I’ve got to get back to my meeting, but Cosma just had to distract me with these classic video clips on dissecting the squid giant axon, including movies of one of my personal heroes, JZ Young (pronounced, as everyone knows, as jay-zed), in action. It’s beautiful stuff.
This is the most perfect description of me on the interwebs.
Pharyngula is a blog run by a science professor named P.Z Myers. Not only does Mr Myers believe in the fantasy of evilution, but every year he milks thousands and thousands of dollars out of the education system to indoctrinate children into his hateful cult. Like most liberal educators at America’s secular colleges, Myers lives a life of luxury at taxpayers’ expense—taking long vacations with his trophy wife, driving expensive foreign cars, dressing his children in exclusive fashions—all the while promoting his vengeful and deceitful ideology.
It could have been a little more complete, though, and mentioned my cosmopolitan lifestyle, my wastrel hedonism by day, and my mansion with the secret cave underneath, in which I lurk by night.
Despite all the flattery, though, I’m still not voting for Sam Brownback.
Another busy day ahead of me: yesterday I met Alex and Bora, shared a dinner table with James Randi, and saw swarms of other people I have to meet today … so off I go to another series of random encounters.
Mainly because you don’t know what foo camp is all about. Yes, I have arrived in lovely Sunnyvale, safe and sound, ready for my alter ego, Tyler Nerden, to face the google geeks.
While I was hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, what did I miss? I just caught Behe on the Colbert Report, and yowza, what a clown. Einstein’s theories were all about putting limits on Newton? And Behe is the guy who’s putting limits on Darwin? Can we just say he’s an idiot and be done with it now?
And speaking of dismissive one-liners, what the heck is going on here in my own little fever-swamp? There are 357 comments on this trivial article! I could tell just from the numbers that a troll has been at work, and what do you know, there’s David snarking away (68 of those comments are just him prattling away), and all you people are feeding the little infestation. Stop it. He’s not worth it. Poof, now he’s gone.
I will be checking in a little more regularly now, so behave yourselves.
…you’ll find this site amusing: Churches ad hoc: a divine comedy.
Maybe it’s news, but at this point all I can say is…who the hell cares what you say, Benny.
News from the Wingnut Heartland! Brave Oklahoma is issuing a new license plate design:
Wouldn’t that look perfect on the SUV decorated with yellow magnetic ribbons that you use to drive (alone) into work every day?
And how about Kansas? You know they’re always going to be at the forefront of America’s mad plunge backward. Now the Republican party in that fine state has decided they need loyalty oaths:
Over the weekend, Kansas Republican leaders formed what they’re calling a “loyalty committee,” a move that’s ticking off moderates and conservatives alike.
It is never a sign of strength when your group, country or otherwise starts imposing loyalty oaths, or so I told Kansas Republican Party Chairman Kris Kobach over the phone on Tuesday.
Next step, I suspect, is to issue belt buckles saying “God is with us” and purifying the party structure in a Night of the Long Knives.
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.
