable results for mass loss in mountain glaciers and ice caps are available from a separate study conducted using other methods, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 475 gigatonnes a year on average. That’s enough to raise global sea level by an average of 1.3 millimeters (.05 inches) a year. (A gigatonne is one billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds.)
The pace at which the polar ice sheets are losing mass was found to be accelerating rapidly. Each year over the course of the study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 gigatonnes more than they did the year before. In comparison, the 2006 study of mountain glaciers and ice caps estimated their loss at 402 gigatonnes a year on average, with a year-over-year acceleration rate three times smaller than that of the ice sheets.
Total ice sheet mass balance between 1992 and 2009, as measured for Greenland (top), Antarctica (middle) and the cumulative sum of both ice sheets (bottom), in gigatonnes per year, as measured by the two different methods used by the researchers: the mass budget method (solid black circles) and time-variable gravity measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellites (solid red triangles). Image credit: NASA/JPL-UC Irvine-Utrecht University-National Center for Atmospheric Research
This will result in a greater increase in sea level of the medium to long term than previously estimated. Unless you live in Kiribati, in which case you’ll be fine.
Lots more details here.
“God’s Lady Problem”
Jen McCreight writes the blog Blag Hag and became famous last year for attempting unsuccessfully to prove that if a large number of women wore low cut shirts there would be a major earthquake. (It turns out that there was a 7-point-something earthquake on “Boob Quake” day, which requires that the experiment be repeated.)
(It is interesting to note that most people seem to have not noticed that earthquake for some reason. And they call themselves Skeptics!)
Anyway, Jen will be a guest on Atheist Talk Radio this coming Sunday, March 13th.
I predict that if an atheist talks about how god does not cause disasters, on the 13th day of the month, there will be an earthquake of 7.0 or greater magnitude somewhere on the earth later that same day.