So, we have some interesting activities that people should join us for.

One, Dawkins joins us here at UVA November 3rd and 4th and we should get together to see his talk. Maybe bitch at him, maybe not, I haven't decided if I like this new atheism idea he has, it sounds like work.

An Inconvient Truth will be playing Thursday Nov 2nd 6:00pm at Newcomb hall.

And next Tuesday I say we spend the night in the bar watching election returns and drinking in celebration or misery.

What say you Give Uppers?

Oh, and after the elections I'll share with you my dream.

Our dear leaders have made a quantum leap into total insanity, with word that they are expanding "abstinence-only" funding to focus on horny 19-29 year-olds.

If you think it's hard convincing a 16 year-old still living with his parents and struggling with trig homework to keep it in his pants on a Saturday night, just think how hard it's going to be to convince a 25 year-old with his own pad and a freaking job. Most everyone thinks they've earned the right to bone in peace by that point.

The funniest thing to me, however, is that the guvmint's apparent reasoning for funding this education (and how are they going to educate all of us loose-moraled twenty-somethings, btw? I mean, I am so not in school anymore) is that the greatest increase in pregnancies by unmarried women is in the 19-29 age range.

Um -- call me crazy -- but I would think the greatest number of pregnancies by any women at all would be in the 19-29 age range. That is when most women, most of the time, tend to get pregnant. Peak childbearing years, those -- regardless of marital status. Durn those crazy facts!

The Times this morning has an article detailing some of the recent work in studying the link between caloric restriction and aging. Briefly, studies in organisms all up and down the evolutionary tree have shown that a reduction in daily caloric intake leads to an increase in lifespan, as well as an apparent increase in quality of life. In some of the lower organisms, they've even worked out a mechanism, and (of course) higher organisms (i.e. us) have varieties of all of the genes involved in the system.

Now they're seeing that monkeys on a reduced diet (less overall calories, but still nutritionally complete) have lower incidence of arthritis, cancer, etc, and they look and act far younger than their counterparts that eat more. Of course, getting people to eat less won't be an easy sell, but with the mechanism known it should be fairly straightforward to develop an artificial means to stimulate the system. Take this pill once a day and live an extra twenty years!

I think we'd all agree this is a good thing - who wouldn't want to feel healthy for longer? Well, Leon Kass for one:

As appointments with death are postponed, says Dr. Leon R. Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, human lives may become less engaging, less meaningful, even less beautiful.

"Mortality makes life matter," Dr. Kass recently wrote. "Immortality is a kind of oblivion - like death itself."

How about an idea: those who don't want to live longer don't have to take the drug. I nominate Dr. Kass to leave this planet a little sooner. I'd like to stay healthy longer, thank you very much.

This weekend several of us at Give Up Blog went to see Jesus Camp at the Virginia Film Festival (which had one of its best years yet).

This was an interesting movie, that depicted the authoritarian teachings of Becky Fischer, and her indoctrination of pre-adolescent youths through her summer camp. We had blogged about what her teachings sounded like before and their frightening resemblence to madrasses. But what is interesting is that in the movie, Fischer says that is her specific goal - indoctrination at the youngest possible age in order to insure that her kids, like the ones in madrasses, will "lay their lives down" for Jesus.

It starts by showing several of the kids about to attend meeting Fischer as she travels about promoting her camp and her youth ministry, and then shows these kids being "educated" by their homeschooling parents. The parents, using creationist textbooks, weren't only teaching the kids not to believe in evolution, but also that global warming was unimportant, and that science itself was unable to explain anything. This homenoschooling was worse than what Buck has been seeing on wife swap, because they were literally giving these kids a denialist education, not based on learning facts, the scientific method, or even a history of discovery but a set of tools they could use to glibly attack science whenever they hear it. It was the best argument for either forcing standards on homeschooling, or forbidding it I have yet seen.

The kids they profiled are great, they're smart, mature, and heartbreakingly damaged by this upbringing. Forced to doubt every natural impulse or desire to enjoy life for a focus on religion. One girl speaks of dancing and how she must concentrate on dancing for Jesus and not dancing "for the flesh" and she couldn't have been older than 11 or 12, which is a bizarre thing to be thinking about at that age. Kids at the camp were told to stop telling ghost stories because they didn't glorify Jesus (a common theme when just about anything fun was engaged in). Also, the tendency to stress the importance of obedience in the girls popped up several times in the movie.

Then the kids go to camp (which before they arrived was carefully blessed by the ministers who prayed over the chairs, the projector, but also Powerpoint, which was hysterical). They immediately start with a sermon in which Fischer attacks Harry Potter and says he essentially should be killed for being a warlock, and how none of the kids should read him no matter how much he fights for good, then proceeds to break down the childrens' spirits. The ministry focuses on making them cry, and shake, and speak in tongues, and repent sins, and oppose abortion, and generally create the ego collapse that is critical for any cult indoctrination. There is no discussion about the teachings of Jesus, the sermon on the mount, the need to protect the poor, to feel love, to prevent war, etc. It instead is about asking the kids to die for Jesus, and they quite clearly are being raised to be warriors, not peacemakers, as the generation the ministers hoped would be the one to bring back Jesus.

There are a few things about this movie that are frightening, like when Fischer basically says she wants to replace Democracy with a Christian theocracy, but I've got to say, I'm not as concerned as most. There were also many things I thought were funny as hell, like the idolatry when they pulled out the cardboard cut-out of George Bush and had the kids worship it. They all became commandment breakers and it was hysterical. I also loved the unintentional hilarity of Fischer saying that, "It's the devil that goes after children" when that was her specific stated goal throughout the movie which she follows very carefully.

But in terms of what this means for our country? Not much. This is child abuse, certainly. There is no excuse for this kind of treatment of children, which is essentially using the classic methods of cult conversion to create mindless followers. They had everything, the music hammering throughout the process, the pressure to conform (which kids are especially sensitive to), the breaking of the kids ego, instilling feelings of worthlessness, and then the emotional catharsis through the worship and renewal. They call this getting the spirit in them, but really what it is is brainwashing, cult-style.

What Fischer doesn't realize is that cult mentality is somewhat fragile when it conflicts with the modern world, and she's set most of these kids up for a major crisis when they get older. The mindset she creates is so opposed to modernity that unless these kids withdraw to the point they're practically Amish, eventually they are going to crack. They will have to be sheltered from the world completely, essentially for their whole lives and well into adulthood for this mindset to stick. That means no public education, no friends not from the church, no secular activities away from a group to prevent the chance encounter with a Harry Potter fan, no college (unless it's Bob Jones - but they can't house all these poor souls), no TV, no movies, no magazines, no books (unless they're Christian-themed) etc. The state that is created is fragile, and once they start getting in those teenage years and the hormones kick in and the brain starts seeing the bullshit, the same thing will happen with pretty much every seriously indoctrinated person I've ever met. They'll either crack, or totally withdraw. They simply cannot interact with the modern world, and while they'll vote for assholes like George Bush, they can't interact well enough with nonChristians or even non-Evangelical Christians (which the kids would say belonged to "dead" churches because they don't shout in services) in order to be politically effective. And look at their so-called Christian leaders. Kuo's new book exposes their relationship for what it is. The Republicans they elect don't believe in this garbage (with exceptions like Brownback), but they use it to rile them up and get votes to cut taxes. Then when it comes time for "faith-based initiatives"? The budget gets cut, and the Evangelicals are ignored until the next election cycle.

These people, through their rejection of the modern world just reinforce their powerlessness. This will lead to two things: increasing political irrelevance and a greater tendency towards violence. We are certainly looking at our future terrorists, but not our future leaders.

Everyone has probably seen the kerfluffle over Rush Limbaugh's criticism of Michael J. Fox and his ad for Missouri's Democratic candidate, namely that he was faking or not taking his drugs.

Well, Crooks and Liars has the video of his interview with George Stephanopoulos, and I gotta say, Limbaugh is a total asshole. The camera pulls back several times during the interview and the problem is obvious.

Fox is on his meds. His meds are the problem. During the video the symptom you see is Levodopa-induced dyskinesias, not Parkinsons (although he shows a little tremor when he raises his hands). A side-effect of long term use of Levodopa are just those exaggerated movements that make Fox practically have to sit on his hands to keep them under control.

Limbaugh is a real asshole for this one.

As per tradition, the folks here at Give Up! gathered last week to carve of the gourdian flesh. Without further ado, here's the crop of this year's pumpkins:

There's the Reverend Doctor's Borat: [Rev Dr. Ed: You don't like my pumpkin I get execute.]

Princess Threepio's Stephen Colbert:

My George Orwell:

And the collection of all of them, including Casmall's Kim Jong Il:

And don't forget to check out last years pumpkins including Dick "go fuck yourself" Cheney and Harriet Myers (it was topical).

They're busted again!

The latest is that they've been labelling all information in their contracts and filings that would show how they've been scamming their government "business proprietary" so they can avoid oversight.

The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found that Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root Services routinely marked all information it gave to the government as proprietary, whether it was or not. The government promises not to disclose proprietary data so a company's most valuable information is not divulged to its competitors.

By marking all information proprietary — including such normally releasable data as labor rates — the company abused federal regulations, the report says.

In effect, Kellogg, Brown & Root turned the regulations "into a mechanism to prevent the government from releasing normally transparent information, thus potentially hindering competition and oversight."

If you ask me that is their proprietary business model and it explains why they're profitable. Their model is screw the military, screw the US, screw the soldiers, screw the taxpayers, profit above all else. I say let's get a rope and deal with these war profiteers the old fashioned way.

Polling on VA Sen is showing good signs for Webb with a dead heat with Felix Macaca Allen.

And with ads like this:



it's only going to get better. That's the best political ad I've seen in a long time.

Tenacious D and the pick of destiny was awesome.



You know why I really loved it? No boring love interest. Just rock.

Everyone should check it out when it hits the theaters.

Today in the festival we've got a bunch of Robert Duvall stuff, and Jonestown. But really I'm just waiting for Sunday for Jesus Camp and The Dark Crystal.

Oh, and in case you thought Tenacious D was being a little sexist, they did make this for the ladies.

The latest is a Florida lawmaker who has been calling other lawmakers on the phone and leaving racist and threatening messages.

For months, state Rep. Rafael Arza has ducked accusations that he repeatedly used a racial slur. But last Saturday night, according to authorities, he was caught using the derogatory term for a black person on another legislator's voice mail, and what has been a long-running sideshow here has come to a political climax.

...

In a statement, Arza apologized for the phone message, blaming it in part on drinking. He is expected to be reelected on Nov. 7.

Quit blaming the booze! When non-racist people drink they don't call people up and yell racial slurs. They also don't blame all wars on the Jews, fondle little boys, or embezzle funds. Drinking doesn't make you a bad person, it only reveals the crappy person within.

And has anyone heard about this anti-Ford ad the Republicans in put out against Harold "I hate gays" Ford in Tennessee? Yeah, I think Ford is a fucking tool, and I won't be too upset if this guy's political career ends early, but playing the jungle-drums? C'mon, that's messed up.

And then there's this RNC ad which uses the whole "Black Harold Ford will fondle our white women" angle:



And here I thought the Republicans had disavowed their racist Southern Strategy.

That's what I think of when in the course of your job you help somebody else do something you might personally disagree with, because it's your freaking job.

Pharmacists who deny access to birth control because they disagree with it based on their medeival morality, should lose their job.

Doctors who refuse to provide the care that patients want, not for legitimate medical reasons but on moral judgements about their patients choices, should lose their job.

And now, cabbies who refuse to transport people carrying alcohol because it conflicts with their religion, should lose their job.

It's your freaking job people, do your job!

New Jersey, despite paying out more in federal dollars than they get back, far more than any other state, has decided to show they believe in basic human rights.

If only every state would follow this example, or even a majority of the blue states.

Here in Virginia they've added a ballot-initiative designed to prevent two people of the same sex from forming contracts that in any way create similar rights as a marriage. It's so retarded my head hurts, who tries to pass such unconstitutional laws? Then my brain kicks in and I realize it's just a way to drag George "Felix-Macaca" Allen's supporters to the polls.

I'm so embarrassed for Virginia right now. It could almost be a blue state, we elect Democrat governors who have balanced the books and started investing more in infrastructure, but we're held back by gay-bashing right wingers, we've got one of the few remaining obviously racist senators, we've got all the crazy evangelical leaders like Robertson and Falwell in Alexandria and Virginia beach, it's just a mess. Maybe one day soon, Virginia will decide to join the modern world rather than just dip a toe in.

We forgot to celebrate the 18th of October as Give Up Blog's 1st anniversary. Here was our first post on Harriet Miers, teen pregnancy and abortion.

It's been a good year. We've jumped to a Technorati rank of 23-25k, and consistently get about 80k hits a month. One of these days I'll get off my ass and install a real tracker that will tell me how many are unique and where they come from, but for the most part people find us from my misbehavior on the Scienceblogs, occasionally Kos, the Hitler or Coulter quiz of course, and when we get linked for things like our denialism post which generated a lot of interest.

I will endeavor to come up with some new maps and update some of the older ones for which there is new data. Happy Give Up day!

KBR, the evil wing of Halliburton (and damn that's evil) is wasting money right and left. Somehow I knew this NY Times article would end up being about KBR.

Overhead costs have consumed more than half the budget of some reconstruction projects in Iraq, according to a government estimate released yesterday, leaving far less money than expected to provide the oil, water and electricity needed to improve the lives of Iraqis.

The report provided the first official estimate that, in some cases, more money was being spent on housing and feeding employees, completing paperwork and providing security than on actual construction.

Those overhead costs have ranged from under 20 percent to as much as 55 percent of the budgets, according to the report, by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. On similar projects in the United States, those costs generally run to a few percent.

The highest proportion of overhead was incurred in oil-facility contracts won by KBR Inc., the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, which has frequently been challenged by critics in Congress and elsewhere.

...

The report did not explain why KBR’s overhead costs on those contracts - the contracts totaled about $296 million - were more than 10 percent higher than those at the other companies audited. Despite past criticism of KBR, the Army, which administers those contracts, has generally agreed to pay most of the costs claimed by the company.

I think I can tell them why, KBR is nothing but a bunch of war-profiteering criminals who would be strung up if it weren't for their connections to the Vice President.

The NYT has analyzed LiebesBush's statements over the last few years and the result is LiebesBush will say anything at any time if it suits him politically.

A close examination of hundreds of Mr. Lieberman's statements on Iraq over the past five years shows that while he repeatedly praised President Bush, he was far more likely to criticize him. But those critiques dropped off markedly in the last two years, even as the insurgency in Iraq gained strength.

At the same time, Mr. Lieberman made negative comments about fellow Democrats three times as often as he made positive comments, particularly after his failed campaign for his party's presidential nomination in 2004.

Near the end of this year's primary, Mr. Lieberman ramped up his criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the war, and soon after his loss, called for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign. More recently he has called for "bringing the troops home." Yet he continues to strongly oppose setting a timetable for withdrawal, echoing the position of the White House.

As the battle of interpretation continues, The New York Times sorted 362 of Mr. Lieberman's war-related comments since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks into content-related categories, and found that he has alternated his arguments about the parties and the war's prosecution, shifting tone at critical points as political circumstances have evolved.

Saying he has been "shifting tone at critical points" is just a nice way of saying, "Lieberman will say whatever it takes to get elected." Especially considering his more left wing statements before the primary and his shameless appeal to GOP voters subsequent to losing the Democratic nomination.



The question is, which is the real LiebesBush? I think the picture above indicates it's the Republican LiebesBush.

Following MyDD's lead.


--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

After bad news about the benefit of drug-eluting stents Johnon and Johnson and Boston Scientific aren't going to be happy about the news that drug-eluting stents, besides not being significantly more effective than non-coated stents, are generating safety concerns about risks of clotting in the drug-eluting stents.



A stent is used to open up an artery, usually the coronary or carotid vessels, that has become stenotic or closed, and restore blood flow. The problem is that after the vessel is opened, cells from the vessel wall will often proliferate and migrate into the stent causing the vessel to become stenotic or occluded again. The solution, many thought, was to coat the stents with drugs that would prevent proliferation and clotting. Bad news though, the drugs don't seem to be providing a significant benefit (news from the NEJM articles), and may actually increase the risk of clotting long-term.

From Business Week:

They're listening now. Over the past two years, doctors have noticed that patients with the new stents sometimes suffer fatal heart attacks months or years after the devices were inserted. At her nonprofit laboratory, the cvpath Institute in Gaithersburg, Md., Virmani, 64, has vivid microscope slides showing why: The victims' stents are totally blocked by clots. New analyses of the data from clinical trials, reported at a meeting last month in Barcelona, show that such late-occurring clots form more often with the new stents than with old bare-metal ones. In its own trials with its Cypher drug-eluting stent, J&J's Cordis division said in a written response that five patients have had late clots, compared with zero for bare-metal stents. The company says the difference is not statistically significant, but that "it is an important clinical challenge.

Prominent cardiologists like Nissen are calling for a large, long-term trial to figure out the size of this problem. The Food & Drug Administration terms it "a small but significant increase in the rate of death" and is convening a panel to examine the risks. Cardiologists estimate that the drug-coated stents may be causing 5 to 15 more clots per 1,000 people than the bare-metal stents. That's not a big number, but such a clot "is a catastrophe," explains Dr. Robert S. Schwartz of the Minneapolis Heart Institute; "100% of patients will have an infarction, and 20% to 40% will actually die. With millions of stents, that's a lot of catastrophes--10,000 to 30,000 patients per year."

And from the Times article:

Today’s reports, presented on Day Three of the annual Transcather Cardiovascular Therapeutics show here at the Washington Convention Center, included results from independent re-evaluations of death and heart attack data from clinical trials. The trials had been conducted by from Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and a third company, Medtronic, whose Endeavor stent is sold in Europe but has not yet been submitted for approval in the United States.

There was also new data from two major studies in Europe, which tracked the outcomes for thousands of patients treated in Spain, Italy and Germay.

Reporting surprising findings from one of those studies, Dr. Alaide Chieffo, a researcher from Milan, said that Italian and German doctors who tracked more than 3,000 patients with drug-coated stents from 2002 through the end of 2004 found that the drug therapy widely thought to protect such patients from clotting had no beneficial effect after the first six months.

Many doctors, particularly in the United States where the drug-coated stents until recently represented nearly 90 percent of the market, commonly put patients on a regimen of aspirin and the anti-clotting drug Plavix for a year or longer. When Boston Scientific and others first reported evidence that long-term clotting seemed to be a rare but real risk with drug-coated stents, they said that risk could be managed by continuing that drug regimen.

Time to reconsider drug-coated or drug-eluting stents as a therapy. They are more expensive, require a more expensive drug regimen, and may not be providing a significant benefit, despite high-hopes they would be a revolution in percutaneous coronary interventions.

It looks like Obama can be divisive too, apparently some even think he's the antichrist.

Damn, that was a short honeymoon period.

According to an article published in Science on Friday, when given math tests, women who are not confronted by negative gender stereotypes out-perform those who are.
Maybe we should also stop telling men that they are naturally more violent.

In other news, we might actually get textbooks in pubic schools. Republican Bill Crozier, a candidate for Okalahoma state superintendent of schools, has officially gone on record saying that public school students should have books. No, not to read, to deflect bullets during school shootings. Now that's compassionate conservatism. He points out that we wouldn't need to invest in new books for the kids, used textbooks will work just fine. Maybe we could send some to the troops.

-DevilBubbles

Promising news in the generation of insulin-secreting beta cells of the pancreas from stem cells that may replace the cells damaged in Type I (or insulin-dependent) diabetics.

The generation of insulin-secreting beta cells from ES cells has not been easy (review) but these and other recent results indicate it's just a matter of tweaking the system. I think it would be easier to generate the cells via embryoid body aggregation and subsequent purification of beta-cells via a selection gene or sorting process.

Either way, the prospect of progress in generating a cure for diabetes from ES cells is far more likely than Parkinson's or Alzheimer's cures, simply because this idea we're going to shove ES cells or their progeny into the brain and create anything but more of a mess seems unlikely. I wish advocates for ES cell research would focus more on Type I (also called Juvenile or insulin-dependent) diabetes simply because it's something that shows promise for being the easiest disorder to cure with these cells (except maybe some hematologic disorders). Significant progress towards a real cure would likely lead to more public acceptance of the technology, or at the very least, would make the vocal minority of critics shut up. After all, the pancreas is not that complicated an organ, and the beta cells don't even necessarily have to be placed inside the pancreas, all they would need is access to some blood supply and they could act as a cellular insulin pump, monitoring the blood sugar and releasing insulin as needed.

Deregulating utilities doesn't work. Stop acting like the market is a solution to problems already. We tried these ideas, they failed and nearly destroyed the country. We have regulation, in almost every case, because of failures of the market. This deregulation crap is just repeating history.

Oh, and if you want to see me antogonize libertarians, it's a hobby of mine I pursue in various forums.

I'll take Obama.

He's inexperienced, but hell, he can win. And I'm still pissed at Hillary for criticizing my Grand Theft Auto.

Bush assembles his generals to provide window dressing for his continued failure to address the catastrophic idiocy of his Iraq policy. Meanwhile, Moqtada al-Sadr's militia has gone ahead and fulfilled the last requirement of civil war, that is, seizure of a geographic territory, if only briefly.

And Shiite Iraqis, more disturbingly, support Sadr's militia as they see it as more effective in protecting them from attacks by Sunni insurgents. So, we're in a catch-22. We cannot secure the country by disarming the militia, since the people aren't being protected by the Iraqi government and there is popular demand for the militias to remain armed. We either need to dump 200k more troops there to actually secure the country, or make the Iraqi security forces capable of providing security. If we can't realistically meet either of these two goals (and I think it's clear we can't), it's time to leave, now.

So, driving around Virginia today and I see this.



I apologize for the poor quality since it was a phone-pic, but let me point out the features of this photograph.

First, the circle around the American flag, we've got a patriot.

Second, the square around the "support our troops" ribbon. I consider this a pretty ridiculous statement, since it isn't like anyone doesn't "support our troops", or that having this ribbon actually leads to more support. But hey, he likes the troops, we get it.

Third, the underlined sticker is a Confederate flag. Note the complete idiocy of putting a Confederate and U.S. flag on the same car, kind of an oxymoron in flag form. But hey, he's a southerner, they think we don't know it's just a not-so-subtle indication of racism (people from the South know that "southern pride" is just a pathetic cover story).

Fourth, and most beautiful, the arrow points to a "Has it been 4 years yet" bumper sticker! Holy crap! The uber-patriotic, Confederate flag loving, support-our-troops guy is asking when we can kick Bush to the curb!

The Republicans are in trouble.

After spending yesterday discussing feminism and literature/violence with three lovely feminist ladies I feel inspired to report on this article in Science on stereotype threat - the finding that reminding susceptible groups to stereotypes about them impairs their performance in various ways. In this case, it was stereotype threat in a cohort of women. Since it's a subscription article I'll paste liberally.

Here's the abstract:

Stereotype threat occurs when stereotyped groups perform worse as their group membership is highlighted. We investigated whether stereotype threat is affected by accounts for the origins of stereotypes. In two studies, women who read of genetic causes of sex differences performed worse on math tests than those who read of experiential causes.

So, how was this study designed?

Our studies manipulated participants' beliefs regarding the source of gender differences in math and measured their subsequent math performance (Fig. 1). In study 1 (7), women undertook a Graduate Record Exam–like test in which they completed two math sections separated by a verbal section. The verbal section contained the manipulation in the form of reading comprehension essays. Each test condition used a different essay. Two of the essays argued that math-related sex differences were due to either genetic (G) or experiential causes (E). Both essays claimed that there are sex differences in math performance of the same magnitude. Two additional essays served as a traditional test of stereotype threat. One essay, designed to eliminate underperformance, argued that there are no math-related gender differences (ND). The other essay, designed as a standard stereotype-threat manipulation (S), primed sex without addressing the math stereotype. Controlling for performance on the first math section, we used analyses of covariance to demonstrate that women in the G and the S conditions exhibited similar performances on the second math test (F < 1). Women in the E and the ND conditions, although not different from each other (F < 1), significantly outperformed women in G and S conditions (all P values ≤ 0.01).

So, simply put, if you interrupt somebody's GRE with an essay on how women are genetically inferior in math skills, or merely made them think about their sex, they performed more poorly (ostensibly because the identification of poor math skills with women is pervasive) when subsequently tested in math, and the control group, either not reading about being women or reading how women are just as good at math genetically performed better. Here's the figure:



To summarize figure one women who were presented with stereotype-threat got 20-50% more answers incorrect than the control groups (and the results were statistically-significant by a wide margin).

This is very interesting and shows how important it is to consider that when "math is hard" Barbie came out, people were pissed at feminists for demanding that the doll be fixed. Well, here's proof the feminists were right. When you tell women that they aren't good at math, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And, as we discussed before this applies to other susceptible groups.

From today's Post:

Larry the yellow Lab sleeps on a memory foam mattress. Paddy the Irish wolfhound laps from an automatically refilling water dish. Olga and Oslo, two Rhodesian Ridgeback-mix puppies, sprawl on a radiant-heated floor in Zen-like bliss.

They are among 80 homeless hounds inhabiting a new animal shelter that is ritzier than many day spas. These mutts exude the contentment of society housewives detoxing at an ashram, soothed into near total silence under a glass skylight skimmed by cascading sheets of recirculated water, the room aglow with daylight streaming through glass walls and thrumming with piped-in harp music.

[...]

Pet lovers find the "holistic" shelter inspirational. Workers show no embarrassment over a place fancier than many of their homes. But Haisley knows he must defend it.

"Of course, people will say it's nicer than some shelters for people," Haisley said, stopping to scratch Tate, a Labrador retriever mix, between the ears. "I understand that, but I don't run a human shelter. And if I did, it would have all this.

I'm sure it would.

In case you didn't know already, God is retarded.

Seriously, if He's been inspiring Rumsfeld we're going to have to put him on the short cloud.

...he's a good man.

Casmall informed me of this bullshit article from the Scientist about a week ago, and I figured it was just a matter of time before someone picked it up and mocked it, or worse yet praised it as Jake Young at Pure Pedantry did. Don't let Jake's Scienceblog status fool you, he's a sucker for any inversion - that is any article that seems to throw a commonly held belief on it's ear - and was similarly suckered by the H2 superior to Prius nonsense being peddled as science by a PR firm a few months back.

Anyway, this article is entitled "Sizing Up Bush on Science: Is the 43rd President of the United States really science's worst-ever enemy?" and is a pathetic apologia for the vehement anti-science of the Bush administration. I think, after reading it and based upon Casmall's suggestion, we should approach it as a denialist argument. After all, the data is in, this administration is the worst for science, ever.

Let's do it!

On a typical day in the Oval Office, the US president, tired of simply watering down reports and testimony that contradict something he supports, decides to simply disband his scientific advisory positions. Along the way, he eliminates the office of presidential science advisor.

To many of the scientists who have been bemoaning what they call an attack on science by the current administration, led by George W. Bush, this may sound like a scenario from the not-so-distant future. It's not. Richard Nixon declared "war" on cancer and established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but he also severely punished scientists who didn't share his views.

The author, McCook, starts with a red herring that is so bad it actually hurts her argument. Are you really trying to justify the current president's behavior because Nixon did it too? And Daddy Bush? This is a pretty silly way to begin an article designed to make people think more highly of Bush on science, unless you were to say that Nixon was worse, which she doesn't.

But the next bit is even better, what's usually the best thing most people can think of to distract from legitimate criticisms of Bush? A diatribe against Clin-ton of course:

Even Bill Clinton - now admired by many scientists for overseeing a doubling in the NIH budget, among other measures - appeared to ignore science for his own political gain. In 1997, the EPA's science advisory board recommended that Congress immediately consider ways to reduce emissions of mercury because of its effect on health and the environment. The Clinton administration delayed release of a scientific report about the dangers of mercury for more than a year, and didn't issue recommendations to reduce emissions from coal-fired plants (the largest source) until three years later, the day after then-vice president Al Gore conceded the 2000 election to current president George W. Bush. However, the EPA set forth a proposal to cut emissions by a drastic amount, which Clinton perhaps knew Bush would have to loosen, enabling his opponents to decry his environmental record. Clinton also publicly denounced the creation of embryos for research.

So, Clin-ton's dodge of a political hot-potato until he was a lame duck is now the equivalent of George "the jury is still out on evolution" Bush's anti-science agenda? Let's think of how many things are wrong with this. First, it's a bit of an ad populum argument, or "every president does it" as a justification for Bush's behavior. Second, I think this justifies a "Selectivity" criticism, as they're pulling incidents from Clin-ton's administration out of context and making them sound evidence of an anti-science bias in Clin-ton. In reality, Clin-ton dodged these things because they were politically explosive, and once there were no political consequences, he let the science out because Clin-ton believed in science. I think that's hugely different than suppressing data, packing advisory panels, and loading scientific commissions with false-experts while suppressing data on global warming from James Hansen just because you're in bed with the oil industry. Clin-ton probably always wanted to release those results, but because of political consequences in an election year, didn't want to create another fight. Finally the worst instance of quote-mining and selectivity yet? Saying Clinton's stance against the creation of embryos for research is the same as being against hES research. That's not the same thing as using IVF embryos that already exist, which Bush opposes, and Clinton supports.

Oh, but McCook doesn't have a problem with industry experts, and actually finds an expert that tells us that panels entirely composed of experts with conflicts of interest isn't abuse of science.

The UCS Web site has also compiled a list of reported Bush administration abuses, ranging from adding information linking breast cancer to abortion on a National Cancer Institute Web site (despite scientists' objections), suppressing reports about climate change and publicly misrepresenting the data, and dismissing from advisory panels scientists whose views oppose those of the administration. "When you get to the 10th, or 20th incident [of politics interfering with science], and they're in six or seven different areas," it starts to feel pervasive, says Sidney Shapiro of Wake Forest University. The current administration has been "egregious in cherry-picking information, distorting information, and withholding information" in a way that has "far exceeded" previous presidencies, according to Jane Lubchenco, former president of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the International Council for Science.

In general, however, the word "abuse" is sometimes overused in this discussion, Sarewitz notes. The list of examples of abuse of science gathered by the UCS includes an incident involving a panel charged with setting safe levels of lead in drinking water, when staff-picked scientists were replaced by people with ties to the lead industry. According to Sarewitz, there is a big difference between altering scientific conclusions and putting someone from the private sector on an advisory board. The first instance is a clear manipulation of science and the scientific process, he says, while the second is not.

Sorry Dr. Sarewitz, packing a board with industry-hacks that will refuse to operate in the public's interest for the sake of protecting the economic interests of corporations is a textbook manipulation of science. It's the old "false expert" tactic. It is a clear manipulation of science to pack advisory board with interested parties, that's a total no-brainer.

In case you thought McCook was done with red herrings, next we have this beauty:

And it's not just 20th and 21st century politicians who've been tough on science: In the later 19th century, some politicians (including southern Democrats) argued that funding of basic science that had no direct public benefit to the nation's farmers was a misuse of federal dollars and best left in the hands of private funders, which led to significant cutbacks in federal funding. Imagine trying to do basic research in that climate, says Daniel Kevles, a science historian at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Anyone who believes that political interference with American science is worse now than ever before has "some degree of historical ignorance," Kevles notes.

The 19th century? Are you fucking kidding me? Government was a miniscule fraction of the size it is now with nothing even resembling the scientific agencies we have now like FDA, NIH, NASA, EPA etc. There was no scientific infrastructure to undermine. But even so, what is the relevance of this claim that some southern farmers didn't care much for basic science over 110 years ago, is she trying to imply a rich history of anti-scientific anti-intellectualism is a justification for it now?

What else can we say, how about molecular biologists are whiners?

What may be adding to the perception that the Bush administration is harder on science than ever before is that in recent years, biology has borne the brunt of political interference in science, which is a decidedly unfamiliar experience for many life scientists. "So far, most of [biologists'] experience with Congress has been showing up and asking for money and going home," says Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists. Now, politicians spend less time talking about atomic energy and space exploration, and more time debating issues related to climate science, biodiversity, reproduction, and molecular biology. So for biologists, it's natural to wholeheartedly believe that politics is interfering more in research, because it's something they largely have not encountered for years, says Kevles. Especially for young scientists, who have only the NIH boom of the 1990s as a comparison, what's going on "is kind of a shock."

That's why we have a problem with Bush. It's not the promotion of abstinence in Africa to fight AIDS, or the banning of meaningful hES cell research using federal dollars, or his unwillingness to accept evolution, it's that we're just pissed that we have a harder time getting grant money. It's true, we are pissed about that, but what does that have to do with Bush's general anti-science approach to governance? What does that have to do with suppressing research on global warming? Like forcing NASA to invest in idiotic moon missions rather than focusing on climate (and even removing the study of earth from their mission statement)? Or putting a lackey in charge of NASA who suppresses or Blodgerizes scientific reports? What does that have to do with his wretched public health policies? Clearly nothing, we're just whiny biologists, and when we don't get paid we apparently just generate a battery of anti-science policies out of thin air.

If all this wasn't bad enough, here's what McCook thinks is good news:

The private sector has kept its R&D funding flowing in recent years, reaching its highest estimated level of close to $40 billion in 2005, only among companies that are members of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). The current administration has encouraged this growth by continuing an R&D tax credit that lets companies write off a portion of their R&D expenses. (The credit expired last December, however, and was also in place for much of recent administrations.) "The President has a very strong record of support for private sector science," according to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), led by Marburger.

The Bush administration's prescription drug plan, Medicare Part D, which began in January 2006, has also helped industry science by increasing the number of people who can buy prescription medications, says Jayson Slotnik, the director of Medicare reimbursement and economic policy at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Pharmaceutical companies "are more profitable now; they have more people using the products," says Slotnik. "They have more money and they can spend it more on R&D."

OMFG! She just found an industry hack to say that the biggest bilking of taxpayers of all time, Medicare Part D, which the administration lied to congress about the cost of to get it passed, is good for science? And why? Because it dumps so much money into drug companies pockets (I hope they have extra room) that it may trickle down into more research. Let's see, what are some problems with this argument?

1. Drug companies spend more on marketing than R&D.
   
2. Since the legalization of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) prescription costs have been surging, with drug companies already making an absolute fortune.
   
3. Drug companies are not innovators (see Marcia Angell's writings), they mosty make "me-too" or "sibling" drugs, and aren't responsible for the majority of basic research that leads to revolutionary drugs.
   
4. This is just so stupid it makes my head hurt.

The next stupidity? Because foundation spending on science has increased, Bush is not anti-science, because he didn't stop charities from spending money on science. I'm not kidding.

Foundation spending on biomedical research has also increased in recent years, from $1.4 billion in 1994 to $2.5 billion in 2003, according to the JAMA report. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds biomedical research along with education and other programs, awarded $330 million in grants by 1998; by 2005, that cumulative number had risen to $10.2 billion. The Bush administration has been "neutral to positive" towards foundation spending on research by not "getting in the way," says Hamilton Moses, first author of the JAMA paper, based at the Alerion Institute in Virginia, which monitors research productivity.

Well, isn't that sweet of him. It's also very kind of him for not being disappointed in us lazy scientists for not fully understanding the genome the year after we decoded it. Again, I shit you not.

Even if NIH funding stays flat, there are many signs that the government supports science, and takes scientists at their word. The scientific community has "done very, very well, and the federal government gives them a lot of leeway," notes Greenberg. Marburger says that he can attest from "personal experience and direct knowledge that this Administration is implementing the President's policy of strongly supporting science and applying the highest scientific standards in decision-making."

For instance, biologists have not been taken to task for promising huge, still unrealized benefits to spending taxpayer dollars on decoding the human genome. The two most expensive NIH awards in 2005 went to projects aimed at further decoding the genome, suggesting that, despite the lack of clinical results, the government still believes the advice of scientists who say this is an important project. "I don't have any reason to believe the administration is not committed to building on what the genome has taught us," says Frankel.

Gosh, the generosity. They'll give us another few years to figure out the biggest puzzle on the planet before they take the genome project and scrap it.

Ready for another red herring? Apparently scientists are meanies because they don't believe in a Democracy of facts.

Part of what may be fueling many scientists' distress over the Bush administration's attitude to science is that many scientists don't understand that politicians have to consider more than just science, and take advice from more than just scientists. This is how policy works, notes Lubchenco, now at Oregon State University. "Some scientists seem to imply that 'if the science says X, then the policy should follow blindly.' And I don't think that's true," she says. Scientists often act "as if the science automatically tells you what you should do, which it doesn't," and making a decision that's not responsive to scientific input doesn't necessarily mean a politician is "anti-science," notes Sarewitz.

In politics, certain facts are debated, which is an unfamiliar (and uncomfortable) experience to some scientists, but quite familiar to anyone who has inhabited the halls of Congress, says Kevles. Anyone who presents a view that interferes with a politician's vested interest will receive scrutiny, whether they're talking about science or not, he adds. "Politics is debate, it's negotiation... you can't just expect to issue some kind of declaration from the mountaintop."

Oh yeah, we scientists, we never debate. Our simple little minds can't understand something as difficult as a disparity of ideas.

This is BS. The scientific unwillingness to debate scientific fact is not arrogance or ignorance, it's the age old adage that you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. This conflation of fact with opinion is another old denialist saw. She might as well have said, "It's just a theory, and congress doesn't need to pay attention to any little old theory." Sounds like freaking creationism!

Then there's this lovely chart:



Hey everything is ok because industry is getting more money! Notice, Bush gets credit for the increase in industry R&D even though the slope of that line hasn't changed since the early 90s, while the NIH budget line looks like it got whacked with a frying pan.

Oy. Well, let's see, we've had red herrings, selectivity, and false experts (Marburger and this BIO guy - as well as the justification of packing panels with false experts). What are we missing? Impossible expectations (or magnification of doubt) and ... conspiracy theories! I don't think she whips out the magnification of doubt arguments, but she does end up with a whopper of a conspiracy theory.

Apparently the UCS is just a bunch of hateful Democrats! They're not scientists, just liberal quacks out to get the president!

For instance, most scientists are Democrats and are public about it. In the 2004 election, the group "Scientists and Engineers for Change" endorsed Democratic candidate John Kerry. When scientists publicly align themselves with Democrats, some Republicans may suspect scientists of having an agenda, says Pielke. Furthermore, Democratic scientists are more likely to criticize a Republican president, given that they likely disagree with him ideologically, not just about science, says Sarewitz. An interesting poll would compare opinions of President Bush between Democratic and Republican scientists, to determine how much of an influence party affiliation may have, adds Sarewitz (who voted for Bush's opponent, John Kerry, in the last presidential election, and has donated money to the Democratic Party). [Note this "interesting poll doesn't exist, it sure would be interesting though!]

It's also always in scientists' interest to say there isn't ever enough funding for research, but those cries for money don't necessarily reflect a crisis, says Greenberg. "Anytime [scientists] don't get 110% of what they ask for, they act like doomsday has arrived," he notes. It's an understandable reaction. "No group that receives money from the federal government says, 'we have enough,'" he adds.

...

In the 1970s, biologists dealt with public and political concerns about recombinant DNA technology, with critics suggesting that the technology could create powerful viruses or resistant bacteria, and also violated ethics by manipulating DNA. However, over years, scientists gradually helped craft a compromise that enabled them to conduct the research, eventually developing a series of life-saving medicines, such as recombinant insulin and erythropoietin. And last August, the FDA approved over-the-counter use of Plan B in women 18 years of age and older. Scientists can convince politicians and the public of their opinions, but it takes time and effort, says Kevles. "This is something [scientists] have to do day after day, month after month, year after year."

You here that? We're a bunch of grant-seeking Democrats that won't let any ethical boundary stop us from getting our precious science done (she makes us sound like mad-scientists). However, I must have lost the anti-Bush Democrat-Scientist newsletter that tells me that Bush is an anti-scientific hooligan because he's a Republican. It's either that or my antenna that downloads instructions directly from Howard Dean at the DNC must be broken.

This is such BS. Scientists didn't form the UCS or the SEA because we hate Republicans, we didn't do it under Reagan, or Ford, or Nixon, or George Sr. We formed these groups because he's an anti-scientific asshole. It's not a political conspiracy you freaking nut. It really is about the science!

Ok, I think she gets a 9 out of a possible 10 on the denialism index since she had multiple BS experts (esp Marburger, what a hack), multiple red herrings and illogical arguments, as well as the selectivity. That last conspiracy theory was the icing on the cake bringing her from 6/10 to 9/10. What a joke.

The Rev. Doctor loves the 19th Century. He loves its quaint ethnic stereotypes, its quack theories, and its excessive use of spats. Thus, he should be pleased to know that a eugenicist crackpot straight out of an HG Wells novella has been expounding on humanity's future over at the BBC. Beware of morlocks!

Also, PZ Myers explains that I, a human female, am not simply an ingeniously disguised chimpanzee. This comes as quite a relief.

Also, is it just me, or does the Y chromosome look all sad and blobby? By contrast, the X appears to be a mighty shag rug of genetic potential.

This post is incredible. He should cross-post this as a diary at Kos or some other blog interested in keeping integrity of elections.

We haven't heard from Chris's blog in a while, but now it's back, he's posting about interesting things under the moniker, "A Brown Study Blog." I realize a brown study is one of pointless abstraction, but I can't help thinking of the brown note.

Oh well.

Bill Maher vomited this at viewers on Real Time last week. It's quoted in full, because every single word is divine:

And finally, New Rule: If you think the worst thing Congress doesn't protect young people from is Mark Foley, then wake up and smell the burning planet. The - the ice caps are cracking, the coral reefs are bleaching, and our poisoned groundwater has turned spinach into a "side dish of mass destruction." Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley's penis.

But that's America for you: a red herring culture, always scared by the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy, middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro, and K Street.

And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting your children for death. They're called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than any month in the last two years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go?

When will our closeted gay congressmen learn, our boys aren't for pleasure, they're for cannon fodder? Why aren't Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we're supposed to be fighting for over there, and what the plan is? Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penis was. But at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions.

You know who else is grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. By convincing you that your kids are depressed, hyperactive or suffering from ADD. In the last decade, the number of children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs in America increased by over 400%. Which means either that our children are going insane-which we might look on as a problem-or more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies.

So, stop with the righteous indignation about predators. This whole country is trying to get inside your kid's pants, because that's where he keeps his wallet.

I don't care - I don't care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penis because I have some sad news for you: your kid is so larded out on Cheetohs and YooHoo, he can't even see his penis. So many of our kids are fat drug addicts nowadays, it's almost as if Rush Limbaugh had puppies!

So we can pretend that the biggest threat to our children is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it's us. Because when your son can't find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying, including the one where the Marine turns into Lancelot--then the person f***ing him...is you.

It's amazing that weeks before the elections that are showing all signs of a giant Republican spanking that Bush continues to show he is living in another world. In his world, al Qaeda is going to attack from space.

I realize that the PNAC conspiracy theories are a bit of a joke, but doesn't this sound like the whole marines in space provision it talked about? Why are we interested in militarizing space? Are we seriously concerned we're going to be battling the Chinese on the freaking moon as opposed to, say, the Taiwan Straight? This idea that there is some way that having a military presence in space will prevent attacks on satellites in case of war is also idiotic. They need to militarize space to protect our satellites now? What, exactly, would they propose to do if the Chinese were interested in striking satellites with missiles or some electronic attack on satellites?

The idiocy, it blinds me.

As President Bush today signs into law a bill that suspends the writ of habeas corpus and our country continues its debate about the ethicality of the rendition and torture of terror suspects, I am once again confused by this administration's logic. According to President Bush, Americans are caught up in "...the ideological struggle of the 21st century...a struggle between good and evil." The struggle, as Bush describes it, is one that most Americans intrinsically understand since we grow up with hero stories like the X-Men, Super Man, and Star Wars. Yet, how did we know, as we watched Star Wars for the first time, that the Rebels were the heroes and that the Empire was evil? Ask any ten-year-old familiar with the story and the answer will seem obvious. We know that Darth Vader is a villain because:
1. Darth Vader chokes people in order to scare or punish them, so he must be bad.
Vader's use of the force to nearly strangle Admiral Motti firmly convinces American children that Vader, even though he looks cool, is a bad, bad dude. The choke and release technique employed by Vader is, incidentally, extremely similar to the water boarding technique currently being employed by U.S. interrogators.
2. Darth Vader tortures people, so he must be evil.
Vader's torture of Princess Leia is not only one of the darkest scenes of the original trilogy, it is also completely ineffectual - the only information that Leia gives is false. Chewy also withstands torture and even manages to repair C3PO while in a secret detention center. However, the United States remains convinced that the torture of suspected members of rebel alliances will enable us to learn where their rebel bases are.
3. Darth Vader bombs innocent civilians, so he must be super bad.
Darth Vader was right - there were guilty people on Leia's home world of Alderan who were plotting against the Empire. Attacking them, his enemies, would not have made him a villain in the eyes of American audiences. It was Vader's targeting an entire civilization because some of its members wished him ill that made Vader bad.
4. Darth Vader serves as his own judge, jury and executioner.
Where was Leia's lawyer? You guessed it - she wasn't allowed to have one.
How do we know that the Jedi Knights are good? Well, they don't choke people, torture them, put them in secret prisons, or harm civilians. The also never attack preemptively - Yoda tells Luke to never draw his weapon first.

So, if we are caught up in a battle between good and evil, like the President says, which side are we? Which side do we want to be?
-DevilBubbles

Stephens	Ruskin

Preston Gates' Dennis Stephens or Commercial Alert's Gary Ruskin?

It turns out that the Jack Abramoff crowd thought that Ruskin is the weasel. Check out this email exchange:

From: Dennis Stephens [Abramoff colleague at Preston Gates]
To: Chad Cowan
Cc: Abramoff, Jack

"Have you guys ever looked into Gary Ruskin, a Nader protege who runs Commercial Alert (which is attacking Channel One, our client)...The guy is a weasel...Someone should consider doing an in depth piece on Ruskin and his Nader front groups. We should have lunch and review the options."

Abramoff responds: "Great. Can you get this moving?"

Amy Berger, another Abramoff colleague, responds:
"Jeff [Ballabon, VP of Channel One] just raised this with me. He said, why aren't you guys doing more on Ruskin? Please move ahead with this! Please keep me informed. Thanks"

The irony here is that there really isn't such a thing as a "Nader front group." Commercial Alert is one of many organizations "spun off" by people who worked for Nader. It's not like they are some sort of cabal to promote Nader! And, as this report (18M PDF) from the minority staff of the Senate Finance Committee shows that the real front groups were Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform and Citizens Against Government Waste.

As the election approaches it seems like the layers of this shit sandwich keep getting thicker and thicker.

WaPo has more on David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith. It sounds even worse, apparently this guy got a brain tumor and realized he had to come clean before he died. As a result we find out the office of faith-based initiatives was a clearly illegal slush fund for rewarding religious allies of the Bush administration (who has nothing but contempt for them).

Then we find out Curt Weldon (R-PA) has been under investigation for peddling influence to enrich his daughter. This asshole then claims the investigation is a political move. By the FBI. Under a Republican administration. Riiight.

Ney plead guilty last week, maybe he'll give up some more crooks to shorten his sentence. And in case you missed it, Norquist has been tied conclusively to Abramoff. He was a money-launderer too, maybe he'll see some jail (crosses fingers).

And torture, of course, doesn't work. But in the good news column, a bunch of geeks figured out how to track the rendition planes.

They're building more bridges to nowhere.

Civil war is in full swing in Iraq with refugees fleeing Baghdad and death squads killing dozens.

Not surprisingly support for the war is at an all time low (64 against, 34 for).

Oh, and on an anti-libertarian note, deregulating utilities does not work. It's interesting too that this article starts out by naming things that ostensibly benefitted by deregulation, but these are weak examples at best. With many benefiting from major leaps in technological innovation unrelated to deregulation. Harder to have such revolutions in sewage treatment, possibly because such models never allow companies to compete for individual consumers.

Phew, that's a lot of crookedness. Can we have this election already? The shit sandwich is stinking up the joint. Oh, and here's 181 reasons not to vote for LiebesBush.

Next Monday, Richard Dawkins will be hyping his new book in Lynchburg, VA. He'll later be in DC, San Fran, and our very own C'ville. And while those locations might make it easier to see him, it just might be fun to head down to Lynchburg. After all, that's pretty close to the town that nearly killed Sascha Baron Cohen.

Also via kos, we've got a real Give Up success story, Ohio.

Tell me what these quotes sound like.

Ohio Democrats, who in recent years have shown all the organizational vigor of Chicago Republicans, have a strut instead of a limp in their step these days, less than a month before the election. And they know they wouldn't be in this position without the timely, bumbling generosity of the Republicans.

"The chickens are coming home to roost," said Rep. Ted Strickland, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who actually lived in a chicken coop for some weeks as a child and is leading in his bid to become the state's first Democratic chief executive in 16 years.

...

"They say they're the values party and they're the party that swept this [page scandal] under the rug," said Marianne Lannan, who runs a lampshade shop just north of downtown Columbus. "They knew about this for a while before they were forced to take action.

"I can't see that staying with the status quo would be any benefit to us," Lannan added.

...


The state's two-term Republican governor, Bob Taft, pleaded no contest last year to ethics charges that he failed to report golf trips and other gifts from lobbyists, and the Bush campaign's northwest Ohio director, Tom Noe, was convicted of losing more than $50 million of state money in a rare coin investment scandal.

...

Even among the Republican faithful, like Mike Cress, a jewelry salesman in Worthington, there is mounting concern about the war in Iraq.

"It really is frustrating. I'm a [Vietnam] veteran and I'm seeing the same mistakes made in my war," Cress said, complaining about an inadequate number of troops and sub-par equipment for them. "It's kind of like Barney Fife--we send them out there with one bullet in their pocket and say 'take care of it.' .. . We never learn."

It's sounding like the red staters are starting to really taste that shit sandwich they bit into in the last couple elections. It sure took them long enough.

Via Kos we find out that when asked, Lieberman can't decide whether it would be better for Democrats to win back congress. No, really.

"Uh, I haven't thought about that enough to give an answer," Lieberman said, as though Democrats' strong prospects for recapturing the House hadn't been the fall's top political story.

He was similarly elusive about the race for governor. Is he voting for John DeStefano Jr., a Democrat and mayor of the city where Lieberman has lived since the 1960s?

"I'm, uh, I'm having," he stammered, then laughed and said his decision would remain private.

Ok people. Face it. If he wins, he's switching parties. He is not just a right-wing Democrat or a neocon. He's a Bush Republican. He is not on our side, he is not a Democrat, and he is not a decent man.

After being upset earlier this week that Webb wasn't ahead in the polls, it's looking like Virginia wants to join the 21st century after all and send this confirmed bigot Felix Macaca Allen packing.

He's now dead even with Webb, with NoVa leading the way:

Allen gets 49 percent, compared with 47 percent for Webb, within the 3 percentage point margin of error for the poll conducted over three days last week. With few respondents saying they are undecided and most seemingly locked in for their candidate, the poll indicates that the candidates' strategies for turning out supporters will be vital and that changes in the national political climate could tilt the outcome.

The sad thing is reading the specifics you find out the people in our state are just retarded. For instance:

Allen, 54, can be content that after what might be the most tumultuous campaign any incumbent has seen this election cycle, he still has a bond with Virginians who elected him governor in 1993 and senator in 2000. A strong majority of those in the poll say they think of him as honest, trustworthy and a leader, and 57 percent approve of how he's doing in the Senate.

When he was governor he did nothing but benefit from national trends in economic growth, and set the stage for the car-tax obsessed asshole that would sink this state into the red until Mark Warner came along and rescued us from disaster. As a senator he has done nothing. From all the reports I read he's bored, doesn't even bother showing up, and when he does, he just copies other students' work. Add on top of that his bigotry and general fat-headedness, and why do they like this guy? Oh, wait, it's that last part.

The Journal reports:

In a conference call this week, [Coca-Cola] the Atlanta beverage giant unveiled plans to launch Enviga, a sparkling green tea-based soft drink infused with a tantalizing claim: Consume three 12-ounce cans of Enviga over a 24-hour period, and a healthy person of normal weight can burn anywhere from 60 to 100 additional calories...

A little later in the article...

Rhona Applebaum, Coke's chief scientist, agrees that the new drink is not a diet pill. "This is not a magic bullet," she says. Enviga should be consumed as part of a healthy diet and regular physical activity, she says. Enviga "gently invigorates your metabolism. It gives your body this extra boost."

[...]

Coke didn't petition the FDA to make a formal "qualified health claim" because the product doesn't assert an effect such as reducing a disease or a health-related condition, Coke's Dr. Applebaum said. "We're not making any weight-reduction claims," she said. The calorie-burning assertion is instead a "structure-function claim," which companies are permitted to make as long as they can back their claim up with science and vouch that the information on the label is truthful, Coke and the FDA say.

Okay, so, this isn't a weight-reduction claim? You hold a media conference call to tell the stenographers that your product burns calories, and it's not a weight-reduction claim?

And that's not the end of it. The data supporting Coca-Cola's claims are based on privately-held industry research that hasn't been peer reviewed. The research was on healthy people, not fat asses who will be fooled by this folly. And is a 100-calorie increase even statistically significant? You can burn 100 calories in 20 minutes by taking a short walk. How do they know that the study participants didn't fidget a little more that day, or take an extra few trips to the bathroom as a result of drinking too much Enviga?

The magical thinking is so intense surrounding weight loss that people will believe anything. So, the science isn't going to matter. The newspapers have already done Coke's scam marketing for them.

And this is the kicker--the Journal is right on with this:

The people most likely to try Enviga will be young people who tend to obsess over the next cool concoction -- most of whom aren't overweight, says Georgia State's Prof. Rosenbloom. "You know who's going to be drinking these," she says. "The thin girls."

Everyone needs to see Colbert interview Steinem and Fonda.



This was pure genius.

Here's an obvious story, "Book says Bush just using Christians". No shit Sherlock. After the first director of the office of faith-based initiatives left with a healthy dose of scorn for the administration, the latest one is writing a book about how it's a joke to trick the religious into voting Republican.

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

The office's primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.

"Tempting Faith's" author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo's previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

He says some of the nation's most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as "the nuts."

"National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous,' 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy,'" Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly "nonpartisan" events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush's 2004 Ohio victory "at least partially ... to the conferences we had launched two years before."

...

when Bush asks Kuo how much money was being spent on "compassion" social programs, Kuo claims he discovered the amount was $20 million a year less than during the Clinton Administration.

The money that was appropriated and disbursed, however, often served a political agenda, Kuo claims, with organizations friendly to the administration often winning grants.

More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged with rating grant applications as saying she stopped looking at applications from "those non-Christian groups," as did many of her colleagues.

You think they're tasting the shit sandwich yet? I think they are, big time.

I was waiting to discuss this Lancet paper on Iraq war deaths as I wanted time to read through what they did and have statistically-inclined people like MarkCC at Good Math, Bad Math have at it. I can see no flaws other than the slight overrepresentation of Baghdad in the clusters (it is slight and not likely to be a major shift in numbers). The consensus at the other science blogs seems to be this is a really well done, well-researched paper with legitimate methodology. Here are the findings.

Findings Three misattributed clusters were excluded from the final analysis; data from 1849 households that contained 12,801 individuals in 47 clusters was gathered. 1474 births and 629 deaths were reported during the observation
period. Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5·5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4.3-7.1), compared with 13.3 per 1000 people per year (10.9-16.1) in the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 (392,979-942,636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 (426,369-793,663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.

Interpretation The number of people dying in Iraq has continued to escalate. The proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, although the actual numbers have increased every year. Gunfire remains the most common cause of death, although deaths from car bombing have increased.

Sounds like we have Saddam beat hands down. Although we're guilty of more of a criminal negligence/manslaughter or reckless heart homicide rather than any kind of first-degree murder or genocide.

The response from a prominent Republican congressman on the fact that one of his colleagues was caught trying to diddle underage boys?

"Well, at least nobody died."

Our favorite 2008 candidate, Mark Warner, has dropped out of the presidential race.

Saddening. And worse yet, Felix Macaca Allen's advisors have figured out a sure-to-win strategy. they are keeping him locked up and quiet until the election. His advisors, seriously, are no dummies. That's what I would do if I were trying to elect a bigoted moron to the Senate in the 21st century.

In slightly better news, Weed is continuing to close in on Virgil Goode (like I say don't trust people named Virgil - at least in Virginia). Kos is reporting the Survey USA results of Weed at 40 and Goode at 56, with the trends showing Goode losing support. Considering last time Weed never even got close, this is encouraging. If only Goode would get indicted in the MZM/Dukester scandal, or maybe people in his district could see how he thoroughly screwed them in the MZM business.

Don't tell Dick Cheney to go fuck himself anymore, you might get arrested. It's amazing that the guy who did that after Katrina (he was interviewed in Spike Lee's documentary), didn't get arrested consider this poor guy was locked up for assaulting the vice president for a non-vulgar statement of protest.

Anyway, here's how it supposedly went down:

Howards says he was taking two of his kids to their Suzuki piano camp in Beaver Creek, Colorado. They were walking across the outdoor public mall area when all of a sudden he saw Cheney there.

"I didn’t even know he was in town,” Howards says. "He was walking through the area shaking hands. Initially, I walked past him. Then I said to myself, 'I can't in good conscience let this opportunity pass by.'; So I approached him, I got about two feet away, and I said in a very calm tone of voice, 'Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.' And then I walked away."

The result?

"About ten minutes later, I came back through the mall with my eight-year-old son in tow," Howards recalls, "and this Secret Service man came out of the shadows, and his exact words were, 'Did you assault the Vice President?'"

Here's how Howards says he responded: "No, but I did tell Mr. Cheney the way I felt about the war in Iraq, and if Mr. Cheney wants to be shielded from public criticism, he should avoid public places. If exercising my constitutional rights to free speech is against the law, then you should arrest me."

Which is just what the agent, Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle Jr, proceeded to do.

Never trust anyone named Virgil by the way. At least not in Virginia.

Nice story though huh?

Or at least people who do marketing are.

The new army slogan, as reported by the WSJ will be "Army Strong."

Notice how the slogans are getting progressively shorter, starting with "Be all you can be", then "Army of One", now "Army Strong."

Why do I feel like this slogan was written by a Frankenstein (or Venturestein) monster? Fire bad! Food good! Army strong!

It's either that or they realize that scraping the bottom of the barrel wasn't enough so they're now recruiting people by lowering their standards. Fewer words good.

I've been having fun over at Coturnix's blog mocking Libertarians. Let me make clear, I'm talking big-L Libertarians, not those poor deluded suckers like Kos who buy into their fuzzy ideological position and lend legitimacy to the crackpots by saying they have "libertarian" ideas. It is for this reason I really liked these two links he provided. First, libertarianism makes you stupid and second a non-libertarian faq.

In particular I like the point that the first site makes about the libertarian position statement, that is so vague that it is meaningless. And sure enough, in our discussion on Coturnix's blog, they end up bringing it out, as if anyone could disagree with something so banal. Here's what libertarianism makes you stupid has to say on this topic.

Libertarian proselytizers will preach some warm-and-fuzzy story such as

"We believe that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud must be banished from human relationships, and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized."

Now, how many ideologies have you ever heard state anything like

"We believe that disrespect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud are good things in human relationships, and that only through slavery can peace and prosperity be realized."

Libertarians are for "individual rights", and against "force" and "fraud" - just as THEY define it. Their use of these words, however, when examined in detail, is not likely to accord with the common meanings of these terms. What person would proclaim themselves in favor of "force and fraud"? One of the little tricks Libertarians use in debate is to confuse the ordinary sense of these words with the meaning as "terms of art" in Libertarian axioms. They try to set up a situation where if you say you're against "force and fraud", then obviously you must agree with Libertarian ideology, since those are the definitions. If you are in favor of "force and fraud", well, isn't that highly immoral? So you're either one of them, or some sort of degenerate (note the cultish aspect again), one who doesn't think "force and fraud must be banished from human relationships".

I think we should adopt a statement of ideology or platform that is similar. It will be as follows:

Here at GiveUpBlog we believe in the cuteness of puppies and the meanness of nasty fascists like Hitler and Mussolini. If you are against GiveUpBlog, you are for Hitler and puppy torture.

The second thing I enjoy mocking about libertarians is this pre-9/11 press release of five things to do to prevent the next Tim McVeigh. The long and short of it? Conceed to all of McVeigh's ideology short of the racism. I particularly like this line:

"No, we're not saying that the growing power of the federal government justifies what Timothy McVeigh did,"said Dasbach. "But the fact is, millions of Americans view their own government with suspicion and distrust."

I love that statement, "we don't agree with time McVeigh, except that we do." And that suspicion and distrust, maybe, just maybe, comes from the constant harping and hate that comes from libertarian think tanks and groups that basically impugn all the hard-working people in government as stupid and incompetent. Now, this administration seems to confirm this view, but the previous one didn't, and we shouldn't be surprised that when you elect people that mistrust and hate government that the inevitable result would be crappy government that we mistrust and hate. They don't think government can do any good, and clearly they're not motivated to make it work effectively. Katrina under Mike Brown wasn't a fluke, these people literally do not believe government can do anything and isn't worth taking seriously, hence putting cronies in charge of everything. Second, virtually every libertarian think-tank is behind the GWOT these days, so all that peace talk is total BS.

I'm surprised actually that McVeigh hasn't gone down in history as our first libertarian terrorist. If you look at what he was saying to reporters like Gore Vidal, or in the book American Terrorist you see that he was really just a very serious libertarian who thought the federal government had become to powerful and had to be stopped, even by violent means. I also believe that his kind of hatred for government is fed and instilled in this country by groups like AEI, Manhattan, Cato etc., that are just hateful towards our civil servants who work in government (I have heard libertarians, and prominent ones, say things like "the FDA has killed more people than Hitler") and who, for the most part, are conscientious people trying to do good, and succeeding when they aren't being undermined by anti-government r-tards elected by people who simply don't think hard enough about how much government does good for them in their daily lives. I am particularly stunned when I hear scientists describe themselves as Libertarian or Republican, after all, where do they think 95% of the funds for science come from? And really, who in their right mind is against the FTC? Or FDA? For people who are against "fraud" they seem to have a dim view of any government agency designed to make fraud difficult (the original purpose of many of these agencies is essentially consumer protection).

Ultimately what you end up with from fuzzy ideological statements and self-righteous blather about freedom is a party based on unenlightened self-interest, unrealistic views of regulation, on hatred of government and the people who work in it and ultimately a destructive pro-business laissez-faire worldview that would return us to a previous century in terms of consumer protection, workforce rights, regressive taxation, and dysfunctional national infrastructure. Screw these people, and all you little-l libertarians should stop giving them credibility by associating the name of their party with anything legitimate or sensible. Don't buy into their bullshit platform, it's just a ploy.

Lots of religion to discuss, first, my Va Film schedule:

A Flock of Dodos (the repeat)
Everything is Illuminated
Jesus Camp (the repeat)
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
Life of Brian
Son of Man
Ten Canoes
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny 00
The Apostle
The Dark Crystal
The Milky Way
Trapped by the Mormons

And speaking of religion, there are two really interesting articles recently out discussing religion in America, both from the NY Times.

The first discusses the loss of the young in Evangelical churches. The data aren't exactly clear, but they are concerned only about 4% of teens remain in the church.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be "Bible-believing Christians" as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it "the 4 percent panic attack"), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

Well, I can't say that would be a bad thing for our country, but what is funny is how they completely ignore the obvious solution. Instead of addressing the fact that their teachings are in direct opposition to the modern world (unless they want to become Amish, they have to change with the times) they instead turn to gimmicks. Music, concerts, anything but a real substantive change that will allow kids to keep their religious beliefs in the face of a world based on reason and science and equality of sexes. Not to mention, really all it takes is for an evangelical to just know a single gay person before they realize they don't have horns and really are the way they are (and good people).

The second article is a discussion of how conservatives have attacked the wall between church and state, and written in all sorts of clever tax breaks and exemptions for religious groups. War on Christians my ass, it's clear the government is excessively friendly towards the religious.

Federal law gives religious congregations unique tools to challenge government restrictions on the way they use their land. Consequently, land-use restrictions that are a result of longstanding public demands for open space or historic preservation may be trumped by a religious ministry’s construction plans, as in a current dispute in Boulder County, Colo.

Exemptions in the civil rights laws protect religious employers from all legal complaints about faith-based preferences in hiring. The courts have shielded them from many complaints about other forms of discrimination, whether based on race, nationality, age, gender, medical condition or sexual orientation. And most religious organizations have been exempted from federal laws meant to protect pensions and to provide unemployment benefits.

Governments have been as generous with tax breaks as with regulatory exemptions. Congress has imposed limits on the I.R.S.’s ability to audit churches, synagogues and other religious congregations. And beyond the federal income tax exemption they share with all nonprofit groups, houses of worship have long been granted an exemption from local property taxes in every state.

As religious activities expand far beyond weekly worship, that venerable tax break is expanding, too. In recent years, a church-run fitness center with a tanning bed and video arcade in Minnesota, a biblical theme park in Florida, a ministry’s 1,800-acre training retreat and conference center in Michigan, religious broadcasters’ transmission towers in Washington State, and housing for teachers at church-run schools in Alaska have all been granted tax breaks by local officials — or, when they balked, by the courts or state legislators.

These organizations and their leaders still rely on public services — police and fire protection, street lights and storm drains, highway and bridge maintenance, food and drug inspections, national defense. But their tax exemptions shift the cost of providing those benefits onto other citizens. The total cost nationwide is not known, because no one keeps track.

What I also love about the article is how, in classic Give Up fashion, the stupid removal of sensible regulations to save them money in each case just seems to result in scandals. The need for regulations of things like nursing homes, addiction treatment centers, whatever, is obvious. There is just too much opportunity for abuse, but they'll just have to learn the hard way again. And when districts have trouble making ends meet because of parasitism of religious institutions onto public utilities and services, there will be a backlash.

One reason I hate hippies is their strange idea that one can or should commune with nature. The problem is, nature hates us. It's constantly trying to kill us. It creates new diseases, environmental catastrophes, and animals with way too many legs all the damn time.

That, and the only reason North American hippies feel like they can really commune with nature is that we've killed pretty much everything that represents a threat to human life. And I'm not just talking about grizzly bears or malaria. How about the freaking screw-worm fly? Talk about nature sucking, this thing would plant it's eggs into any open wound and they would then eat your flesh until they hatched and fell out.

Nowadays we can walk around the woods and commune with nature, but only because we've killed enough of nature that we're comfortable being in it. Nature is a bitch without some serious modifications.

Now I'm reading in Scientific American about the next way nature will try to kill us. Apparently it will be a global warming-induced suffocation by hydrogen sulfate gas.

Their studies indicate that enough H2S was produced by such ocean upwellings at the end of the Permian to cause extinctions both on land and in the sea. And this strangling gas would not have been the only killer. Models by Alexander Pavlov of the University of Arizona show that the H2S would also have attacked the planet's ozone shield, an atmospheric layer that protects life from the sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Evidence that such a disruption of the ozone layer did happen at the end of the Permian exists in fossil spores from Greenland, which display deformities known to result from extended exposure to high UV levels. Today we can also see that underneath "holes" in the ozone shield, especially in the Antarctic, the biomass of phytoplankton rapidly decreases. And if the base of the food chain is destroyed, it is not long until the organisms higher up are in desperate straits as well.

Kump and Arthur estimate that the amount of H2S gas entering the late Permian atmosphere from the oceans was more than 2,000 times the small amount given off by volcanoes today. Enough of the toxic gas would have permeated the atmosphere to have killed both plants and animals--particu-larly because the lethality of H2S increases with temperature. And several large and small mass extinctions seem to have occurred during short intervals of global warming. That is where the ancient volcanic activity may have come in.

...

But the most critical factor seems to have been the oceans. Heating makes it harder for water to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere; thus, if ancient volcanism raised CO2 and lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and global warming made it more difficult for the remaining oxygen to penetrate the oceans, conditions would have become amenable for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of H2S. Oxygen-breathing ocean life would have been hit first and hardest, whereas the photosynthetic green and purple H2S-consuming bacteria would have been able to thrive at the surface of the anoxic ocean. As the H2S gas choked creatures on land and eroded the planet's protective shield, virtually no form of life on the earth was safe.

Kump's hypothesis of planetary killing provides a link between marine and terrestrial extinctions at the end of the Permian and explains how volcanism and increased CO2 could have triggered both. It also resolves strange findings of sulfur at all end Permian sites. A poisoned ocean and atmosphere would account for the very slow recovery of life after that mass extinction as well.

...

Most troubling, however, is the question of whether our species has anything to fear from this mechanism in the future: If it happened before, could it happen again? Although estimates of the rates at which carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere during each of the ancient extinctions are still uncertain, the ultimate levels at which the mass deaths took place are known. The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place. How soon after that could there be a new greenhouse extinction? That is something our society should never find out.

Charming. I also hear dengue-fever is moving north, hence I'm more down with the Monty Burns view of Nature:

"Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese."

Although C. Montgomery Burns was discussing the despoiling of natural resources as a good thing, I like his quote because I believe not in communion with nature, but more of having detente. I still think we should make a few species extinct in revenge for Katrina though. That would show her.

Kidding aside, I am serious about environmentalism, that's why I harp about global warming. But it's not because I love nature or have some crystal-clutching hippy earth mother love for all living things. Rather, I just suspect if we're not careful that bitch will kill us.

We've been tagged by stanley on a book meme. I encourage readers/contributors etc to play along, because I am too freaked out by the chain letter-like aspect of this to tag anyone else.

1. One book that's changed your life
   
   

   Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol, because I was an obnoxious, sheltered white suburbanite who had no idea how good I had it, then I read Kozol's book and realized I was a jackass.

   
   
   
2. One book that you have read more than once:
   
   

   The books I have re-read the most are definitely the Tolkien books.

   
   
   
3. One book you would want on a desert island
   
   

   Any really good book on how to survive on a desert island.

   
   
   
4. One book that made you cry
   
   

   Any book in which they kill the dog. I think it's a nasty trick authors use to yank the old emotional chain. Tell a story about a dog and then kill it.

   
   
   
5. One book that made you laugh
   
   

   Most recently, Confederacy of Dunces.

   
   
   
6. One book you wish had been written
   
   

   Give Up: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Bush administration

   
   
   
7. One book you wish had never been written
   
   

   Sophie's Choice. Not because it wasn't a great book, and beautifully written but because William Styron decided to write the world's biggest mind-fuck of all time (Sophie's actual choice) and every time I think about it I get depressed. (Dammit)

   
   
   
8. One book you are currently reading.
   
   

   I'm reading Everyman by Philip Roth, Two Years Before the Mast by Dana, a book called Saturday by Ian McEwan which I've misplaced somewhere, and I'm listening to Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina. Oh, and Cecil's Textbook of Medicine, slowly.

   
   
   
9. One book you've been meaning to read:
   
   

   Areas of my Expertise by John Hodgman. I'm thinking now that they have an audiobook of him reading it, that I might just download it.

   
   

I have fulfilled my meme duties.

It really seems like my iPod is screwing with me by always playing Beck. And I like Beck although less now that he's a Scientologist, but sheesh, I don't want to listen to him constantly. It's like my iPod is fixated on him, almost always front-loading the Beck despite there being thousands of other songs on my pod, and none of my songs are rated so it's not that.

So, I thought I was nuts, but apparently I'm not alone. Pretty much everybody has the same complaint about their Pods if they use one long enough. Although it has less to do with the iPod shuffle function being non-random as the tendency of humans to interpret random events as non-random.

Remember that this time of the year isn't just for nobel prizes but also for the IgNobel Prizes.

I feel as though I have been robbed though, I think I sent the email nominating the peace prize winner (although I think suggested physiology) for the invention of the Mosquito, the device that repels teenagers through a sound only they can hear. So where was my recognition? Where is my plane ticket to join the ceremony and shake hands with nobel prize winners, and throw airplanes and wear funny hats?

Sigh.

The other winners were

1. Maths: How many photos must be taken to almost ensure no-one in a group shot has their eyes closed, by Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes
   
   
2. Ornithology: Why woodpeckers do not get headaches, by Ivan Schwab and the late Philip RA May
   
   
3. Nutrition: Why dung beetles are fussy eaters, by Wasmia al-Houty and Faten al-Mussalam
   
   
4. Acoustics: Why the sound of fingernails scraping on blackboards is so annoying, by D Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand
   
   
5. Medicine: The Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage, by Francis Fesmire, Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie Oliven.

That last one is a real doozy.

Representative Feeley is distracting us from George Felix Macaca and his noose collection!

But how could it not distract us as we see news reports indicating that Foley has been a problem with pages further and further back in time. It looks like as early as 1995 pages were giving eachother sidelong looks as this guy was rubbing up on them.

Beck-Heyman, who later worked for the Clinton White House and the John Kerry presidential campaign, joined the page program in the summer of 1995. He said that a departing page told him to be "very careful" of Foley.

Within weeks, Beck-Heyman said, Foley had learned his name and asked at least twice to take him to get ice cream. He declined. After he completed the page program, Beck-Heyman wrote thank you notes to 10 House members. He received a reply from Foley suggesting they meet during the Republican convention in San Diego.

So how didn't more people notice this? I'm even wondering why the Democrats didn't figure this out. If they had, I'm sure it would have been to their advantage to cry pedophile and get this creep thrown out long ago (which makes me believe they were just oblivious).

Lot's of media blowhards, especially retarded ones like Bill "falafel" O'Reilly, Geraldo "the troops are here" Rivera, and Count Novakula have been hard on good old Jon Stewart for his fake news show. In particular, they've accused him of capitalizing on a pothead viewing audience, mocking old ladies falling over (don't remember that one happening) and fart jokes (don't recall many of those either).

But time after time, when people study the show, it seems that it leaves its viewers more informed than the traditional news. How could this be?

Again today, I see this article suggesting Jon Stewart's show is more informative than traditional media sources.

The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.
...
Using the entire half-hour programs as the basis of analysis yielded the same results: there was just as much substance to The Daily Show's coverage as there was on the network news. And The Daily Show was much funnier, with less of the hype—references to photo ops, political endorsements, and polls—that typically overshadows substantive coverage on network news, according to the study.

And the interviews are better too, and harder hitting believe it or not.

I think it's official, there is no more need for network or cable news, we can just watch the Daily Show. And if you're serious about hard news? The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Via slashdot.

So, who can tell me what's wrong with this video.

This Representative Feeley scandal has gotten so bad with prominent Republicans keeping his pedophilia a secret that even the Moonie Times is calling for Hastert's resignation.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once. Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance.

But then the great irony, who do they recommend to replace him? Henry "Youthful indiscretion at age 41-50"" Hyde. They're all hypocrites and crooks.

link fixed

First it was Mel Gibson saying that it was the alcohol's fault he went on an anti-semitic rant, now this pedophile Representative Feeley is saying his real problem is alcoholism.

In a letter faxed by Foley to WPBF-TV in West Palm Beach, the former congressman talked about why he entered an alcohol treatment facility.

"Painfully, the events that led to my resignation have crystallized recognition of my longstanding significant alcohol and emotional difficulties," Foley wrote. "I strongly believe that I am an alcoholic and have accepted the need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and related behavioral problems."

Foley said he deeply regrets and accepts "full responsibility for the harm that I have caused."

Sorry pal, alcohol is not what is making you a pedophile, or anti-semitic or whatever. The alcohol may help uncover these behaviors as a disinhibitor, but it is not causing you to message teenage boys about their penis size.

Seriously, I'm tired of people attacking alcohol for their personal flaws. We will not have alcohol scapegoated!

Has gone to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for discovery of RNA interference also known as RNAi or miRNA/siRNA. Here is their original article.

I like that they won this prize. I use siRNA a lot, and the discovery of siRNA and miRNA has also uncovered a new regulatory system used by the cell that was previously unthought of. Always before the dogma of molecular biology was that DNA is transcribed to RNA which is translated to protein, and it's the proteins which are functional.

This has subsequently found to be overly simplistic. RNA has shown itself to be just as important as proteins for determining cell phenotype. Not only is it responsible for translation of DNA into protein, but it also can act in a variety of other ways. It can act in a gene-regulatory role as miRNA, weakly binding to transcripts and preventing their translation. It appears to act as a silencing transcription factor on DNA to cause it to be methylated, thus decreasing transcription from a locus. Then there are the variety of enzymatic functions of RNA that have shown it is vital for things like the translational machinery itself.

This is a great decision to award the Nobel to the discover of siRNA. Their discovery has really opened up an entirely new field and allowed new insight into the functions of RNA in the cell.

We've got three big Republican cover-ups, first, news that Republicans knew that Foley liked fondling the pages since 2001 and were warning pages to avoid him.

The blotter includes a 2003 IM conversation representive Feeley had with a page.

Maf54 (8:08:31 PM): get a ruler and measure it for me
Xxxxxxxxx (8:08:38 PM): ive already told you that
Maf54 (8:08:47 PM): tell me again
Xxxxxxxxx (8:08:49 PM): 7 and 1/2
Maf54 (8:09:04 PM): ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Maf54 (8:09:08 PM): beautiful
Xxxxxxxxx (8:09:38 PM): lol
Maf54 (8:09:44 PM): thats a great size
Xxxxxxxxx (8:10:00 PM): thank you
Maf54 (8:10:22 PM): still stiff
Xxxxxxxxx (8:10:28 PM): ya
Maf54 (8:10:40 PM): take it out
Xxxxxxxxx (8:10:54 PM): brb...my mom is yelling
Maf54 (8:11:06 PM): ok

Dirty boy!

The second, that the Whitehouse covered-up a meeting between Tenet and Rice on an imminent Al Qaeda attack from the 9/11 commission.

The third, big surprise, is that Bush has been lying about the sitation in Iraq.

The last two are both from Woodward. Does this mean he's an investigative reporter again? Because for about 5 years there, he seemed like he was Bush's BFF.

The AAAS, for being a society for the advancement of science, should really consider and open-publishing system like we've been seeing from PNAS and PLoS. In particular, this week there is a special issue dealing with evolution of organ systems, and these are just really interesting articles that would be great for the advancement of science.

For starters, I'd send people over to read this review of the evolution of the heart from the viewpoint of gene regulation. It's from Eric Olson, a leader in the field of cardiac and smooth muscle research, and it's an interesting look at how as organisms vascular systems get progressively more complex, the number of variations on a similar set of genes increases. In other words, lots of new genes aren't being created from scratch (duh) but an increase in numbers of variants of critical cardiac transcription factors emerge.



Then there's the discussion of hox gene clusters from Derek Lemons and William McGinnis which demonstrates a similar theme, the importance of the numbers of and variable expression of a limited set of control factors can result in huge changes in morphology and complexity. PZ will love that one no doubt.

And finally Casting a Genetic Light on the Evolution of Eyes from Russell D. Fernald is a wonderful discussion about the various ways organisms have adapted to detect light, often these adaptations were in parallel, but developed the same basic systems. It's also nice because the impossibility of the evolution of the eye is an old denialist/creationist saw, when in reality, it's quite easy to see how we moved from simple to extreme complexity by comparing eyes in various other species to our own.

Great reading, but only for those who have institutional subscriptions or AAAS membership. Sorry. One of these days AAAS will wake up and move to an open publishing model.

Who wants to go see Jackass 2 with me?



Holy freaking crap, how are these guys not dead?