PSA: The Countess has a new URL, so update your bookmarks. If you’re wondering what she writes about the latest post there is about Kama Sutra chocolate molds, which is just about perfectly representative, I think.
By the way, we learn that the source of those molds is a company in Chicago. Now at last the real motive for the YearlyKos convention’s locale in the Windy City is revealed — but then, we all knew the dirty hippies were into that free love thing.
I still wish I were there.
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.
Abbie of ERV has made her first guest post on the Panda’s Thumb, and it’s a good one. Go see how Behe was wrong and there are documented genetic and biochemical changes in the evolution of HIV, including the evolution of new molecular machinery.
My last Seed column is online. Print media feels a little weird — it’s like I wrote that one long ago, the one I finished earlier in July is going to print right now (and will be out in mid-August), and I’m already working on the column after that. It’s like looking at old history for me.
It’s also an old story for you subscribers. It’s just those who haven’t subscribed yet who are months behind the times. So when are you people going to join the rest of us…in the future?
Tomorrow, I’m flying off to San Jose, California to hang out with a bunch of weirdos on Google’s dime, and naturally I’m anticipating being pissed off at the experience of going through the airports again. I despise TSA, an organization of typical Bushpublican incompetence that will not accomplish their goals of suppressing terrorism, but is supremely efficient at being a nuisance to legitimate travelers. Actually, the one good thing about them is that they’ve replaced fear of flying with annoyance at bureaucratic idiots as the primary emotional vibe in modern American airports.
So naturally I’ve been enjoying Bruce Schneier’s interview with Kip Hawley, head of the TSA. Well, enjoying Scheier’s side of the discussion, anyway: Hawley is an obtuse timeserving fan of petty hoop-jumping. Read about the fluids foolishness, the shoe scam, and the no-fly list nonsense. Hawley can only provide shoddy excuses, and as Schneier says, it’s only cover-your-ass security, nothing useful. If you don’t want to read it all, Timothy Burke has a good summary.
But tomorrow I’m still going to have to take my shoes off and play games with toothpaste and deodorant and shuffle through that familiar line of bored, officious goons who will make you suffer if you don’t pretend they are the beloved guardians of your safety.
A few readers sent me a link to this interview with Alister McGrath; most thought it was worth a laugh, but one actually seemed to think I’d be devastated. I’m afraid the majority were correct: everything I’ve read by McGrath suggests that here is a man whose thoughts have been arrested by a temporal lobe seizure that he has mistaken for a lightning bolt from god. He’d probably be flattered to be compared to C.S. Lewis, but I see some similarities in the shallowness of their thinking that they believe they’ve deepened by tapping into theological tradition, but I’m sorry — my bathroom tap could drip for millennia, but it’s a nuisance, not Niagara.
It also doesn’t help that his argument is basically one of dogma and contradiction.
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!
A few years ago, Mel Gabler died, and I put up my response below. Now his wife, Norma Gabler, has also died. Good riddance at last. Those two did an awful amount of harm to American science education by inflicting their ignorant opinions on textbook selection in Texas.
I read this which led to this, where I learned a few months late that Mel Gabler was dead. This Mel Gabler. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Gabler had a good 89 year run in which he spread poison and ignorance and lies, and made his wretched mark on the textbook industry. He was a dishonest old man who reviewed biology textbooks through the lens of his own stupidity and religious prejudice, and he was darned good at it.
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.
People might read this definition of Asperger’s Syndrome and think, “Gee, that Miyyears fellow meets two of the three criteria, maybe that’s his problem”.
Asperger’s, like too many other mental illnesses, is in effect an almost whimsical diagnosis of exclusion: If someone is really smart, arrogant beyond measure, and tends to be an asshole or otherwise impossible to converse with in a normal way, then he must have a form of autism.
I’ll have you know, though, that I took the test and scored a 24, an “average math contest winner.” You need a 32 to suggest Asperger’s, and a 15 is the average. So there. I don’t have Asperger’s, I’m just cruel and insensitive.
