Today, the YearlyKos event begins in Chicago, with Tara Smith handling the science events in which I would have been participating if I hadn’t been tagged to play at Sci Foo. I wish I could be there!
Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the ethanol boondoggle.
Ethanol doesn’t burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America’s energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol’s wholesale market price.
And that’s just the beginning … it starts getting savage after this point.
One of the weirdest issues to drive the religious right into frothing madness was the discovery of a vaccine against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which would effectively reduce rates of cervical cancer … and it was opposed because it blocked infection with a sexually transmitted disease, and thus would encourage licentiousness. Weird, I know. Their brains don’t work right.
Anyway, here’s a new twist: investigators have found other non-genital reservoirs of the virus: HPV strains that could cause severe forms of cancer have been found under people’s fingernails. Ooooh, yuck, you filthy humans, crawling with viruses and microorganisms and various creepy crawlies … it gives one a little sympathy for obsessive germophobes.
It has to be emphasized, though, that finding the virus in one place does not mean it is transmitted via that place — this may be a completely negligible finding. If transmission is documented, then this could be an important discovery for public health policy, since we could at least tell them we’re inoculating their kids against a virus they might get from their priest patting them on the head, rather than just in case their child grows up to be a nasty dirty slut who actually has sex. It’s too early to do that, though, and right now this is mainly an opportunity to justify more research into mechanisms of infection with HPV.
OK, I don’t know quite what to make of this: it’s a site called The Atheist Conservative. I know there’s no obstacle to being both godless and conservative, but this one is ’round-the-bend freaky far-right Bush-lovin’ conservative. I don’t know how an atheist could write a review of Ann Coulter’s Godless that contains gooey dollops of praise for Coulter — that book was one flaming bonfire of stupid. But hey, if there are conservative atheists out there with tears running down your cheeks because you’re reading this pro-atheist site by a crazed liberal, maybe you’ll be happier over there.
Oh, and they’ve got their own symbol for atheism: it’s the square root of 2. Oy. Everyone’s gotta be different.
(via The Friendly Atheist)
Tom Tomorrow has a list of things he’s been wondering about, but it’s actually a list of things I suspect but would rather not have confirmed.
If you’re considering purchasing some supplies for home repair from one of the mega-chains, you might want to consider their advertising policies. Archy makes a good case that you should shop at Lowe’s—they don’t support barking mad reactionary freaks.
Of course, it’s a bit irrelevant to me, since I don’t have either one near me. Instead, we’ve got four or five small locally owned hardware stores. Their owners might be sympathetic to Bill O’Reilly, but they don’t have enough money to buy air time on his show.
Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it’s great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier tiers of the political arena, and that good wholesome sparring in the primary is going to help them both out, no matter who wins the nomination. Why, though, should this Minnesotan care? Aside from having lived in Oregon for 9 years (and loving it!), it was brought to my attention that there’s a sly tactic being carried out here. Someone dropped the A-bomb in the discussion already: they’ve asked “Is Steve Novick an atheist?“
That quickly developed into a major topic of discussion at BlueOregon. One of the major points is that while Oregon is one of the least godly states in the country, it still has a large Christian majority, and the assumption is that tagging him with areligiosity will hurt Novick’s chances.
What this kind of tactic actually does, though, is tarnish the reputation of Christians, so I’m saddened but unsurprised that more believers aren’t distressed by it. Imagine if a black candidate were running, and someone tried to argue that he was going to be beat because a large percentage of the voters were white. That’s not a commentary on the candidate, although there always is a tendency to hold the victim accountable: it’s an acknowledgment that the majority of voters are superficial bigots, an appeal to the prejudices of the lowest of the mob.
At least nowadays people wouldn’t try to publicly defend their bigotry against blacks, although I suspect many still practice it in the privacy of the voting booth (it’s also still a useful dirty campaign issue, as was used against McCain). We’ll still see people argue that atheism is a legitimate reason to vote against someone though, because he doesn’t share their “values”. That’s an admission, I think, that they want a Christian candidate who will inject religion into the secular task of running the country.
This is excellent, but I have a request that I hope Roy grants someday — my personal favorite is “America” from his “Faulty Intelligence” CD. Trust me, it’s awesome.
Aww, heck, they’re all good. I also want to see him on The Daily Show, and playing on the White House lawn outside GW Bush’s window.
It’s not as good as we might have hoped — it was commuted to a life sentence, rather than expulsion from Libya — but at least they aren’t going to be executed. Effect Measure has the story.
No, I don’t mean the infamous cruise of diarrhea and vomiting, I mean something far, far worse — a trip that would make a week locked in the head with fluids gushing from your orifices seem enticing. I mean…
Neo-cons. Casual racism. William F. Buckley, Dinesh D’Souza, Norman Podhoretz. Fear of Mexicans. Nuke the liberals. Bernard Lewis and Kate O’Beirne. Muslims must die. Desiccated ancient WASPs urging their kind to breed.
Steven King must ship out on one of these cruises sometime. It will spawn a horror novel so terrifying that it will need to be stored in a secret crate in a warehouse somewhere near Washington where it will be promised that Top Men will study it.
(via at-Largely)
