gravity’s rainbow

Losing your house because the economy sucks?  Hoping to vote for someone who’s going to do something about the sitution?  Guess what?  The Republicans are going to make sure you don’t [via Feministing].

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,”

Bonus points if you can guess what racial group is disproportionately affected.  Surprised?

Share/Save

From what I observed growing up in the South, I’d say this has a lot more to do with racism than class.

Sarah Palin charged rape victims for their own rape kits.  As Majikthise puts it

Do fraud victims have to pay for forensic audits? Do banks have to pay the police to watch the security video after they’ve been robbed? Of course not. There is absolutely no way in good conscience that a mayor could force victims to pay for the own rape examinations.

A great analogy to the creationist argument [via Pharyngula]

The theory of childhood, also known as child origin, is a damnable, loathsome and indefensible lie. How can any thinking person suppose all humans used to be babies once? Just consider these arguments:

There is no development path from babies to adults, no transitional forms between these two species. Show me even one baby with the head of a grown man on his body. Can you? No? Not even a bearded toddler? No adults with unfused skullbones, outside unfortunate disorders? Not even a tiny little newborn girl suddenly sprouting a respectable bosom? You can’t find them, because they don’t exist. There isn’t a single transitional form between children and adults, and you will never find one because the theory simply is an unscientific lie.

A fantastic new blog-find: LundBlog.

Warmongering

Share/Save

The latest A Softer World comic:

PZ Myers points to a video of Sarah Palin telling an Assembly of God church that the Iraq war is “a task from God.

Obama answers some important questions about science and policy.

Dooce tells Republicans to live up to those compassionate principles:

Because Leta was diagnosed with plagiocephaly when she was two months old, she cannot qualify for private insurance until she is thirteen years old. So the only insurance we can get her is high-risk insurance that costs us upwards of $300 a month. Just for her alone. And even then that insurance won’t cover anything until she has reached a $3000 deductible. I am fortunate enough to have grown up in a white, middle class family who could afford to send me to college, as did my husband, and we have enough work experience to run a business that makes it so that we can afford this insurance for our daughter. We don’t have to make the choice between buying food or insuring our daughter. We are really fucking lucky.

Edge of the American West points out some problems with Palin.

The BBC interviews Republicans.  I’m very very embarrassed to share a country with the people interviewed: ["My belief in the Bible informs my politics."]  Really embarrassed.

Oh, and Russia is making the EU pretty nervous.

Share/Save

Dave on right wing crap

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.

Vulvodynia

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.

Liz is frustrated with Exodus

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.

Angry Astronomer on the state of sex ed.

Share/Save

Georgia: even more of a backwater than you thought.

Read a book, plant a tree. I need a lot of these.

You don’t believe in evolution. You just believe it.

To believe in something takes faith, trust, effort, strength. I need none of these things to believe evolution. It just is. My health is better because of medical research based on evolution. My genetic code is practically the same as a chimpanzee’s. My bipedal feet walk on an earth full of fossil missing links. And when my feet tire, those fossils fuel my car.

I was told that Australia was wider/larger than the continental US. But that’s not true! They’re just about the same size. The continental US is 8,080,464.25 km² and Australia is 7,617,930 km². Whew! I was worried about my knowledge of geography for a few days.

World’s best headline: Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens. And it just gets better. This reporter is angry, and rightfully so.

Neither is Boehner likely to be helped by a Senate ethics committee decision yesterday exonerating Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) over his use of the “D.C. Madam’s” call girls. The Senate cleared him because the prostitution occurred when he was in the House — and the House can’t punish him because he left for the Senate. The madam, meanwhile, killed herself by hanging last week.

Dear animal rights activists against all animal testing, you aren’t allowed to go to the doctor ever again.

You thought Jeremiah Wright was a problem? John McCain refuses to renounce a man he calls a moral compass even though he argues for the murder of millions of people, just because they’re Muslim.

Ok, so maybe this is the world’s best headline: Great tits cope well with warming.

Share/Save

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.

Share/Save

Siberia is melting fast and so is Antarctica

Fox news: Democrats are mommies, Republicans are daddies

No frogs + no bats = serious bug problems

Dolphins give their girlfriends flowers too

Cheney doesn’t give a fuck

Velorution (why doesn’t my school do this?)

Male pregnancy

The monogamy delusion

Follow the money - which politicians get money from oil companies

The music biz and the moral high ground

Philosophy of university beaurocracy

Share/Save

Poor Brazilians figuring out who’s really screwing them over

A very addictive game

John McCain is a hypocrite

John McCain thinks I’m a baby machine

Another university goes after the people who aren’t really cheating

A song to brighten your day

It’s a computer, it’s a mouse brain!

Frida Kahlo, survival, and the stories we tell ourselves

Survivor: scientists edition

UNC drag show pictures

Poorly trained campus police + assault rifles = dead students

Pulp fiction cover art (and atheists)

A very big squid

Rapid evolution of a plant in Montpellier

US “democracy” in action

Share/Save

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.

Share/Save

Rachel Carson inspired the environmental movement with her book Silent Spring. Her 100th birthday was earlier this year and lots of celebrations were held in her honor. But our government’s attempt to honor her impact didn’t go forward.

Sen. Tom Coburn derailed approval of a Senate resolution honoring the life of Carson, whose 1962 book “Silent Spring” warned of the dangers posed to wildlife and humans by the pesticide DDT and who is credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement.

“Rachel Carson’s work both directly and indirectly created a climate of hysteria and misinformation about the impact of DDT on the human populations,” said John Hart, a spokesman for Coburn, in explaining why the Oklahoma Republican withheld his support for the plan to honor her.

And we wonder why it’s so hard to get people moving on issues like climate change. This guy wants to bring widespread DDT use back. Of course, he probably recognizes the dangers, but he’s probably getting paid to say things like this. You’d think as a doctor he’d care a little more about the health of his constituents.

Share/Save