One of the standard conservatarian responses to anyone suggesting government-funded universal health care is to start talking about how universal health care will inevitably lead to faceless, heartless bureaucrats denying or delaying treatment for stupid reasons. My response to these stories is “Who’s supplying your health insurance? And how do I get on that plan?” […]
Category: Politics
Stop Marking Your Territory
While I managed to correctly re-set the clock yesterday, in the process, I turned my alarm off, so I’m running late. Which means no lengthy science blogging this morning. Even running late, though, I can’t pass over Fred Clark’s message to the evangelicals who organized an anti-pop-culture rally in San Francisco: Stop it. Just stop. […]
Admissions Is a Hard Problem
There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of “Affirmative Action for Men.” The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed device of talking about a particular student […]
All Scientists Left Behind
Orac beats me to commenting on today’s depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict “No Child Left Behind” requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math: Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction […]
They Can’t Handle the Truth
I’m generally sort of hesitant to take part in the various “meme” things that float around the Internet, because I’m just contrarian enough that it feels wrong to link to something just because everybody else is. Orac’s got a good one, though, for a worthy cause. Recently, somebody tried to burn down the Holocaust History […]
Better Jobs Than Science
Via Matt McIrvin (whose earlier entry on “Nerd Bravado” is also a must-read), the best explanation I’ve heard so far of the whole “Why are there so few women in scinece?” debate: they got better jobs: One of my students, we’ll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he wanted to […]
FEMA in Space
Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed– Gordon Watts serves as a nice example. Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney has carved himself out a nice little niche writing about […]
Fred Phelps: The Untold Story
Leonard Pitts has the scoop: Allow me to share with you an epiphany. I think Fred Phelps is gay. Not that I’d have any way to know for sure, and not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it seems obvious to me that Freddie has spent a little time up on Brokeback Mountain, if […]
King of the Wonks
John Zogby, of the Zogby polling agency gave a talk on campus earlier tonight. I have to say, having heard him speak, that whoever came up with the word “wonk” probably had somebody like Zogby in mind– he had poll numbers for absolutely everything he talked about, and for every single question he was asked […]
Next Time, Hit It With a Rock
Like PZ, I wasn’t going to mention the whole “Cheney shoots another hunter” thing, because that is, after all, part of the sport of hunting. And while I don’t personally hunt (I prefer fishing), I went to a high school where classes were unofficially cancelled on the first day of deer season, so I have […]