Nov 15 2008
You know that $700 billion bailout? Did you know the Federal Reserve gave $2 TRILLION in emergency loans? And they won’t say who that money went to? That’s your money.
Google is better than the CDC at following flu epidemics.
PZ writes about Mormon support for Prop 8 in CA.
Obama includes gender identity in his employment non-discrimination policy for his administration.
Sep 06 2008
Indexed expresses a little anger with an awesome Venn diagram.
Hollywood’s five saddest attempts at feminism. [via Feministing] Lays out how those “strong” female characters are so very disappointing.
Some Iraqi’s have no hope left:
do you know
that your tomorrow
has no tomorrow?
that your blood
is the ink
of new maps?
Unsurprising news of the day: Many women leave the church because of its “’silence’ about sexual desire and activity, and because of its hostility to single-parent families and unmarried couples.” [via A Spritely Oolong]
Sciencewomen point to an awesome statement by Michelle Obama:
I was raised to believe I could do it all, and that was very empowering. Then I got into the work force and realized there was really no support for me to do it all. … We either have to fix that or be honest about it.
An awesome video - my new crush raps about the LHC.
Aug 30 2008
Lots of interesting science this week:
Le territoire des sens featured this beautiful image recently:
And John Hagee tells men that taking care of their children will earn them a toasty spot in hell. (via Feministing)
Jul 06 2008
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.
Jul 04 2008
From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.
[T]here is no mystery or symmetry needed to explain why the air is spread uniformly in a room. Each atom moves randomly, it is just the statistics of enormous numbers. Perhaps the greatest nightmare of the Platonist is that, in the end, all of our laws will be like this, so that the root of all the beautiful regularities we have discovered will turn out to be more statistics, beyond which is only randomness or irrationality.
This is perhaps one reason why biology seems puzzling to some physicists. The possibility that the tremendous beauty of the living world might be, in the end, just a matter of randomness, statistics, and frozen accident stands as a genuine threat to the mystical conceit that reality can be captured in a single, beautiful equation.
Jun 06 2008
That’s how right-wing crap works. It’s not meant to advance or even partake of discourse; it’s meant to end it. One can argue the worth of Hillary’s policies or her voting record or her position on the war till the cows come home; but when she’s reduced to being a bitch, that pretty much ends the discussion. And when it’s as pervasive as it’s become in the past decade, its effects are paralyzingly toxic.
These numbers are particularly maddening given how debilitating the condition can be: Women with really bad vulvodynia can become unable to walk, wear pants, or sit without pain, and it can last for years or even for a lifetime. Imagine, by contrast, how the medical community would approach a disorder that made any friction unbearably painful for one in six penises.
Now I do speed read. Sometimes I miss the nuance of a sentence and need to go back because it is too complex to fly through so quickly. This one I staggered through several times not because of speed but out of sheer goggling.
Pharyngula reminds us we’re all going to hell.
May 01 2008
Temperatures are expected to be a bit cooler in the next decade due to natural cycles, but after that, the current too-fast rate of warming will continue. Hopefully people pay attention to articles like this instead of saying “well it’s been really cold the last few years so global warming can’t be a problem.”
Some scary things have happened on the supreme court in the past few years. Do something about it.
Nuclear power has some serious problems. Like nuclear waste. Also, it’s got a wicked high carbon cost.
The new poll tax.
Dave Neiwert on Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and things Americans don’t like to talk about:
It’s human, of course, to want to think of yourself as a good person, and your country as a good country. Which is why it’s human of white Americans — the descendants and beneficiaries of the people who perpetrated these atrocities — to want to forget that these things happened. And they want to believe that because these events were in the past, and they took some initial steps toward reconciliation 40 years ago, the issues should have gone away, and if they haven’t, well, it’s the victims’ fault.
Choosing to buy bottled water may lead to having to buy bottled water as our municipal water supplies go bad. So don’t buy bottled water.
This is definitely what those crazy churches’ retreats are like. It’s terrifying that there are so many people who’ve been taught not to think.
And in the same vein, religion is child abuse.
Good science education is important for everyone. An English TA comments on a student paper: “I personally have lots of reservations regarding evolution (even scientifically).” This is appalling. As one scientist put it
“Imagine a teaching assistant writing, ‘I personally have lots of reservations regarding the fact the Earth is round.’”
You may have heard Ben Stein recently claiming that “science leads to killing,” specifically that it led to the Holocaust. A powerful refutation of his nonsense.
My period might save your life.
Someone needs to tell the Swiss government that plants could care less about their dignity.
Compassionate conservative Douglas Bruce calls immigrants “illiterate peasants.”
Obama and Clinton tap into anti-intellectual sentiment.
In Britain, donkeys get more government support than women.
Feb 09 2008
My school newspaper recently published an article on the debate surrounding Roe v. Wade. I wrote a letter to the editor in response. It was not published. This confused gem about “liberal politics” did make the cut, though. While I’ve discussed most of the things I bring up in the letter already on this blog, I think it’s a decent summary of a big problem in the abortion debate.
Anti-choice activists claim that they are trying to save lives by fighting to make abortion illegal. In fact, criminalizing abortion does not reduce abortions; it kills women. A study published last October in the Lancet found that abortion rates were not affected by its legality. Some may argue that criminalizing abortion is the right thing to do even if it does not actually affect abortion rates. This stance is inhumane. Almost 70,000 women a year die from unsafe illegal abortions. A year after Nicaragua placed a blanket ban on abortion Human Rights Watch published a report, “Over Their Dead Bodies,” documenting the results of the ban. This report found that women were dying because of the law. Many pregnant women with complications are afraid to seek treatment in case they are accused of attempting to induce an abortion and doctors are not giving abortions to women who will die without one. If anti-choice activists were truly “pro-life,” they would join hands with the pro-choice movement to promote policies that reduce unwanted pregnancy – comprehensive sex education in schools, forcing insurance companies to cover family planning services and providing public funds for this effort, and ensuring easy access to emergency contraception. Unfortunately, most anti-choice activists do not support these actions. Like many religious fundamentalists, they seem far more concerned with controlling women and punishing them for having sex than saving lives.
Sep 05 2007
I think stories are incredibly important, especially the ones we tell about our lives and our collective past. They make absolutely horrible experiences bearable and often meaningful. Pain without a purpose is terrifying. The Royal de Luxe tells stories to cities with giants. It is storytelling on a very grand scale.
Each time Royal de Luxe plays a new location – and this was their Scandinavian debut – Jean-Luc Courcoult, the company director, writes a story especially for the people of that place, a simple story that will reach deeply into their trove of archetypes yet be understood by children under 10. It must be performable by the Giants, too, who are between 20 and 40 feet high, made of carved wood and operated not only by cranes but by numerous actor-technicians manning pulleys and ropes, swarming all over the marionettes. Learning this, one might assume there was a lid on the expressive potential of the Giants. There is, but not in the way that springs to mind. And which is more important? What a giant marionette does, or how it makes you feel watching it? “For years, I wondered how one could tell a story to an entire town,” Courcoult has said. “On a plane to Rio, the idea of using out-size marionettes came to me… People have believed in giants since the year dot. Every culture on earth has stories about them. I find the giant more powerful than God or religion – because it is more make-believe yet more human.” [link]
Jul 15 2007
Some people say that there shouldn’t be hate crimes laws:
The bill directly violates freedom of religion in this sense as it declares moral disapproval to be unacceptable.
“And they’re saying what’s why they killed him. Because he was gay. And he wasn’t gay,” said Thomas Hall. “I don’t know any crime on the planet that deserves that type of punishment.” Court papers show Gray and King brutally attacked, then photographed Hall. King hit him with his boots at least 75 times. The suspects told police they dragged Hall down the steps, loaded him into Robert Hendricks’ truck, and dumped his body in a ditch. They say they went back two days later, and found Hall in a nearby field. That’s when they tell police they wrapped the body in a tarp and hid it in Gray’s garage.
Either these people think that brutal murder is an acceptable form of “moral disapproval,” or they are confusing hate crime with hate speech.
Hate-crime laws are never about hate speech per se. They are only about acts that are already crimes. Now, certain acts of speech — particularly threats and intimidation — are the subject of criminal sanction already in the law, so if these crimes are committed with a racial, religious, or gay-bashing motive, then it is possible for some speech to be considered a hate crime.
But the core principle is this: The First Amendment has never covered criminal acts, because crimes are never a form of free speech. You can’t kill someone and claim it was an act of political protest, at least not under Western law as we know it.
These acts are still crimes whether or not the motive is considered, so why should the motive be considered and make the sentence more severe? For one, hate crimes hurt an entire community. If a man you know is tortured to death for being gay (or because someone thought he was gay), you understandably might do your best to appear not gay. If someone from your place of worship is killed for being a member of that particular religion, you may stop attending or talking about your faith.
And that is what hate crimes, in the end, are all about: Taking away the rights and freedom of our fellow citizens, denying them the right to participate in the community where they reside and forcing them to live as shadow citizens. People opposed to hate-crimes laws are, at rock bottom, profoundly anti-freedom.
An example of the fear and restriction a crime against someone you don’t even know can have (Via Feministing):
i thought about her on the train ride to work. and by this, i mean i thought about her and i thought about myself, in that we’re both women. as far as we know at this point, she was merely a young woman in a parking lot - i am that woman a lot of times too. and these horrible moments in time, regardless of how long the odds of them happening to any given woman are, exist for all women in the sense that we know it could happen to us. that we could walk out of a Target at 7:10 pm on a saturday and not make it safely to our cars. that we could be the victims of such terrorism, such pointed destruction, such punishment.
Hate crimes laws don’t just protect the queer community - they protect even Christians, who are often the ones most violently opposed to the laws.
the fact that the crime itself — arson against a place of worship — is backed up by a serious law carrying stiff penalties demonstrates once again how important hate crimes laws are in protecting everyone’s rights. The same laws that protect synagogues and mosques are now being brought to bear to defend the Victory Family Church and its members.
Hate crimes laws are also important because when no one speaks out specifically against these crimes, the perpetrators feel like their community actually approves. Often, the most outspoken opponents of hate crimes laws are Christians on the far right. This isn’t surprising considering the racism, sexism, and homophobia of some of their most beloved leaders (Via Majikthise).
But for Falwell, the “questions of the day” did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality–nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement
Even now, the Right defends the “white, Christian, male power structure” (via Feministing).
