We won’t have Dianne Mandernach to kick around anymore

Our Minnesota Health Commissioner, a Republican appointee who was supported by our Republican governor through a number of startlingly clueless incidents, has finally resigned. Here’s a short summary of her career:

This summer, Mandernach was criticized over her suppression of a state study about 35 cancer deaths related to taconite mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

In 2004, her credibility suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. Critics denounced those claims as junk science, and the wording was removed from the website.

So she hid real cancer risks and promoted fake cancer risks. She got it wrong coming and going! How could that be? Could it be…ignorance and arrogance?

Marty said his misgivings began about a year after her appointment, when Mandernach was forced to remove the wording on the website that claimed a link between abortion and breast cancer.

“She told me it was her judgment to override all of the scientific information at the time,” Marty said.

What were the qualifications of this paragon to override scientific evidence? She was “a former nun and teacher, was chief executive of the Mercy Hospital & Health Care Center in Moose Lake”. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?

Bridge collapse update

The place to go if you want to track the media responses to our Twin Cities bridge disaster is Minnesota Monitor. There are regular updates as new information comes in.

If you’re looking to know where the responsibility is going to fall, Nick Coleman has the answers.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

After citing that ghastly quote from Grover Norquist, “My goal is to cut government in half … to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” (especially after Katrina, that quote deserves to be Norquist’s epitaph), Phoenixwoman seconds that suggestion:

It’s possible that delayed maintenance — delayed because of budget cuts, as the Republican Pawlenty would rather chop off his own genitals than undo his tax cuts for the rich — may have been a factor.

I think we can safely say that the Republican party platform has been a catastrophic and costly failure. Let’s hope one positive result from these recent disasters is that people realize that taxes ought to be used for investments in infrastructure rather than propping up the obscenely wealthy and funding wasteful foreign military adventures.

Spot makes an interesting observation: he reminds us that the Republican convention is in Minneapolis next summer. This disaster is not going to be corrected by then. Can we all remember to rub their noses in the debris when they come around?

Now we just need an opportunity to tell the Democrats that they’d better set their priorities appropriately, too.

Also read BldgBlog: Infrastructure is patriotic.

It’s interesting to point out, then, that the Federal Highway Administration’s annual budget appears to be hovering around $35-40 billion a year – and, while I’m on the subject, annual government subsidies for Amtrak come in at slightly more than $1 billion. That’s $1 billion every year to help commuter train lines run.

To use but one financial reference point, the U.S. government is spending $12 billion per month in Iraq – billions and billions of dollars of which have literally been lost.

Yikes!

i-1cef5d92f2a994fdf191825676831314-bridge_collapse.jpg

I was nowhere near this disaster—I’m on the other side of the state—but I’ve been over this bridge lots of times when I travel from Morris to the Twin Cities campus; now it has suddenly collapsed during rush hour, killing at least half a dozen and injuring many more. I’m shocked. There wasn’t any obvious cause, just boom, it fell apart.

An in-person account by someone living right by the bridge, with photos, is available.

Go for a walk

Here’s a cool tool: Walk Score. Type in an address, and it uses Google Maps to look up destinations like parks and stores and theaters that are in walking distance of the place, and gives you a score out of 100 on walkability. A place like Manhattan will give you high scores; one of those desolate suburbs where you have to drive to get anywhere (like my old address in Pennsylvania) will give you lousy low scores.

Morris is middling: I get a 52.

i-562a735ae73159b1067703f5cd11d6b9-walkscore.jpg

There’s funny stuff in the Google data base, though. It places a Donnelly grocery store a few blocks from my house and says it’s 24 miles away; there are also a whole lot of appropriate businesses that simply aren’t listed.

(via Mercury Rising)

They can’t shut me up!

Tomorrow, Sunday, at 1:00 in the Roseville Library, I’ll be giving a talk on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. Come on down and argue with me!

Now I have to get back to polishing this talk up. I suppose no more than ten powerpoint slides of equations is the limit? (Nah, not really—there’s no math in this talk at all. A few pretty pictures, though…).

By the way, if you listened to the Horgan/Myers Show, there was an unfortunate characterization of atheist organizations as groups of people congratulating one another on how much smarter they are than those crazy theists. As you can see, we actually do have issues of substance to discuss, and it actually helps to talk about them in an explicitly non-supernatural way.

And as everyone knows, the backslapping chatter about our plans for world domination are confined to the business meeting.

Recruiting the local unbelievers

It’s never too early to start advertising: Skatje is starting up a new campus organization next fall, with another student, Collin Tierney, as co-chair. The group is called the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists – Morris Chapter, and if you’re an interested UMM student, they’d like you to join the facebook group at that link. The plan is to start the fall term with a respectable number of potential members, have weekly meetings, and develop a plan for education and outreach and just plain having fun.

I think Skatje and Collin are planning to have open meetings, so you don’t even have to be a student to show up.

Hooray! We’re getting less money!

Academia is a strange little world—we’re happy about this news!

The biggest winners from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting? The 1,900 students at the Morris campus who saw their tuition go down by almost $1,000.

We’re an even better bargain than before. Now we just need to get more students to take advantage of us…so enroll at the University of Minnesota Morris! Send your kids here!