There’s an effort to get Lego to put out an HMS Beagle kit. It’s beautiful! All you have to do now is go vote for the Beagle (no cost!), and if it gets enough support, they’ll come out with a set and instructions to build it.
David Petraeus has made a plea deal on the charge of revealing secret military plans to his paramour/biographer, and of lying to federal investigators. He’s getting off with a trivial misdemeanor rather than getting strung up for treachery. Popehat has a few things to say about that.
I knew she would. You can read her post about her speech at CPAC right now.
After my post yesterday about Mike Cernovich’s idiotic recommendations — he claimed, and I quote, If you’re a straight man, you will not get HIV
— he’s been firing back pathetically.
He tried to argue that global warming is a hoax, because it snows in February.
More fabrications have emerged. The latest: he claims to have personally witnessed nuns being executed in El Salvador.
He didn’t.
Two households, both alike in dignity,
On fair Earth, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
(From that great classic play, Romeo and Juliet and an Unnamed Egg Donor)
Let’s compare the scientific relevance of the British House of Lords and the Republican party of the United States.
There are currently concerns about nuclear transfer procedures in human fertility treatments — you may have heard some of the noise in the news about babies with three parents. Cases of mitochondrial disease are passed on from mothers to all of their children, but one way around it is to use donor mitochondria, so woman #1 provides the cytoplasm for a healthy egg, woman #2 provides the nuclear DNA, and a man provides the sperm that fertilizes the genetic material provided by woman #2. That’s three parents, one child.
Or maybe it’s something magical about Bill O’Reilly. We have another example of BillO making stuff up. He wrote a book about the Kennedy assassination, and in it, he claims to have been a witness to the suicide of a fringe character in the story, George de Mohrenschildt.
I was prepared for an amusing story — let’s all laugh at the dumb rednecks! — in this tale of Americans getting outraged because someone in Puerto Rico won the powerball lottery (apparently, that money is supposed to go to real Americans.) I knew that Puerto Rico was a US territory and that the residents were US citizens, so I am clearly superior to those goofs, but then the author answered with a history lesson about Puerto Rico. I did not know most of this stuff.
