If the usual suspects whine about embryonic stem cell research, it stands to reason they’ll be opposed to anything involving cloning, even if it’s just a future patient’s own gene inserted into an embryonic stem cell. But for the rest of us this looks like a promising breakthrough: [Read more…]
There can be great profit in giving powerful people the wrong answer, as long as it’s the answer they want to hear. But there’s also times when a wrong answer really is wrong. Polling giant Gallup has issued intent to do that, and I think we can all tell them exactly how to accomplish it — assuming they really want to:
TPM — Gallup’s editor-in-chief Frank Newport wrote in an email published Monday by Politico that “a blue ribbon group of outside experts” is conducting a review of the firm’s “methodological issues” during the 2012 election. The findings will be unveiled during an event on June 4 at Gallup’s Washington, D.C. office.
The move comes after an embarrassing stretch for Gallup in which the firm was widely panned for its 2012 election polls. Soon after the election, Fordham University put the firm near the bottom of its rankings for pollster accuracy. And more recently, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough launched a blistering on-air attack last week against the firm.
Here’s how Gallup the polling operation fixes massive polling failures: you fire the highest level, best paid people who were assuring you everything was fine as the failure unfolded. I don’t know if that includes Frank Newport or not.
But I predict Gallup the for-profit company won’t do that. After being jaded by the new corporate reality, where failure at the top is crammed directly down below as far as it will go with no consequences at all to the culprits, I predict Gallup will let go a few mid level people, nerf payouts and career ladders for the least infuential and most vulnerable foot soldiers in their workforce, and keep most of the high level fuck-ups in place free to refuck-up. Then in a few years maybe we’ll all be treated to Gallup failing again and wondering quietly or aloud why they can’t get it right when so many others did.
In most any civilized space-time that headline would be unassailable. Remove or reduce food, shelter, and medical care, and more people die. Some get so depressed by facing all of that, they choose the only way out they see. But we live in interesting times, where facts don’t count for a huge chunk of the purportedly most prosperous and best educated nation on earth. Expect the usual hand waving and cold-blooded denial from them.
For the rest of us, data linking depression and suicide with the sudden onset of homelessness, medical bankruptcy, or hopeless grinding poverty comes as no surprise at all. Austerity kills, it really is that simple and everyone knows it. In Greece, where Austerians have rammed through ledge penalizing the least affluent and most vulnerable for the greedy sins of the super rich, the healthcare system is collapsing along with what’s left of the economy. But in other places equally hard hit or worse, where the Austerians have been held at bay, the data shows exactly what you’d expect: [Read more…]
Recorded on the ISS … And I thought Tebowie was good?
The difference between 399 parts per million of carbon dioxide and 400 ppm isn’t much, but new data from NOAA shows that that thresh-hold has now been crossed. The last time earth saw levels this high it was a very different place: [Read more…]
Remember that communique? It was the header on a memo that made its way into the Bush WH, then into a reporter’s hands, where it sped into the imagination of two groups of people. One was the mainstream left, who thought “Aha! See? Bush/Cheney are totally incompetent!” The other was the fringe 9-11 truther clowns who said “Aha! See? Bush/Cheney knew about 9-11 because they and the Saudis/Israelis/Illuminati planned the whole thing!” But despite the damning headlines, all by its lonesome it wasn’t good evidence of either of those back then. But there’s a lesson in it for today: [Read more…]
Both gloves have fingers and thumb, a right-hand will fit only one
Space has a lot of resources, technically it has all the resources. Some of them are obvious, some serendipitous. Aside from the mountains of platinum group metals or nickel-iron and oxygen floating around free for the taking, in addition to the nearly inexhaustible energy sources, micro-gravity is a new and to date poorly utilized resource in itself. Back in the 90s, research into drug production helped inform our friends in molecular biology about making pure isomers. Today similar experiments may yield kickass space whiskey. There are many other examples but there’s one big international obstacle, the Russkis. If politics makes strange bedfellows, and we can strain that metaphor to the breaking point, this deal has the GOP rolling in the hay with some strange denizens indeed. [Read more…]
I find this hard to accept at face value. Not saying it isn’t true, just an Occam’s Razor thing. But, I bet we can all guess what group of people will find it very easy to accept: [Read more…]
One can only imagine the denizens that titular link bait will draw, huh? And all they’re gonna get is a pic of three half-bald admittedly attractive grannies who like to mind-rape powerful men. Opps, did it again didn’t I? This place could be fixin to be interestin …
Peggy Noonan is a camouflage artist. She can look perfectly reasonable, even blend in as relatively non-partisan at times, and then morph into Teahadi activist in a flash. Who’s to say which is the real Noonan? Here she comes riding in on an ideological bender waving this decade’s version of a semen colored dress — hey this is show business, man, right-wing demand for scandal must be satisfied like any other, and page hits equal ratings. It happens to have no such material on it, but that ain’t stoppin her from pitching the usual vague implications. This part is particularly bait worthy: [Read more…]
It’s become vogue to hate Facebook, so here’s another reason to hate ’em: Mega Church Pastor Joel Osteen is tapping into social media big time: [Read more…]