In order to avoid doing something about pollutants, the White House simply refused to open the email from the EPA. (via The Scientific Activist)
I really hope we don’t invade Iran. (via pebkac thoughts)
You know how US soldiers were tortured by the Chinese during the Korean War? Well, we’re using the same techniques on Iraqis. (via Gadfly)
The “good old days” weren’t good.
Beautiful Darren Waterson paintings at Le territoire des sens.
Yasumasa Morimura dressed like famous female movie stars and photographed himself. (via Manolo’s Shoe Blog)
Reminder from Angry Astronomer: prayer is bullshit.
Congress still pushes for abstinence only funding. The ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson says it best:
It’s hard to imagine a good reason why, in these tight economic times, Congress would intentionally flush taxpayer dollars down the drain by spending them on disproven, ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. We are floored that they continue to ignore study after study, and the consensus of the public health community, all concluding that these programs censor vital health care information, teach gender stereotypes, discriminate against lesbian and gay teens, and in some cases promote religion in the classroom in violation of the Constitution.” (via Feministing)
Pharyngula links us to abiogenesis in a nutshell.
Tags: abiogenesis, abstinence, art, bush, darren waterson, environmentalism, epa, iran, iraq, politics, racism, religion, sex ed, torture, yasumasa morimura |
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While the price of birth control pills on college campuses in US has skyrocketed this year due to Bush’s Deficit Reduction Act, Brazil is looking to prevent unwanted pregnancy by subsidizing the pill. If our politicians really were interested in reducing abortions, they wouldn’t make it so difficult to prevent pregnancy.
Bill O’Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the “No Spin Zone,” but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.The IU researchers found that O’Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.
Tobias & Bush, Torturing Africa With Abstinence
Back in April 2004, Tobias sparked a controversy by declaring, at the Berlin Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS that “Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective… It’s been the principal prevention device for the last 20 years, and I think one needs only to look at what’s happening with the infection rates in the world to recognize that has not been working.”
Regardless of whether he actually believes in such ideological positions or not is irrelevant; Randall Tobias has been one of the leaders spearheading a Bush Administration push to shift US international family planning policies towards a “faith based” approach and re-channel US foreign aid away from secular organizations and towards religious groups that, per one major survey, are predominantly Christian. Starting as head of US global AIDS policy and moving up to head USAID, some would go so far as to call Tobias a leader in an international war on woman’s reproductive rights.
Duck and Cover
while the United States demands that other countries end their nuclear programs, the Bush administration is busy planning a new generation of nuclear weapons. Nearly 20 years after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the United States is allocating more funding, on average, to nuclear weapons than during the Cold War. The Bush administration is pumping this money—more than $6 billion this year—into renovating the nuclear weapons complex and designing new nuclear weapons. Such hypocrisy is one of the main obstacles to nuclear arms reductions because it runs the risk of shattering the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in which the nuclear-armed states pledged to begin the process of disarmament if the non-nuclear states opted not to pursue the deadly technology.
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