2011 voting

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Michael

The interesting results…

Locally, Maine has voted down Republican efforts to curb the ability of Democratic voters to cast their ballots. That is, Maine allows same-day voter registration and the Republicans tried to randomly add a couple of days to that. It is a fine system as is and it has featured zero issues; it’s obvious that the Republicans were just trying to weaken turn-outs for Democrats. Of course, the reality is that the number of people they would prevent from voting is probably pretty insignificant. But that doesn’t mean there was any reason whatsoever to change existing law.

We also rejected a couple of casinos. I voted for them because, well, why not? Jobs are jobs. Finally, we also have a census-based issue that involves changing redistricting from 3 years after the U.S. census to 1 year. It makes perfect sense, but it’s one of those issues that has to go up for a vote. Unfortunately, for whatever stupid reason, the vote is relatively close. The change will probably still happen, but there’s no reason for people to vote against it. I suspect this is one of those cases of people saying “no” because they didn’t understand the question.

Now onto the national stage…

Ohio voters don’t want to destroy public sector unions…

Mississippi is not willing to arbitrarily declare an egg to be a person…


Atlanta voters have said they want to buy alcohol on Sundays if they so please…

And now onto 2012.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: | 16 Comments »

Joe Frazier, dead at 67

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Michael

Hell of a boxer.

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Yet more rule internalization

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Michael

I think one of the most classic examples of rule internalization has to be zero-tolerance policies. These awful, awful things are intensely, severely popular in schools across America, and they rarely, if ever, do anything to help anyone. Anywhere. Ever. Take this example from Southwest Middle School in Palm Bay, Florida:

A 14-year-old middle school student was suspended as a result of the Florida school’s strict no-hugging policy.

Nick Martinez said he hugged his best friend, a female student, quickly between classes, according to WKMG-TV, Orlando, and never thought the gesture would result in suspension. The principal at Southwest Middle School in Palm Bay saw the hug and brought the two students to the dean, who issued a one-day in-school suspension.

“Honestly, I didn’t know, because I didn’t think hugging was a bad thing. I didn’t know you could get suspended for it,” Martinez told WKMG-TV. “A lot of friends are hugging. I just happened to be the one caught doing it.”

This is a result of lazy thinking. The board which came up with these policies did so in a way that demonstrates a complete lack of interest in the welfare of the children it is charged with overseeing. If they gave a damn, they would have bothered to spend 15 minutes coming up with a few distinctions. For instance, was Nick Martinez grabbing some ass? No? Oh, well, then, carry on.

Of course, like any non-thinking entity, the board has some ready-to-go excuses:

“We cannot make an opinion or judgment call on whether a hug is appropriate or not. It’s very difficult to police that on campus,” Christine Davis, the public information officer for Brevard County Public Schools, told ABC News.

No, no, no. It isn’t that they cannot make a judgement call. It’s that they are cowards who don’t dare to make judgement calls.

Davis said the school puts policies and procedures in place to help keep the students focused on learning.

Really? So taking two students out of their classes for an entire day is a focus on learning? For a school system unwilling to make simple judgement decisions, they sure are willing to make bold judgement calls of pure shit when it comes to educating children.

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Naturopathy in New Hampshire

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Michael

The New Hampshire House recently had before it a measure to require health insurers to cover patients using naturopaths as primary physicians. (I don’t know how NH defines naturopaths, but in Maine they are not physicians.) The NH House did not pass that measure, though they have passed something which isn’t much better:

Instead, the requirement will be limited to the individual market, where people already had the option to use a naturopath, since consumers in that market pay a percentage of the cost of each visit, unlike an HMO-type system in which a physician acts as a gatekeeper to prevent the over-utilization of specialists…

Committee Chair Rep. John Hunt, R-Rindge, said insurers are upset because under current contracts, physicians are supposed to be able to refer patients to a specialist, not naturopaths.

Rep. Donna Schlachman, D-Exeter, argued that it was good public policy not to discriminate. Besides, she said, naturopaths are less likely to refer patients to specialists, meaning lower costs.

What’s really unfortunate here is that Schlachman does not understand the reason naturopaths are less likely to refer patients to specialists: they do not have the requisite knowledge needed to make a proper determination for what the best course of medical action is for an individual. Go take a look at the few accredited naturopathic schools around the country – the course loads include a bunch of homeopathy, acupuncture, something known as cupping, and other forms of malarkey. Hardly any of it is science. People would be better offer finding a first semester pre-med student than going to a naturopath. (The same goes for people who seek any form of alternative medicine. After all, if it was medicine, it would just be called that: medicine.)

The end result of this measure in NH will be less cost for insurers, more business for naturopaths, and less health for consumers. It’s a bad deal.

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Little Adolf Hitler is so cute

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Michael

His parents are dicks, though:

Adolf Hitler is one of the most evil men to ever walk the face of the planet. He also happens to be a little boy in New Jersey. Adolf Hitler Campbell was taken away from his parents in 2009 because welfare officials said that his name was a form of abuse.

And Adolf Hitler isn’t the only strange name in the Campbell family. Heath and Deborah Campbell named their daughter JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. But is an offensive name reason enough to divide a family?

I can’t say I hate laws like Germany has barring the use of such stupid names, but this probably isn’t a reason to take a child away in the US. I’m not sure, but I doubt it even has any legal grounding.

However, I do believe the child should be allowed once a birthday for the rest of his life to punch his parents square in the face with no repercussions.

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I’ll always remember the Nintendo

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Michael

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This is really shitty

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Michael

At a recent Republican debate, Rick Santorum fielded a question via video by a gay soldier, Stephen Hill. Hill asked what the Republican candidates intended to do in reference to the excellent repeal of DADT. Here’s the video:

Rick Mix of Lube Santorum has been on a crusade through most of his lack-luster campaign to get the conservative social vote, so the awful things he said in that video aren’t a surprise. For instance, when he says sex should not be involved in the military, he’s implying that being gay means doing nothing but having crazy, crazy butt sex anywhere and everywhere. We all know that’s what he means because the Christian right actually thinks that’s what it’s all about. And I know I often say what a fan of rhetoric I am, but just because what someone says is effective – it is in this case because he’s appealing directly to the misconceptions and ignorance of his audience – that doesn’t mean it isn’t really shitty.

In better political news, President Obama took on the Republican answers at the debate as well as the boos the soldier received from the audience:

“We don’t believe in standing silent when that happens,” Obama said in the keynote address at the annual convention of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest U.S. gay lobby group…

“You want to be commander in chief?” he asked. “You can start by standing up for the men and woman in uniform” and support them even when it is not politically convenient.

To be fair, Obama is obviously waiting until after the 2012 elections to come out in favor of gay marriage – we all know he will – and that is political convenience, but I can’t imagine him standing for an audience that boos a service member. For that matter, I don’t know as Dubya would have stood for it. Of course, except for perhaps Huntsman, this is a notably crazy crop of Republicans this year so maybe I shouldn’t hold them to very high standards.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Joe E. Kirk is a douche

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Michael

Students at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) recently created a free speech wall on campus in response to a controversial social media policy instituted by their school. Some people wrote things about legalizing pot, others made funny quips, and still others made topical and political comments. One of those comments said “FUCK OBAMA”. Another person wrote “BUSH” under “OBAMA”. This is all protected free speech, of course, but that didn’t stop Professor and full-time douchebag Joe E. Kirk from vandalizing the poster:

But what happened next is what’s so outrageous. An SHSU faculty member offended by the insult to President Obama reportedly used a box cutter to cut the expletive out of the wall after students refused to accede to his demand to censor that particular speech.

In response, the students called campus ‘police’ to report the vandalism. One might think that Kirk would have been ordered to leave the area, what with his unconstitutional, douchebaggery destruction of private property. But nope. This happened:

But after the students called the campus police to report the vandalism, they were threatened by a campus police officer with charges of disturbing the peace and required to remove all profanity from the wall, or else take it down! Under this pressure, the students dismantled their “free speech wall”…

What usually happens in events like this is that the wrong-headed authority figures will defend their moronic actions. This time is no different:

Later that day, as reported by SHSU student newspaper The Houstonian, University Police Department Deputy Chief James Fitch stated that because Kirk was “offended by the use of the profanity,” its use “qualified it as disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.”

That is a blatantly wrong statement. The courts have long held that free speech is free speech, no matter how indecent it may be. The above link discusses the specific cases, but this stuff should be basic knowledge to every American. The University Police, James Fitch, and especially Joe E. Kirk are all censorious, ignorant, douchebags. Each and every one of them ought to know better.

Oh, by the way: FUCK JOE E. KIRK.

originally via Popehat

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Two year marriages in Mexico

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Michael

Mexico City is proposing some pretty awesome ideas about marriage contracts:

Mexico City lawmakers want to help newlyweds avoid the hassle of divorce by giving them an easy exit strategy: temporary marriage licenses.

Leftists in the city’s assembly — who have already riled conservatives by legalizing gay marriage — proposed a reform to the civil code this week that would allow couples to decide on the length of their commitment, opting out of a lifetime.

The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple splits.

“The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends,” said Leonel Luna, the Mexico City assemblyman who co-authored the bill.

“You wouldn’t have to go through the tortuous process of divorce,” said Luna, from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has the most seats in the 66-member chamber.

(I presume there are also other contract lengths available.)

This is a good idea. The primary purpose of marriage is for couples to fulfill whatever meaning they attach to the idea. If they view it as a temporary agreement, then fine. Or, as I think will likely be the case, they view it in pragmatic terms – it’s something they want, but they can’t know if it will work out – then this is the perfect plan.

I’m sure conservatives are going to come up with every Armageddon scenario under the soon-to-be-falling sky, but this just makes sense. Even if it encourages marriages to end more quickly than they would otherwise, the fact that people can move onto a potentially better match without the fear of possibly going through another divorce proceeding, then they won’t need to hesitate because of dreaded, petty legal entanglements. This will lead to more net happiness and that’s a good thing.

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Why this neutrino business is not worrying

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Michael

It may have been noticed over the past couple of days that Christian and creationist blogs have been in a bit of a tizzy. Recent findings at CERN have shown something interesting about neutrinos and the cosmic speed limit:

Physicists on the team that measured particles traveling faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.

Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world’s foremost laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle, the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of Albert Einstein.

“To our great surprise we found an anomaly,” said Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team.

An anomaly is a mild way of putting it.

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen, according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

This is exciting to the anti-science crowd because of a religious and/or ignorance mentality. That is, with religion we have doctrine and dogma and ingrained beliefs which are not to be challenged. If they are, it’s going to take some big steps to reconfigure things. Take the Catholic Church’s insistence that Earth was at the center of everything. It was embarrassing to find out just how wrong they were and they had to re-think a lot of their baseless declarations. But science isn’t so stubborn. And even with more secular ‘skeptics’ ignorance can be a problem. ‘What? Science has changed? But if it was right, it wouldn’t have changed!’

Of course, none of this is actually worrying in the least. Let’s assume something can go faster than light. That does bring about some significant changes, may have big research implications, and could lead to better insights into how the Universe works. But that doesn’t mean Einstein was wrong, no more than Einstein showed Newton was wrong. Yes, there are corrections, tweaks, re-writes, but that does not dismiss all the other stuff that is right. When Einstein and 1905 rolled around, apples didn’t stop falling from trees. Now that we have these CERN researchers in 2011, that doesn’t mean our GPS systems will stop working.

What I find so heartening about all this is that the majority of the articles I have seen have been done responsibly. For instance, from the article linked above:

If the experiment is independently repeated — most likely by teams in the United States or Japan — then it would require a fundamental rethink of modern physics…

“We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation,” [Antonio Ereditato] told the AP. “Everybody is free to do what they want: to think, to claim, to dream.”

And from an AP article:

Q. How likely is it that this finding is correct?

A. Experts are skeptical. Einstein’s relativity theory has withstood a lot of experimental tests over the years. The scientists who reported the finding say they’re still looking for flaws in their experimental procedures, and they’ve asked other labs to try to duplicate the results.

And another AP article:

The elegance of Einstein’s theory and its proven track record are why nearly every one of the more than a dozen physicists contacted by The Associated Press about the new findings has been cautious, skeptical or downright disbelieving.

Whether we’re talking about something as fundamental as Einstein’s theory or something as side-view as DEET, scientists again and again will say we must wait for confirmation, for scientific scrutiny. Physics isn’t going to get overturned based upon a single experiment. Yes, one experiment may lead to a turnover (and all the textbooks will be sure to note the original finding, not all the confirmations), but it takes repetition for something to be scientifically valid.

As one of my favorite bio professors once said, “Science is all about reproducibility. If you can’t reproduce your data, it’s all a load of horseshit.”

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, News | 11 Comments »

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