I suspect this poll is a bot battleground right now

It’s a pseudo-poll with 168,000 votes already, and I don’t believe it. The Rethuglican Wisconsin governor who has been trying to silence the people is not going to be the recipient of such clear favor and such large numbers…but here, go play with it anyway.

POLL: Do you approve of the job Gov. Walker is doing?

Strongly approve 48.95%

Approve 5.56%

Disapprove 1.88%

Strongly disapprove 43.61%

Just remember, if anyone tries to cite this stupid internet poll in support of any position, it’s completely meaningless.

Michele Bachmann writes a letter

Minnesota’s own pious Republican idiot (uh-oh, I repeated myself three times) has chastised Obama for his wickedness in a recent letter. His crimes are many. In a recent speech in Indonesia, he 1) referred to our national motto as E pluribus unum, not “In god we trust”, 2) quoted a small part of the Declaration of Independence that did not include the word “Creator”, and 3) mentioned that the US is unified under one flag without saying the magic phrase, “under god”. Now I know that Bachmann is an amazing expert in American history, so I think Obama should give this letter all the attention it deserves. The historicity of her complaints in this letter are thoroughly documented.

However, I’m afraid I must bring something even more significant to everyone’s attention. Recently, Ms Bachmann had a national platform in which to discuss important issues: she gave the Teabagger response to the President’s State of the Union address, and I notice something terrifying in the text of that speech.

She fails to acknowledge any gods anywhere in the speech, except as an afterthought in the very last sentence. Never mind that the speech was total BS, by her own standards, she must demand a retraction and apology from herself for its appalling absence of public piety.

I must also note something else. She is a woman. She is also working outside the home. And she has displaced a man, who could be holding down the position she is occupying. Under normal conditions, this would not be a problem, except that Ms Bachmann would like to return our country to the high moral state that it held in the 17th century, before the Enlightenment and secularism tainted our government with its ungodly latin motto of E pluribus unum, and impious independent women who deprived men of their exalted status really are guilty of a great crime.

Therefore, Michele Bachmann is a witch. I demand that we put her to the test.

Are teachers overpaid?

Let’s compare teacher salaries in different countries and find out.

i-5be648df09303316c8b073964ae60a3a-teacherspay-thumb-400x295-62502.jpeg
(Click for larger image)

You go, USA! Looks like we need to bust up some teachers’ unions and get those pay scales down even lower.

(That’s sarcasm, for any Republicans/Teabaggers/Libertarians who might show up and find that kind of thing difficult to read. We’re starving our teachers; it’s not a job that earns significant returns on the major educational investment it takes.)

Bannerless!

Many have noticed that the Pharyngula banner has been gone for a few weeks. This is a completely independent problem from our recent (and still ongoing) access bugginess. For some reason, our tech guy hosted all those images on the Amazon web server when setting up the pages, and Amazon has either locked us out or reorganized their directories, and they aren’t loading any more.

The easy solution would be to put the images in some other accessible place, and tweak the code to redirect it to load from the new address, but unfortunately, when the tech guy set up the images, he cropped and resized and tweaked them in various ways…and I don’t have the modified images. I have my original files, but I can’t simply upload those — they won’t work.

So I guess I need a brand new banner. Anyone out there have any graphic artistry who’s willing to whip something up for me, in return for an acknowledgment, and a link on my About page? I can give you the old logo collection (that’s a .tar file of a set of Photoshop images), tell you that the size should be 760×120 pixels, and turn you loose. There is no obligation to use the old logos, and creativity is a good thing (I always felt the old banner never had enough tentacles, for instance); also, if you send me something, I’m not going to feel obligated to use it, or may even use it for a while and then replace it. So don’t agonize over it, or I’ll feel awful.

Thanks to everyone who has pointed me to caches of the old banners, but they also won’t work. The old banners were composites put together by putting images together with some randomizing code. I’m really thinking of a fresh start right now, a simple single banner.

An inside view of the Journal of Cosmology

I’ve been saying for a long time that that ‘journal’ that published the meteorite microbes story was a joke: now someone who has also published in the JoC gives us a look at the review process there. It’s not very rigorous, as you might expect.

She also gives a good mineralogical explanation of the structures they were seeing (see also Ian Musgrave’s summary). This paper’s dead, Jim. But don’t be surprised if you see it cited in other papers from the fringe astrobiology crowd in the future.

Somebody tell them…Dickens’ London was not a utopia

Jane Cunningham, a Rethuglican (of course), has sponsored a bill in the Missouri congress that will disillusion you a little further today. Behold, SB 222!

This act modifies the child labor laws. It eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen. Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed. It also repeals the requirement that a child ages fourteen or fifteen obtain a work certificate or work permit in order to be employed. Children under sixteen will also be allowed to work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished. It also removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ. It also repeals the presumption that the presence of a child in a workplace is evidence of employment.

OK, that’s enough. I’m not reading any more email this morning. Instead, I think I’ll zip down to the liquor store and pick up a gallon jug of rum and curl up in a corner, weeping.

Damn, no. We’re in the middle of a storm with 35-50 mph winds howling outside. I guess I’m just going to have to face this universe sober.

I hope these people aren’t your friends

Japan has a tragic and devastating earthquake. American responses follow a range of attitudes. One that is normal and appropriate is sympathy and outreach by donations to organizations like the Red Cross; if you’re in that group, good for you, congratulations on being a human being.

Another response that is far too typical is for people to drop to their knees and start praying to their fairy-tale magic man in the sky, being about as ineffectual as is possible while still feeling smug about it. That’s human too, it’s just dumb. You don’t get congratulations for being a stupid human being, but at least you don’t make me want to disown the human race.

And then there’s a third reaction. I was sent a collage of messages posted on Facebook in the last day or so, and these make me ashamed to share a culture with these wretched people.

I may be about to ruin your morning. Don’t click on this compilation of facebook entries unless you’re one of those cynical people who already has low expectation of the worst of Americans.

And…the story from Japan has just gotten worse. There was an explosion at a nuclear power plant last night.

Markey is a hero, Rethuglicans are morons

Lately, I’ve completely given up on giving any credit to the Rethuglican party at all — where once I could have grudgingly admitted that perhaps some conservative policies were sensible, the current party is no longer conservative, but simply insane. As an example, I give you The Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, a Republican-sponsored, Republican-promoted exercise in outright science denial blessed by Koch Industries.

To amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas due to concerns regarding possible climate change, and for other purposes.

It simply blatantly redefines “pollutant” to exclude carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and any other substance that science might discover contributes to climate change, and says the EPA cannot regulate them. As you might guess, the oil and coal companies, as well as agribusiness, are drooling over the prospect of gutting the EPA.

The hearings on this bill have been a series of scientists testifying to the lunacy of it all, with Rethuglican ignoramuses responding with canards and stupidities. One guy did stand up for reason, Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachussetts.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.

However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

That last remark is a little bit unfortunate, since the fundagelical zealots actually do hate the theory of relativity. They really are that crazy.

My hat is off to Ed Markey, and right now, I’d like to make him president. Unfortunately, the Rethuglican chaired and dominated House energy and commerce committee subsequently proceeded to approve the bill.

Do you get that?

The Republicans have decreed that pollutants are not pollutants, therefore we can ignore them.