At last, you too can understand how our government works.
Be sure to listen through to the end and catch the request for donations. Giving Weiner the money to buy explosives sounds like a total win to me.
Oh, lord, what have we done to deserve the affliction that is Michele Bachmann? I’m beginning to think there is no god up there. Her latest joyful promise to the extreme Right is a set of promises for what she’ll do as president.
Tonight, Michele Bachmann became the first presidential candidate to sign a pledge created by THE FAMiLY LEADER, an influential social-conservative group in Iowa. By signing the pledge Bachmann “vows” to “uphold the institution of marriage as only between one man and one woman” by committing herself to 14 specifics steps. The ninth step calls for the banning of “all forms” of pornography. The pledge also states that homosexuality is both a choice and a health risk.
You can find a more complete list of her vows here.
So now she wants to ban all forms of pornography? She’s going to have to define it, first, since my personal definition of offensive porn includes sadomasochist degradation of non-consensual partners, which means we’re going to have to ban the Republican party, and Bachmann herself is going to get life in prison.
Oh, wait, I just saw this other weird part of her vows.
Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born in to slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African- American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.
I don’t understand the message she’s trying to get across here. “Slavery: Not So Bad As Freedom?” Or is she making a pledge to re-enslave all the black folk and force Mommy and Daddy to live together and raise their children?
We already know how unethical and sleazy Murdoch-owned media are — and now, if you’re in the UK, you should be aware that he’s making a grab to take control of an even larger slice of the media pie.
Murdoch already controls more of our media than is legal in many countries – and is notorious for using his power to skew our politics. The official consultation ends this Friday — let’s tell the government we don’t want his media empire to control our largest commercial broadcaster. Send a message now — using your own words to make it stand out — calling on Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron to refuse Murdoch’s BSkyB deal until there’s a full Competition Commission review and a full public inquiry into phone hacking.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation already owns 40% of British newspapers and 40% of BSkyB, the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster. In the US, Australia and elsewhere this degree of media dominance would not be allowed. News Corporation has admitted responsibility for hacking the phones of politicians and celebrities, and now stands accused of listening to messages of a murdered 13 year old girl. But our government wants to give Murdoch power over half of our media, allowing him to then squeeze out his rivals one by one.
There’s much more information here, and also something you can do: a letter-writing campaign has begun to request the British government to block the monopolistic acquisition of the network BSkyB. Contribute!
Sadly, an Indian health minister has gone on record calling homosexuality a “disease”.
For the Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, men having sex with men (MSMs) is not only “unnatural” but also a “disease.”
According to Azad, “this disease has come to India from foreign shores”, and Indian society needs to be prepared to face it. Unfortunately, he said, the number of “such people” is increasing by the day.
All gay people are alien immigrants from Gaydonia, I guess, and no natives of the subcontinent could possibly be gay. Unless maybe they’re from Pakistan.
I think we could make a legitimate case for calling homophobia a disease or mental illness, though. All you have to do is browse this sampling of homophobic comic books to see that there is something just wrong with those people. The bizarre, crude work of politician Brent Rinehart alone makes a disturbing case for institutionalizing the wackaloon.
I had no idea that gayness gave you superspeed and that rainbows trailed behind you wherever you went, but if it were actually true, it would be awesome. Except for the children of the corn who’d be pursuing you all the time.
Bernie Sanders gave a wonderful speech to the senate. Here’s the conclusion:
So, today, I am asking the American people that, if you believe deficit reduction should be about shared sacrifice; if you believe the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations should be asked to pay their fair share as part of deficit reduction; if you believe that, at a time when military spending has almost tripled since 1997, that we begin to take a hard look at our defense budget; and if you believe the middle-class and working families have already sacrificed enough, I urge you to make sure that the President hears your voice–and he needs to hear it now.
I would urge the American people to go to my Web site, sanders.senate.gov, and sign a letter to the President letting him know that enough is enough…
I would like to vote for Bernie Sanders for president in 2012. Can someone convince him to run?
It’s been a rough weekend. It was a rough night, with little sleep. This morning I had the double whammy of a doctor’s appointment and a dentist’s appointment. So I’m feeling a little cranky, and my teeth are all coated with this gummy gritty cherry-flavored fluoride goop. You don’t want to cross me today.
And then some idiot going by the name ‘eident9’ charges into a year-old thread and first demands an audience with me, and then demands an apology. WTF? This is a blog. Just post your comment and be done with it. And what bug has crawled up his butt suddenly? He says, “Recent matters have reminded me of this board.” Which had me wondering. What matters?
I’ve found out. It seems Russell Crowe had a twitter tantrum over circumcision. He’s against it. So am I. But apparently, I am not sufficiently angry about circumcision, and I belittled people who make it an obsession. I’m not going to apologize for that; I consider circumcision to be needless cosmetic surgery and a barbaric practice, and I’m not going to condone it, but neither am I going to go off the deep end like that guy and consider my life ruined by it. A majority of American males have been circumcised, and we’re a randy, raunchy, sexed-up lot who don’t seem to be suffering from an epidemic of sexual inadequacy. Well, maybe eident9 is, but one frustrated guy does not an epidemic make.
Now Salon has followed up with an article that suggests that circumcision may actually have some health benefits. I am not impressed. They cite a couple of incomplete epidemiological studies in African populations for HIV infection, and they come up with some astounding figures: a 50-60% reduction in infection rates. Wow, with that kind of advantage…sign me up.
However, these are deeply flawed studies. None of them were completed: they all abandoned the protocol and stopped the research as soon as preliminary results gave them positive values. This is like shooting craps and announcing that all your dice throws were practice…until you get a good roll, and then, yeah, that was the real deal. That one counts.
They all overstate their results. That 50-60% reduction was in relative rate, in comparison across the two groups. The actual calculated protection in absolute terms conferred by circumcision was a 2% reduction in the likelihood of infection. That doesn’t dazzle me, either, and given that the studies were terminated when they got their best results, I’m not persuaded.
And finally, give me a plausible mechanism for how circumcision would achieve these remarkable gains. Tell me how it is supposed to work. If it’s something to do with hygiene, it seems to me that better sex and health education should have the same or better effect than lopping off bits of skin.
So to my crackpot complainer, I say no apologies. I also say as I always have that I oppose circumcision, think it is a pointless and petty bit of suffering to put children through and ought to be discouraged, but I also don’t think it’s as hideously damaging as the obsessive nuts want to claim. Also, in the context of the original post, I consider it a prime example of selfish privilege to invade discussions of female genital mutilation, which does cause serious sexual and medical problems, with demands that we pay more attention to the lesser concerns of males getting lightly scarred penises.
This is a German scandal: Sylvana Koch-Mehrin was recently found to be guilty of extensive plagiarism in her doctoral thesis, such a blatant abuse of scholarship that the University of Heidelberg took the remarkable step of revoking her doctoral degree. Before that happened, she had been marching up the ladder of the European political cursus honorum, reaching the rank of vice-president of the European Parliament until her disgrace forced her to resign.
But now a very odd thing has happened: this ex-scholar, this impeached student, this deplorable fraud has been appointed as a full member to the Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy of the Parliament. I don’t get it. She’s screwed up so badly that she’s been tumbled out of a prime political position, so the Parliament turns around and elects her to the committee that oversees research policy? Doesn’t this suggest that the Parliament cares little for competence and integrity, but loves it some cronyism?
Scienceblogs.de has more information and a petition demanding her resignation. Support good science and science policy and throw the rascals out.
Matt Taibbi is giving me nightmares. Read his long political biography of Michele Bachmann, with this terrifying conclusion.
Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more “viable” boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it’s Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.
It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera’s dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.
Now watch the cartoon. Get ready…”When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
She’s done. She’s been on this cross-country bus tour to promote her folksy ways, and now she has quit halfway through. This is a woman with a very short attention span and a complete lack of discipline and focus; she couldn’t complete her governorship, she can’t finish a bus tour, there’s no way she could cope with a grueling presidential campaign. And if, by some bizarre fluke, she were to actually get elected, I think she’d get bored halfway through the presidential oath of office and decide to go moose hunting, instead.
I often pick on Texas — that is one screwed-up, backwards, insane state, you know — but just for a change I thought I’d mention a few good people working there and doing what they can to improve the dump.
Aron Ra, of course, who is one of the best purveyors of scientific information on youtube.
Dr Michael Soto, who is on the Texas State Board of Education and is one of the few people there who promotes teaching kids good science instead of that hackneyed medieval crapola other board members peddle. Keep him on the board, please, and elect more like him.
All the scientists working in Texas universities who do a fine job doing and teaching science. To represent them all, I’ll just cite the biology department at Sam Houston State University, which goes against the political grain and makes a clear statement about evolution:
We unequivocally support evolutionary theory, which has gained unwavering support by scientists who acknowledge that scientific validity comes only as a result of hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and replication by others. It is this respect for the scientific method and scholastic integrity that has convinced the scientific community that evolutionary theory and the work of Charles Darwin are one of the most important of our time.
In short, we acknowledge that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky 1973).
All the fierce readers of Pharyngula from Texas who are fighting the good fight. You can take a bow in the comments.
Keep on battling!
All right, because everybody is reminding me in the comments, I’ll also recommend The Atheist Experience. I wasn’t trying to be exhaustive, there’s a swarm of good Texans out there!
