Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it.
I think in a few years, once this is all behind us, people will look back in disbelief at the utter inability of a party that controls the White House and large majorities in the Congress to convince the American people or a single member of the opposition party that its primary policy objective is one worth supporting. The attempted legislative chicanery is merely a symptom.
It’s been probably a decade since I voluntarily gave an honest answer when asked for my race. I will be listing my race as “American” for the Census, and I wholeheartedly encourage everyone else to do so as well. We can’t make the racial bean counters stop their counting, but we can deprive them of beans.
Apollo posted this at 9:52 PM EST on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 as Amer-I-Can!, Race
Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he’s ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.
There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
The original crew of “Star Trek” featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.
“Well, they’re all dead,” Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.
This pseudo-scientist has clearly failed basic Warp Theory, Astro-navigation and Elementary Starfleet Engineering. In the first place the deflector array is there to take care of these issues while at impulse and at pre-warp speeds. At Warp Speed they are dislocated from the normal space time continuum inside a subspace bubble.
Duh!
Nice try, Mr. Scientist.
Jamie posted this at 5:29 PM EST on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 as Nerdom
I’m not the biggest Sarah Palin fan, however the recent attacks on her for this quote are laughable:
My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not — this was in the ’60s — we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada,” Palin said a speech Saturday night, according to the Calgary Herald.
OMG – this obviously means that SarahPalin LOVES socialized medicine. What a hypocrite! What a Liar.
Turns out Canada didn’t have Socialized Medicine until well into the 80s. Properly understood Sarah’s quote can be read as “Yeah I used to use Canadian Health Care when it was free from government control and awesome, but I wouldn’t think of using it today.”
Note to my liberalfriends: Next time learn history before making an ass of yourself.
Jamie posted this at 5:26 PM EST on Monday, March 8th, 2010 as Health Care
That expanding legal abortion is now the single most important issue to the Democrat Party? If they are willing to sacrifice nationalizing health care if it doesn’t involve making it cheaper for women to get abortions, I’m not sure there’s any other conclusion to draw. Health care! This is a target they’ve been aiming at for over sixty years. But they’re willing to let it slide yet again simply because Senate Democrats couldn’t let this bill pass without using it to further a pro-abortion agenda. Justice is a strange thing.
Two things are worth noting as this farse continues to unfold. First, if the anti-abortion Democrats actually do stand firm, I will be flabbergasted. Honestly, I’m flabbergasted that they’ve stood firm to this point. This debate shows how deeply ingrained pro-abortion sentiment is among Democrats; that these ostensibly “pro-life” politicians were willing to have a D after their name made me believe they weren’t really that firm in some of their beliefs. I’m pleased to be wrong.
Second, all the libertarians who spent all eight of the Bush years griping about social conservatives should take note. Government takeover of 1/6 of the economy is being thwarted not by eloquent libertarian arguments about economic freedom, but by a strange coalition of those who object to using the government to promote abortion.
I’ve thought for a long time that the opulence of American higher education – universities with tuition greater than the average income of an American family, fundraising departments raising hundreds of millions to fund endowed chairs for tenured faculty who produce nothing of worth and will earn six figures well into senility, unnecessary administrative employees as far as the eye can see, with most of the actual work of teaching students being done by minimum wage adjuncts and TAs – is unsustainable. It simply makes no sense to have so much of our national wealth and resources tied up in doing so little, when it could be done for so much less.
This probably isn’t the reckoning I’d like it to be (though it would be delicious if said reckoning began in the UC system), but I think we’re going to see much more of this. When soft institutions meet hard times, Reality won’t much care how much it’s denounced in scholarly journals.
Three cheers for the residents of Texas’s State Board of Education, District 9 for tossing Creationist and Christian Revisionist Don McLeroy out of office in Tuesday’s primary (the man who beat him, a moderate on these issues, faces no opposition in the general election).
Due to its size — and the way California’s persnickety standards and budget woes have removed it from the process — Texas’s standards are extremely influential nationwide. Getting a confirmed crazy loon like McLeroy off the board is an important victory.
Those who write treatises of natural law can only declare what their own moral sense and reason dictate….Where they agree, their authority is strong; but where they differ (and they often differ), we must appeal to our own feelings and reason to decide between them. — Thomas Jefferson, 1793
Brookhiser, Richard. Alexander Hamilton, American. The Free Press, 1999. p 171.
Tom posted this at 11:22 PM EST on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 as Philosophy
One of the amazing things about Texas is how diverse the place is. I don’t mean diverse in the trite racial sense, but in terms of real differences in peoples and cultures. The Hispanics of El Paso bear little resemblence to the Hispanics of the Rio Grande Valley.
How distinct is the Rio Grande Valley from the rest of the state? In Michael Barone’s write up of Texas’s Republican primary yesterday, he says: “I didn’t separate out the heavily Hispanic counties along the Rio Grande Valley, because they cast relatively few (in some cases zero) votes in the Republican primary.”
Zapata County is 85% Hispanic. Let’s compare that to El Paso County, which is almost as Hispanic at 78%. In El Paso, there were 34,237 Democratic primary voters, and 15,372 Republican primary voters. That’s still more than twice as many Democrats, but those numbers just reflect a county with lopsided partisan numbers, not, like in the Valley, where one party – the majority party for the state at large – basically doesn’t exist (Hidalgo: 7 times more Democrats than Republicans; Willacy: 27 times more Democrats than Republicans)
This post is vaguely amusing and somewhat worth reading. It makes fun of this article, by a woman who thinks she’s being radical and new agey by not taking her husband’s – I mean, “wusband’s” – last name. She considers herself a “hife,” and lists of some of the “wife” stereotypes that she doesn’t follow:
I’d argue that, for all of my wifely qualities (I can obsess over throw pillows with the best of them), I have an inner husband who tends to drive at least double the legal speed limit and leave socks on the floor . . .
Frequent readers (or passengers) will know that I’m not a slow driver. When my GPS is on, I will always drive above the speed limit, where the Garmin shows my speed in menacing red, as a point of principle. I think that the speed limit on most highways should contain three digits and only be enforced in egregious circumstances. When I got a warning for speeding back in December (my 4th in 26 months in Texas), I was advised that, “Eventually if you get enough of those, someone will write you a ticket.” Point being, the big side of the legal limit is familiar territory to me, and I have no objection to others driving fast.
But “at least double the legal limit”? That means 71 in a 35, or 111 in a 55, or 141 in a 70. If you can do that, either you or the person who set the speed limit is doing something wrong, and it’s probably you. The main virtue of a legal limit is that it causes traffic to flow at a predictable pace; if someone is driving a car twice as fast as the flow of traffic, even if that person is a good driver, it’s almost always not safe.
So perhaps this woman’s “inner husband” is allowing her to fulfill that most feminine of stereotypes: the bad driver. I presume her “inner husband” has other masculine traits, like liking large vehicles (her Lexus crossover), and electronics (the phone glued to the side of her head).
Al Gore digs his way out of the mountain of snow blanketing the east coast to assuage our fears. See some of us have taken the recent events surrounding Global WarmingClimate ChangeNo Wait Its Global Warming Again Sigh Whatever the Frack Its Called Now to indicate that perhaps we aren’t about to be buried under fast rising seas. Well thank god Al is here to remind us that the Earth is doomed!
He begins thusly:
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
Who the hell is he kidding? Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change Skeptics (try saying that 3 times fast) aren’t attacking science (well some are), they are going after people whose malfeasance has done more damage to science than a fleet of Kentucky educated christians ever could.
Al goes on to make the typical noise about foreign oil, but then gets right back to the crux of the matter:
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skepticsmay not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
Nice try, Albert, but there are considerablymorethantwomistakes in those thousands of pages, but its cool I guess, we’ll ignore that…
The rest of the Op-Ed is the typical pablum about how temperatures over the last decade have been getting hotter. Uh, no. That hurricanes and other weather based natural disasters are getting worse. Uh, no. And calls for the US to be the leaders in the fight against disaster. Please God, no.
Look despite what, Albert Little wants us to believe, the sky is not falling. Those of us who are skeptical of CAGW, aren’t knuckle dragging anti-science young earth creationists. Some of us love science and the process of scientific discovery. It’s because of our reverence for science that we want to hold the charlatans at the University of East Anglia and in the IPCC to the standards science demands. We aren’t saying that Global Warming is over, thanks, have a nice day. We’re saying that more study is needed.
What real scientist would ever say that we should stop researching? Oh yes, the ones that said the science was settled.
Jamie posted this at 11:23 AM EST on Monday, March 1st, 2010 as Convenient Truth