Last year Cheney was the scariest.



However, this year our friends have added to the pumpkin-politics pantheon with

Harriet Miers, now defunct SCOTUS nomination,



And the always frightening Greenspan.

So there's this horrible commercial for Ameriprise financial planning. It starts out with some boomer/60s images and the narration goes, "You're a generation who brought new meaning to the meaningful relationship, and we can relate to that." Included in the little clips from the 60s and 70s is a picture of Richard Pryor kissing the hand of a woman. Now, I love Richard Pryors comedy, but this is a great example of boomers' poor memory and the stupid sentimentality of that defective generation. Here's Pryor's marriage history.

Flynn BeLaine, married October 1986, divorced January 1987, remarried April 1990, divorced
Jennifer Lee, married August 1981, divorced March 1982, remarried 2001
Deborah McGuire, married September 22, 1977, divorced 1978
Shelly Bonus, married 1968, divorced
Patricia Price, married 1960, divorced

Hmm. Now, I don't know who the woman in the commercial is but it might be Deborah McGuire, who stared in the Russ Myers Supervixens films, and who Pryor was arrested for chasing across his lawn in his car. Now, if the boomers are the generation that redefined love, and that involves 5 wives, 6 divorces, 8 children born in and out of wedlock, and chasing women across the lawn in your car, maybe our generation should redefine it again. Or maybe, Ameriprise financial should consider a new symbol of enduring love besides Richard Pryor.

For more on why boomers suck, check out the Kill your parents issue of Vice magazine.

Well, Bush's new nominee already has a diminutive nickname, Scalito.

It sounds like he has some real pro-life credentials, but are the Republicans really dumb enough to appoint a SCOTUS judge who will help overturn Roe? Do they really want to lose congress and the white house for a generation? More likely he'll be just like previous appointees on this issue, that is, willing to put obstacles in the way for minors and certain forms of abortion, but unwilling to support outright bans.

So, Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed for the LA Times on how the last 27 months have been for him and his wife. In it he addresses what I felt was the weakest point in the argument that a crime had been committed, which was whether or not his wife was truly a covert agent or just an agency bureaucrat as many have suggested. Consider this excerpt:

But on July 14, 2003, our lives were irrevocably changed. That was the day columnist Robert Novak identified Valerie as an operative, divulging a secret that had been known only to me, her parents and her brother.


Well, if it's true only four people in the world outside of the CIA knew that's where she worked, it certainly sounds as if she was an agent whose identity was being protected.

So,Dr. Girlfriend has brought up the point that for the maps that shamefully include blue states, I should color them in blue so that one can easily see the relative complement of red and blue states to our nation's problems. I think she's got a point.

What do others think? Will that be more clear or should the connotation of the red coloring be shameful and people can look at the banner to remind themselves of which states are blue?

Also, I realized now that this whole blog is dedicated to shadenfraude. Go shadenfraude!

Everybody else is probably blogging about the Libby indictment, which you can read in its entirety if you like, but I'd rather talk about energy rather than shadenfreude.

Here's a scary Halloween message to the red states. You know those high gas prices? Well, they're like a selective tax on them. The red states are doomed as energy prices escalate because they represent the least efficient model of development.

Consider, red state Americans, due to their ugly sprawl and McMansions developed 40 miles out of the city, have to drive farther than other Americans.



And it's not just a matter of more fuel efficient cars, their homes are inefficient, take a look at how much it costs to heat and cool these houses that are built in the middle of nowhere. Denser, more concentrated development is more energy efficient. Sprawl will be the end of these states when the energy prices hit.




Sources, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration Office of Highway information Management, Our Nation’s Highways - 2000: Selected Facts and Figures, Publication No. FHWA-PL-01-1012 www.fhwa.dot.gov

Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Energy Consumption Estimates by Source and End-Use Sector, 2001, www.eia.doe.gov

These are bizarre.
First, don't hang yourself on Halloween.

And Sulu is gay?

Well, based on the picture they used of him

why would anyone be surprised?

So, WSJ reports:

Exxon Mobil Corp. racked up its biggest quarterly profit, reporting third-quarter net income surged 75% to $9.92 billion on high oil and natural-gas prices.

Who else thinks the Oil company executives will be the first against the wall in the coming revolution? This was a single quarter profit, of 9.92 billion, 75% higher than the previous quarter. Doesn't this suggest that the inflation of gas and oil prices in response to natural disasters has been fabricated or exaggerated to generate outrageous profits for those who are already super-rich? Do these men know what the word hubris means?

Ahh, it's so nice to be protected by the Give Up philosophy, and to sit back and laugh as these dingbats dig their gold-lined graves. Give up! Ride a bike and laugh at the SUV drivers!

Well, Halliburton gets a lot of bad press. But if you look closely you see the real trouble maker is Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) the evil subsidiary of Halliburton that is the construction equivalent of Wolfram and Hart.

The latest story of incomprehensible evil is in the LA Times, discussing KBR's activities in what appears to be white slavery, also known as human trafficking. Apparently a "subsidiary" of KBR has been using labor brokers in countries like Nepal who charge poor schmucks some ridiculous fee ostensibly to acquire them high-paying service jobs in Jordan. However, these unfortunate suckers find themselves dodging bullets in Iraq, working as "foreign contractors" for Halliburton and subject to kidnapping and execution. Ack.

I need to create my own subsidiary that commits crimes for me and allows me to avoid responsibility by blaming my out-of-control underling. I can then whip out all the old responsibility avoidance cliches like it's just a bunch of bad apples, or suggest I'm too busy to track the activities of my subordinates.

Scary article on global warming suggesting it is accelerating.

Neat evolution/infectious disease article in PLoS on evolution of the human CCR5 allele in response to pressure from HIV.

Everyone by now should have read Richard Smith's Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies.

Also, PLoS Biology on evolution by gene duplication and more articles on evolution in PLoS Genetics than I can be expected summarize.

And finally, stupid Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals annoyingly existing tens of thousands of years ago before god created earth in 4000 BCE.

Well, evolution might be responsible for morality and karma among other selfless behavior in humans. Again I apologize to those without institutional subscriptions, but this is certainly an interesting review of models of cooperation designed to figure out the evolutionary benefit of human selflessness. Briefly:


The evolution of cooperation by indirect reciprocity leads to reputation building, morality judgement and complex social interactions with ever-increasing cognitive demands.

Indirect reciprocity and public goods games are also closely connected. For example, donors are more generous if they learn that the recipient has recently made a donation to a charitable institution. An even more remarkable effect was found in an experiment alternating rounds of the Public Goods Game with rounds of the indirect reciprocity game. It is known that many players show an initial willingness to contribute to the public good a substantial amount of their endowment, but this willingness often vanishes within a few rounds. This is not the case if indirect reciprocity games are sandwiched between the rounds of the Public Goods Game. If players are informed about their recipient's action in the Public Goods Game, they tend to be more generous towards recipients who contributed much.

Anyone else watch My Name is Earl?

Also, Chimps are jerks and a nice evolution paper explaining why the final stages of divergence between species occurs, using experimental evidence from tree frogs.

So, the big bankruptcy bill went into law last week and there was an interesting article in the Post this weekend about the disparity in treatment of corporate bankrupts versus citizen bankrupts. Take a guess for whom bankruptcy is easier.

Bankruptcy is a wonderful Give Up issue. There has probably been no other bill passed by Republicans that will more thoroughly screw their own constituents than the bankruptcy bill. Go Republicans! Dig your grave! Woohooo!



Source for Bankruptcy data was the American Bankruptcy Institute, Total Business and Non-business Filings (2000-2003) by state, www.abiworld.org , the rate per capita was determined using state population data from the United States Census www.census.gov from the appropriate year.

Congratulations to our friends at EPIC who made the front page of the post today.
Way to stick it to the man!

So, the Nation's Report Card for 2005 has just been released. So far, evaluations of the data seem to show the only negative thing is that reading and math proficiency have remained more or less flat during this administration. However, since the federal government really doesn't have that much power to influence the quality of education in the states since the overwhelming majority of funding is local, you can't really blame the administration for any specific failing. Education, despite what politicians say, is not that much of a national issue except in terms of raw funding and things like school lunch programs.

The most striking thing about the national report card is how it is just total bullshit. A study of educational achievement that identifies no real problems and no really significant differences state to state is on its face, totally worthless. If you look at the data, previous trends showing higher scores and better education in midwestern states are flattened out, and I belive this is actually purposeful. You see, it has to do with the beautiful political strategy of introducing pointless standardized tests to assess students' "proficiency" in various topics. They apply this pointless test, and find, well, nothing much.

Additionally, the politicians that employ these so-called measures of accountability are cynically exploiting schoolchildren to pad their accomplishments, as was seen in Virginia in the last decade. First you introduce a bullshit test that no one is prepared for. All the results are totally crappy, and the politician who introduced says, "Look at the state of our schools! The previous administration failed Our Children! Blah blah blah!" The next year teachers teach to the test (and/or they weaken the standards) and scores dramatically improve. The politician then says, "It's an education miracle! Look at what my administration did!" Meanwhile, by any meaningful metric of success nothing significant has changed, except the kids have gotten better at taking pointless standardized tests.

This is the source of the so-called "Texas Education Miracle" that Bush used in 2000 to represent himself as a champion of education. In fact, the Texas educational miracle was one of the greater frauds perpetuated against the American people by a state government. Bush's accountability scheme, rather than actually changing anything, focused on pointless measurement and threats of loss of funding rather than real improvement. The result? Texas schools hide their massive dropout rates rather than honestly addressing them. Bush claims a reduction in drop-outs from 40% to 1% in 4 years, but they couldn't hide the data for long. An independent study of graduation rates by the conservative Manhattan Institute found the real graduation rate in Texas is somewhere between 57-67%. Real success in education usually takes a decade to appear, and any claim to the contrary should be immediately suspect.

Check out this map of a real metric of educational success. The lesson? Try to educate your kids in the hard-core red states and there is a high probability they will never graduate.



Data compiled from
Greene, J.P., High School Graduation Rates in the United States, November 2001
(Revised April 2002), The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

Also see:

Michael Dobbs, Education Miracle Has a Math Problem:Bush Critics Cite Disputed Houston Data, The Washington Post, November 8, 2003.

And
Dan Rather, The ‘Texas Miracle’, 60 Minutes II, August 25th, 2004.

A rotten comment allows the New York Times to report on the realities of a rotten industry:

A well-known advertising executive and worldwide creative director at WPP Group resigned his position yesterday amid an uproar over remarks he made at an industry event about female creative executives. The comments, by Neil French, 61, drew attention to the absence of women at the highest levels of the creative side of the ad industry.

Mr. French told an audience in Toronto on Oct. 6 that women "don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to," saying their roles as caregivers and childbearers prevented them from succeeding in top positions.

[...]

Billed as "A Night with Neil French," the $100-a-person question-and-answer event was to be a look at the creative side of advertising. When Mr. French was asked by a female audience member why there weren't more high-ranking women in creative agency positions, he said it was because they were not good enough.

[...]

The One Club, a nonprofit organization that honors creative work in advertising, will induct a woman into its Hall of Fame next week for the first time since 1974. Out of 40 current inductees, 4 are women, according to the club's Web site. The average annual base salary for female creative directors is $4,000 less than that for men, according to a study by the National Association for Female Executives; men earned $123,000, while women earned $119,000, according to the study.

Cindy Gallop, the former chairwoman of Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, said such imbalances in agencies were typically starkest in the creative department.

"Senior female creatives are virtually nonexistent," she said. "It's an incontrovertible fact, and nobody has ever come up with any strong or clear answers on the issue."

Four articles dealing directly with evolution this week in Nature.
In Drosophila (this is an interesting one)
In Sea Spiders
Humans
And Flu
And some bacterial evolution, bird evolution, global warming and rainforest deforestation in Science.

It's an interesting side-note in the ID debate currently going on, number of articles on evolution this week in the two most important scientific journals = 6, number of actual scientific articles published to date containing actual data on ID = 0. I've seen estimates of journal articles on evolution in the literature in the tens of thousands. It is difficult to assess by searching since evolution is also frequently used as a less-specific term. Hence, simple pubmed search yields 165,000 results since 1949. The ID people of course have no data, only analogies. Sometimes I wish science could be performed solely based on who has the most appealing analogy, it would make publishing a whole lot easier. Sadly, that's pretty much the definition of Lysenkoism, which as is pointed out by the Wikipedia article was what Carl Sagan dubbed modern creationist efforts.

It is important to remember though, that the duty imposed upon you as followers of the great Give Up philosophy is not to care that people want to misinform their children about biology. It just means that the Red states will just fall behind in yet another measure of knowledge and human progress, and more science jobs and higher education for those who raise their kids in Blue states (excepting Dover PA) or among those who take the initiative to actually teach them real science. It's the Give Up version of survival of the fittest!

While Mr. Delay may seem smug and self-assured about his impending trial, he better be careful. They are pretty tough on criminals in Texas.


Consider Texas has the highest rate of incarceration in the US.

But before you get the idea in your heads that this actually discourages violent crime (it's clearly not preventing money laundering), consider that the states with highest incarceration rates don't appear to enjoy any benefit in decreased murder rates. All that incarcerating and executing, and you still got all those murderers and money-launderers. Shame shame.



Data compiled from:
Mother Jones magazine, Debt to Society: Special report, Incarceration rates in 2000, incarceration rate is defined as the number of prisoners sentenced to more than one year per 100,000 residents, as recorded by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

Kochanek KD, Murphy SL, Anderson RN, Scott C. Deaths: Final data for 2002. National vital statistics reports; vol 53 no 5. Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics. 2004.

It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner.

Say what you want about the man, but he knows how to take a good mug shot. Can you believe it? This shot looks like a head shot for a McDonalds assistant manager application. See his arrest warrant at the Smoking Gun.

Look at this nice engravature that the WSJ uses for our pal, Scooter:



Compare it with the Washington Post's version:



I've been trying to emulate Scooter's WP look, but thus far have been unable to. I think I need more contempt.

So, I was watching Jerry Kilgore on the TV, and what really creeps me out about him is his hair. That perfectly aranged, slightly greasy, fascist parted Republo-helmet he has makes me think he's the type of guy who might compulsively steal women's underwear.

Anyway, let's take a look at some partisan hair.
For example, Tom Delay, Jerry Falwell, both Bush's and Rick Santorum have some seriously scary hair parts.

On the Democrat side I'm reassured by Bill Clin-ton's white man fro, and Barak Obama's clean-cut uniformity.

However, I'm am somewhat alarmed by John Edwards severe part and sometimes-feathered comb-forward.

And I'm definitely thankful Trafficant was put in jail, his hair makes him look like Boss Hog after a hurricane.

Finally, what do you do about bald and evil? Does the severity of part truly correlate with traffic with Satan? And how can you know if, due to congenital baldness, we are no longer given the warning signs of Republico-part? Well, I leave you with my closing argument. Check out this photo of two of the most menacing parts I've ever seen.

Today's New York Times reports on scientist Michael Behe, the progenitor of "Intelligent Design" theory:

In two days on the stand, Professor Behe has insisted that intelligent design is not the same as creationism, which supports the biblical view that God created the earth and its creatures fully formed. The Supreme Court has ruled that creationism is a religious belief and cannot be taught in public school.

It's scary to see how much success Behe has had in these endeavors. Back when I was at the University of Georgia, I organized a debate with Behe for the Sagan Society. We decided to put up a student against Behe--a very bright guy named Keith Lankford, who was one of the first people to discuss the danger of the creationists' "wedge" strategy. Back then, the whole thing was laughable. Now it's quite serious.

The Times also noted that Behe "acknowledged that under his definition of a scientific theory, astrology would fit as neatly as intelligent design." This is good news for me. Because I've given up, and if intelligent design and astrology is scientific, so is my belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I was touched by his noodly appendage while exploring Twin Peaks the other day. See--it has been written! Or rather, drawn:

Has anyone seen the Colbert Report? The intro is the best. When I first saw him waving that giant CGI American flag I nearly plotzed.

Check out Colbert Nation.

So, when Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court, it was apparently the first time a confirmation fight really got ugly, and set the stage for the fight over Clarence Thomas, Roberts, and now Miers. Today Bork writes for the WSJ that Bush is not a conservative and his candidate for the Supreme Court is a joke.

Now, many of you won't have a WSJ subscription to read this but I'd like to sum up some of the glorious irony contained in this opinion piece.

1. Bork is a lunatic, and so crazy-right wing that he was rejected for the court based on ideology (this is the court that has Scalia and Thomas on it despite Democratic majorities in congress, so that's something). The elephant sitting in the room, which didn't even come up in his hearings because there were plenty of other reasons to criticize him, was that Bork was the Nixon crony who finally fired Archibald Cox! This is the guy who's going to comment on anyone else's Supreme Court choices?

2. He titled his own opinion piece "Slouching Towards Miers." Ha! What a freak! To those not familiar with his book "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" which one reviewer noted was less cohesive and reasonable than the Unabomber's manifesto, this means he thought it might be a good idea to replace "Gomorrah" with "Miers" and that would be funny or something. Wow, the judicial candidate worthy of comparison to a city that God razed with heavenly fire for its sins.

3. His main criticism of her isn't over Roe, or her conservatism or qualifications but her failure to demonstrate and embrace of Originalism, Bork's own insane, and almost universally rejected judicial philosophy. Basically, it means the only judicial review that is appropriate must involve travel in a time machine to the year 1776, acquisition of a founding father, and subsequent interviews with him to determine how he'd feel about a law passed 200+ years later in a somewhat different country.

Ah, the WSJ opinion page. Source of so much lunacy. It's like going to a zoo.

The NYT has two articles on the type of stupid crap that will ruin Republicans.
One is evidence of a total disregard for the livelihood of soldiers in our military as the US military apparently runs it's own casinos.
Now that's fucked up.

The second is that after a month and a half FEMA still can't find its ass with both hands.

But that's not too surprising, what about this administration would make anyone think things would ever get better at any agency they're in charge of? Remember, how Porter Goss was supposed to reform the CIA? Hows that been going? Oh yeah, badly.

Here is a WP article suggesting that Bush's unpopularity may be spilling over into the VA state governor's election.


This would actually be Give Up in action. One of the central tenets of the Give Up philosophy is that control of the federal government is likely to be out of progressives hands for a long time, so one should focus on keeping one's state blue until the Republicans make things so bad that people will finally see them for what they are. It is then interesting the Bush is doing such a bad job that dissatisfaction federally already may be leading to more progressive success in a Red state government. It is really amazing, Bush is putting Give Up to the test in fast forward. I thought it would take another Republican president before people figured it out, but we'll see.

So, reading nature and I run across this article:
Evolutionary origin of insect wings from ancestral gills

Sorry for all the non-science types who don't have nice institutional subscriptions to journals, but to sum up, this paper explains a likely origin for the innovation of insect wings from mutations in genes controlling development of gills in related crustaceans.

We have isolated crustacean homologues of two genes that have wing-specific functions in insects, pdm (nubbin) and apterous. Their expression patterns support the hypothesis that insect wings evolved from gill-like appendages that were already present in the aquatic ancestors of both crustaceans and insects.

That is all.

So, the Washington Post reports that Harriet Miers has discounted reports she would overturn Roe. They write:

Trying to woo senators who will determine whether she is confirmed for the court, Miers aided the White House as it scrambled yesterday to quell controversy over a published report that two Texas judges said she opposes the 1973 decision that affirmed the right to an abortion in all 50 states. "She said, 'No one knows how I would rule on Roe v. Wade ,' " Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters after their private meeting.

No one knows? How about you lady? Anyway, despite the ostensibly reassuring news that she's still playing coy on Roe, an even more disturbing, but more subtle revelation follows:

Meanwhile, Schumer said that he had asked Miers whether she believes Griswold is "settled law," and that "she said she was not ready to give an answer on that."

Now, Griswold vs. Connecticut if anything is a more significant ruling than Roe considering it was the decision that established the right of women to use birth control on the basis of personal privacy. So, we don't know if she'll overturn Roe or even if she'll support Griswold! Not that it matters anyway, since there is still enough sanity on the court that it is unlikely anyone but Scalia would join her in a challenge to Griswold in the unlikely event a challenge would even come before the court.

Now in terms of Giving Up. Three things are of note.
1. If Roe were overturned abortion would still be legal in 17 states and most of the Blue states that still have antiquated laws would quickly legislate a cure.

2. The whole idea that the Supreme court originally was acting anti-democratic in establishing a right to abortion is absurd, as at the time there was national disapproval of the abortion ban because it was only a socio-economic ban. Women could still obtain abortions if they had enough cash to say, fly to New York (which provided 1 million abortions a year, almost as many as are performed across the country nowadays).

3. This map, which shows that once again, the red states are just screwing themselves with this, and will just have to learn, again, the hard way.


Menacker F, Martin JA, MacDorman MF, Ventura SJ. Births to 10-14 year-old mothers, 1990-2002: Trends and health outcomes. National vital statistics reports; vol 53 no 7. Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics. 2004.