"Penn & Teller debunk Intelligent Design as a possible scientific theory, even while it is being added to science curricula across the U.S." (Video on YouTube)
This is a great tv series. I am will P&T on this one. (BUNK) It is the complete video of the episode on ID.
"An informal, inclusive progressive social group. Raise your spirits while you raise your glass, and share ideas while you share a pitcher. Drinking Liberally gives like-minded, left-leaning individuals a place to talk politics. You don't need to be a policy expert and this isn't a book club - just come and learn from peers, trade jokes, vent frustration and hang out in an environment where it's not taboo to talk politics.
Bars are democratic spaces - you talk to strangers, you share booths, you feel the bond of common ground. Bring democratic discourse to your local democratic space - build democracy one drink at a time.
While drinking liberally, always remember to drink responsibly, and make liberal use of designated drivers. Drinking and driving is reckless and irresponsible, like a neocon war or corporatist tax cut. Liberals, don't do it."
Met one of the local AL hosts, Emma Fry, when I was working in Huntsville. Nice group of guys and gals...
Nashville has a meet-up every Thursday, 6:00 pm onward at The Flying Saucer, 111 10th Ave S, hosted by Amie Loyer.
On Bullshit Essay by Princeton University professor emeritus Harry Frankfurt.
"In the essay, Frankfurt sketches a theory of bullshit, defining the concept and analyzing its applications. In particular, Frankfurt contrasts bullshitting and lying. Where the liar makes deliberately false claims, the bullshitter is simply uninterested in the truth. Rather, bullshitters aim primarily to impress their audiences. Whereas the liar needs to know the truth the better to conceal it, the bullshitter, interested solely in pretense, has no use for the truth. By virtue of this, Frankfurt claims, "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
"Part of its attraction lies in watching a first-rate mind dissect a second-rate concept.
Pandering to politics costs lives, lost productivity
Topic: Society
5:46 pm EST, Feb 5, 2006
Suppose that over the next year the entire population of the Memphis metropolitan area were to die: 2,700-plus people gone each and every day, over a million in a year. And further imagine that another 200 million-plus, more than half the population of the entire U.S., were made chronically ill and, in a majority of those cases, unable to work.
Then consider that it was all caused by a disease that could have been eliminated through use of a common, cheap chemical, but the government refused to allow it, even though no scientific evidence had ever shown it to have caused harm to humans.
Imagine the outcry.
Such a scenario is being played out over much of the globe: One million to three million people dead annually, 200 million to 300 chronically ill from malaria, because governments won't allow the use of the pesticide DDT to kill mosquitoes that carry the disease.
That DDT was ever banned in the first place is yet another farce of the Nixon era, when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Ruckelshaus arbitrarily decreed that it be removed from use — despite extensive hearings that concluded it posed no danger to human health and a judge's ruling that it shouldn't be banned. Ruckleshaus, it is reported, refused to attend the hearings or to read one word of the more than 9,000 pages of testimony from more than 125 witnesses.
The ban on DDT, widely used on crops, was a direct outgrowth of the public hysteria regarding all things chemical that followed publication of Rachel Carson's book, “Silent Spring,” in which she painted lurid pictures of landscapes devoid of bird songs and a human population rife with cancers from exposure to pesticides and chemicals.
Although there was some questionable evidence that DDT, in large quantities, caused thinning of the shells of the eggs of some bird species (this is still being debated in the scientific community), there was not then — nor now — one scintilla of scientific proof that DDT had caused a single human death or a single human cancer.
But DDT became a cause for environmental organizations, and their relentless campaigns have been a major influence in it being banned in the U.S. and many other countries.
They could afford to be holier-than-thou; malaria had been eliminated in the U.S. prior to DDT being outlawed. But for much of the rest of the world — especially Third World nations — the loss of DDT saw the number of malaria cases begin skyrocketing. And deaths.
Efforts are now afoot to ban DDT worldwide, a move that would condemn millions more to needless suffering and death. Organizations and governments are playing politics with people's lives, denying the use of an effective, safe, cheap pesticide that has stood the test of time as the absolute best material in malaria control programs.
One small step: Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., has succeeded in pressuring the U.S. Agency for International Development to reform its inefficient, wasteful malaria programs. Another is Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates' $250 million-plus contributions to malaria research.
But now, and for the foreseeable future, DDT is a much-needed lifesaver.
Yesterday's New York Times had an article about Facebook.com discussing the usual stuff about too-much-information, stalking, privacy, etc. But the prank described in the lede of the article was new to me and really funny:
AS far as Kyle Stoneman is concerned, the campus police were the ones who started the Facebook wars. "We were just being, well, college students, and they used it against us," says Mr. Stoneman, a senior at George Washington University in Washington. He is convinced that the campus security force got wind of a party he and some buddies were planning last year by monitoring Facebook.com, the phenomenally popular college networking site. The officers waited till the shindig was in full swing, Mr. Stoneman grouses, then shut it down on discovering under-age drinking.
Mr. Stoneman and his friends decided to fight back. Their weapon of choice? Facebook, of course.
Once again they used the site, which is visited by more than 80 percent of the student body, to chat up a beer blast. But this time, when the campus police showed up, they found 40 students and a table of cake and cookies, all decorated with the word "beer." "We even set up a cake-pong table," a twist on the beer-pong drinking game, he says. "The look on the faces of the cops was priceless." As the coup de gr�ce, he posted photographs of the party on Facebook, including a portrait of one nonplussed officer.
American dream, in peril, is successfully pursued through state programs
Topic: Society
11:07 pm EST, Dec 10, 2005
Working hard and being employed may no longer be enough to ward off poverty, according to a study released today by the Sodexho Foundation and Brandeis University's Institute on Assets and Social Policy. The study finds that the U.S. has a large contingency of working poor who do not have sufficient resources to support their families at a minimum economic standard. The future might be more promising, however. The study shows that new state policies are enabling more low-income households to move from poverty to the middle class by rewarding work effort, enhancing job-related earnings and providing ways to encourage the accumulation of assets such as savings and home ownership. The study, Innovative State Policies to Reduce Poverty and Expand the Middle Class: Building Asset Security Among Low-Income Households, examines a new domestic policy framework called "asset building." The framework is based on the concept that helping people develop financial assets provides stability and an opportunity to move into the middle class.
Swaziland, with the world's highest rate of HIV, cut Aids day events, and South Africa's health minister publicly refused to back anti-retroviral drugs. US President George W Bush pledged new funds and called for decisive action. The EU stressed the need for effective measures to prevent the disease. More than 40m people are infected with HIV/Aids, according to the UN. "The lessons of nearly 25 years into the Aids epidemic are clear. Investments made in HIV prevention break the cycle of new infections," said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids. "By making these investments, each and every country can reverse the spread of Aids."
Fighting Words for a Secular America: Ashcroft & Friends vs. George Washington & the Framers
Topic: Society
8:35 pm EST, Dec 1, 2005
Alert: Americans who honor the U.S. Constitution’s strict separation of church and state are now genuinely alarmed. Agnostics and atheists, as well as observant people of every faith, fear — sensibly — that the religious right is gaining historic political power, via an ultraconservative movement with highly placed friends. But many of us feel helpless. We haven’t read the Founding Documents since school (if then). We lack arguing tools, “verbal karate” evidence we can cite in defending a secular United States. For instance, such extremists claim — and, too often, we ourselves assume — that U.S. law has religious roots. Yet the Constitution contains no reference to a deity. The Declaration
John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, has a bone to pick with Wikipedia.
In an op-ed in USAToday Seigenthaler takes the community-authored encyclopedia to task for running a biography of him that falsely accused him of being a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. The charges remained up on the site for months before Seigenthaler got them removed. The claims were posted anonymously on the encyclopedia, and while he was able to trace the author's IP address to a customer of BellSouth Internet, the company said it would not disclose the name without a subpoena, Seigenthaler wrote. "And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research--but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects," he wrote in the essay. "Congress has enabled them and protects them."
