John Logsdon hits the big time

Last night at #nwc36 we were talking about evodevo, and one of the topics that came up was the importance of Drosophila reasearch in providing the foundation for comparative genetic analysis…which led to Sarah Palin. Remember Palin’s ignorant mockery of fruit fly research? This is what we get from the Republican party.

Now Michelle Malkin’s blog chimes in with a similar complaint. John Logsdon got an NSF award to study reproduction in snails. WASTE OF MONEY! CUT THE DEFICIT! HOW DARE THEY SPEND MONEY ON SOMETHING SO STUPID!

Malkin’s blogger, Doug Powers, and the majority of the commenters there are embarrassingly ignorant. They quote the award announcement with some annotations.

The study, first funded in 2011 and continuing until 2015, will study the New Zealand snails to see if it is better that they reproduce sexually or asexually – the snail can do both – hoping to gain insight on why so many organisms practice sexual reproduction.

“Sexual reproduction is more costly than asexual reproduction [just paying for the drinks can end up running into the thousands of dollars over a lifetime – DP] [fucking moron – PZM], yet nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs,” the study’s abstract asks.

And then doubles down on the cluelessness.

“Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs”? Seriously?

Yes. Seriously. That’s an important question in biology. Selfish stupid libertarian/republican idiots ought to understand this clearly.

Look at it this way, Doug. When you go to reproduce, you — perfect, powerful, independent, self-serving you — need to go to a mere woman and in order to produce offspring, you only pass on half your genes, and they are mingled with half the genes from your partner. That’s what we mean by the cost of sexual reproduction. You don’t get to produce a literal self-made man: you need to cooperate with a partner, and your genome will be diluted with that of some other person. That other person is using YOU as well, parasitizing off the perfect efficiency of your genes to propagate her patently inferior genes.

Any good conservative Republican ought to be outraged at this state of affairs. Think about it: your God, President Ronald Reagan, instead of cloning himself, had to randomize his genes with some other person and produced a son, Ron Reagan, who is a politically liberal atheist. You ought to be throwing far more money at this problem!

Snails are an interesting choice to study this problem because, unlike humans, they have options to either reproduce in that familiar sexual way, or to do it asexually and essentially clone themselves. The question is why any individual would elect to throw away half their genes each time they reproduce.

If Doug Powers can explain that, he could get published in some big name science journal instead of the blog of an ignorant political hack.

Hey, we should study that choice, too, except we haven’t yet found any molluscs stupid enough to have to decide whether they want to be published on Michelle Malkin’s site or not.

Speaking of terribly rude women…

Now Amina has disappeared.

The 19 year old Tunisian Amina who posted a topless photo of herself with the slogan “my body belongs to me, and is not the source of anyone’s honour” has disappeared. Most likely her family have kidnapped her and taken her to an unknown location, (earlier reports mentioned a psychiatric hospital). What’s clear is that they have removed all forms of communication from her so that she can no longer be reached.

Let’s have a discussion now about how impolitely exposing one’s breasts is a disproportionate response to the dudebros. She should have just had a quiet discussion in private with her imam.

Gosh darn it, it would be the funniest political race ever!

All eyes would be focused on Minnesota if Michele Bachmann tried to challenge Al Franken for his senate seat. Franken knows how to do the sober statesman with the occasional pointed barb just perfectly, and would be an excellent foil for the often deranged Bachmann — I also think Franken’s personality meshes very well with the electorate in this state, while Bachmann is a weirdo who only fits her exquisitely gerrymandered House district…which she came very close to losing in the last election.

Bachmann would go splat against Franken, and the big bonus: she’d lose her House seat as well.

frankenbachmann

I’m making a list of who’s going up against the wall in the revolution

Top of the list: bankers. Did you know this?

Both bankers and their once free-spending wives are suddenly becoming familiar with the art of thriftiness.

That’s part of some money-saving tips for bankers, which is full of rage-inducing suggestions. They aren’t applicable to you or me, for instance, because among them are such jewels as “sell the second home” (I haven’t paid off the first yet! Also, yes I know I’m privileged to be able to afford just the one), fly coach class (yeah, I almost always do), have the wife do the ironing (really, the sexism in this article alone is grounds to start the revolt), take cheaper skiing trips, and here, my very favorite:

The more money you have in your pocket, the more you will want to spend it. “Stop carrying a wedge of cash around with you,” said the ex-Goldman banker. “It reduces the temptation to tip people so much.”

Screw the people poorer than you are!

Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!

Ah, remember the good old days back in 2003 when every right wing blog in the country was proudly reciting that phrase? There was Dean Esmay, and Instapundit, and I recall that even James Lileks was flaunting it on the sidebar to his web page. We had invaded Iraq, and we were victorious, and the cute adorable Iraqis loved America and were asking for all the things we loved in their charming broken English.

It made me wanna puke. It was patronizing colonialism all over again, with every chickenhawk proudly patting themselves on the back for a ‘victory’ gained in bloodshed and destruction.

They aren’t saying it so much any more.

It’s ten years later. The invasion failed to bring democracy or whisky to Iraq, and no, it certainly wasn’t sexy. It was damned expensive: almost 4500 US dead and 32,000 wounded, and so many dead Iraqi civilians, on the order of hundreds of thousands, that every time the topic comes up the right-wingers still start squealing that all the numbers are wrong, no matter what they are.

Eventually, the U.S. spent $60 billion to rebuild Iraq and the special inspector general estimated in its report that at least $8 billion of it might have been wasted. The Pentagon estimates that the long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq cost $728 billion.

It makes me sick every time I consider it, so just go read Charles Pierce’s commentary on the war.

This is the one event on which the country’s chronic historical amnesia cannot be allowed to bring itself into play. The country was lied into a war by a raft of criminals, greedheads, and geopolitical fantasts. These latter were enabled by a cowardly political opposition and a largely supine elite press. Hans Blix was right. Paul Wolfowitz was wrong. Robert Fisk was right. David Frum was wrong. The McClatchy guys were right. The late Tim Russert was wrong. Eric Shinseki was right, and Anthony Zinni was right, and Joe Wilson was right, and George Packer, Michael O’Hanlon, and Richard Perle were all wrong. George H.W. Bush was right (in 1989) and his useless son was stupid and wrong. There is no absolution available to any of the people who helped the country down into this epic political and military disaster no matter how lachrymose their apologies or how slick their arguments.

George W. Bush should spend the rest of his days dogged by regiments of wounded veterans. Richard Cheney should be afflicted at all hours by the howls of widows and of mothers who have lost sons and daughters. Colin Powell — and his pal, MSNBC star Lawrence Wilkerson — should shut the hell up about how sorry they are and go off to a monastery somewhere to do penance for what they didn’t have the balls to try and stop. This catastrophe killed more actual people than it killed the careers of the people who planned it and cheered it on. We should all be ashamed. And we’re not.

None of the people who perpetrated this long national nightmare have ever suffered any consequences for it. They still idle languidly in wealth and respect, drawing encomiums and hefty speaking fees from the extremist think tanks that all also promoted the war. George Bush paints pictures of dogs that he cheerily signs with his presidential number. Meanwhile, Bradley Manning is tortured for their sins.

Every one of those goddamned pro-war media pundits ought to be rounded up and stuffed in Manning’s cell, while he is released. The establishment politicians — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice — who lied us into this destructive debacle deserve worse, and it makes me question the wisdom of our Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, because every day they should be doused in buckets of blood and forced to walk a gauntlet of war widows throwing offal at them. Monsters, every one.

Democracy. Whisky. Sexy. That phrase should fill us with shame.

The difference between us and them

Liberals and conservatives…let’s first consider what we agree on. Rape is bad, mmm-k? It should be stopped, it would be an uncompromised good if the rates declined. We’re on the same wavelength there.

But now we turn to how to fix the problem, and look what happens. The liberal’s eye focuses on the perpetrator, and they suggest we ought to educate them and modify the culture that enables rape to persist. The conservative focuses on the women, and regards the liberal as crazy for not thinking that the victims need to be fixed.

Here’s a beautiful example: Zerlina Maxwell meets Sean Hannity.

And then read how conservative media responded. Read the comments, or go to the youtube video and read the comments there (no, on second thought, don’t.) They all think Maxwell is moronic, insane, stupid, ridiculous.

I think she’s right.

As is typical, the conservatives have this unimaginative, short-sighted view of what it means to tell someone rape is wrong. They’re all imagining a woman confronted by an attacker who then solemnly tells them that they’re committing an illegal act, and expecting them to simply stop. But that’s not what she’s talking about at all.

We live in a culture where boys grow up to be privileged, entitled little shits who think women are pleasure objects for their benefit. Let’s start there and change that. Let’s say that frat boy antics are not OK. Let’s tell media to wake up and notice that women are autonomous human beings, not convenient plot points and MacGuffins. Let’s wake up and realize that valuing women only for the size of their breasts and the youthfulness of their skin is dehumanizing. She’s talking about taking on the difficult task of changing cultural attitudes.

And perhaps we could also have a little more respect for men, too. Most men are as capable of empathy as most women; if we stopped enabling the promotion of facile juvenile behavior as manly, maybe we’d see more responsibility from would-be rapists than someone like Sean Hannity proposing that women need guns to keep him from assaulting them. That’s a surrender of responsibility. That’s a declaration that men are too selfish and stupid to maintain civilized social behavior without the threat of gunfire to keep them in check.

Seriously, Hannity and you other gun-worshippers. Stop belittling my sex so much.

I had a brilliant idea!

I was inspired by this cartoon:

scaliatoles

I have a better plan: appoint Scalia to the papacy. It’s win-win all around: you know it’s what Scalia really wants, it gets a fanatical kook out of the judiciary, and it gives the cardinals exactly the kind of regressive ideologue they really want. His only failing is that I don’t think he has a history of sexually abusing children, but that’s only a rough guideline, not a requirement for the job.

Any of my readers good buds with some high ranking Catholic nabob so they can drop a hint in their ear? I don’t think any of the Catholic bigwigs read this blog, so I’d hate to have such a perfect idea fail to be implemented simply because they didn’t hear about it.