Via harpersnotes: Hodg-Man himself assesses President Obama’s nerd credentials at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. And it is awesome.
Essential companion reading: Sarah Vowell’s essay “The Nerd Voice” (in The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Simon and Schuster: 2003), which captures exactly the jock-ness of the Bush Administration, and the very nerdy reasons why Al Gore is not our first modern nerd president.
Regarding Sunday’s shooting of abortion-providing doctor George Tiller, in the lobby of his church, by a professed pro-lifer, Slacktivist says it best, reflecting on a similar shooting, and the similar responses it elicited, in 1994:
These were groups that routinely spoke of abortion as “murder” or “mass-murder,” and that routinely spoke of legalized abortion as an “American Holocaust.” They had, for years, been using precisely the same rhetoric and making exactly the same arguments that Paul Hill was now using to attempt to justify his [1994] double homicide.
Those groups’ condemnations of Paul Hill then — like their condemnations of [Tiller’s alleged killer] Scott Roeder now — ring hollow. Such condemnations seem to be self-refuting. How can they condemn men like Hill or Roeder just for taking their own arguments seriously?
Thought experiment: if anti-abortion groups were Muslim and said the things they said, and a professed Muslim followed through and shot someone, would it even occur to the American political classes to take said groups’ word that they never meant to call for actual violence?
Via Pharyngula: Abortion provider George Tiller was fatally shot this morning, in the lobby of his church. Police have a suspect in custody, according Twitter updates from the Wichita Eagle. Perhaps they caught the fellow while he wandered lost through a nearby forest, inspecting every individual tree for moss.
I’m working through the great New York Times Magazine interview with President Obama, between grading and lit-searching. And something struck me in this section on education. (A question by the interviewer, David Leonhardt, is in italics as in the original.):
My grandmother never got a college degree. … She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —
Today, you mean?
Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.
There’s something awfully comforting about a President who (1) has a personal connection to a world where higher education is a genuine luxury and (2) has first-hand knowledge of the product of modern American education. Quite apart from any objections I had to his policy positions, I can’t imagine the previous President saying anything like this — his family has been assured of college degrees for generations, and he never had the opportunity (or, presumably, the inclination) to critically evaluate law students’ writing. I don’t necessarily mean that as a criticism of the former President; but now that we have Obama, it seems astonishing that this sort of contact with real Americans’ experience isn’t considered more important as a qualification for the Presidency.
Jesse Lava runs through the actual, on-the-books, law of the land regarding torture. Bottom line: torture, and even “acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture” are illegal, regardless of how useful it is, or how scared we are, or what we saw Jack Bauer do in last week’s episode. (It’s impressive, and sad, the degree to which the language of the Geneva Conventions actually anticipates the justifications being bandied about in the media right now.) You’d think all this would go without saying. And, apparently you’d be wrong.
Via the Daily Dish: Flier distributed at a counter protest against Westboro Baptist Church, the congregation that has built a theology around the hateful, un-Christian catchphrase “God hates fags.”
(A more readable, freely copy-able, version is provided here.) Given that Jesus makes no reference whatsoever to homosexuality, there is in fact a stronger case to be made that God hates figs, in a purely dueling proof-text kind of way. (I’ll see your Pauline epistle and raise you two Gospels!) It’s fully in the spirit of Westboro’s abuse of scripture that the flier pulls text from two different accounts of Jesus rebuking the fig tree.
See also: God hates shrimp.
A bill presently under consideration by the House Judiciary Committee would end the National Institutes of Health open access policy – which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public 12 months after publication – and ban other federal funding agencies from enacting similar measures.
This is, of course, primarily for the benefit of scientific publishers, who rely on subscription and online access fees as a major source of income. But it means that taxpayer-funded research would be inaccessible to members of the public who don’t benefit from institutional subscriptions. How we fund scientific publishing in the Internet Age is a tricky question – but legal fiat is not a good way to negotiate that question. Contact your representatives, and tell them to vote “no” on H.R. 801.
Via OpenCongress. See also coverage on Greg Laden’s blog.
Via Twitter/BillCorbett: Back in 2002, John Scalzi pretty much nailed the three major strains of American political thought:
Liberals: The stupidest and weakest members of the political triumvirate, they allowed conservatives to turn their name into a slur against them, exposing them as the political equivalent of the kid who lets the school bully pummel him with his own fists (Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself).
…
Conservatives: Self-hating moral relativists, unless you can convince me that an intellectual class that publicly praises family values but privately engages in sodomy, coke and trophy wives is more aptly described in some other way.
…
Libertarians: Never got over the fact they weren’t the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board.
Prefiguring, it turns out, the best entry in the 50 most loathsome people in America in 2008, #43: You.
You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree.
In the wake of Louisiana’s passage of a back-door Creationism “education” law, the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology is canceling plans to hold an upcoming conference in New Orleans. Good for them. The new location? Salt Lake City.
Stephen Quake laments the grant-approval process of most U.S. federal funding agencies, and suggests making room for risky proposals:
I wonder if this should also be the time to rethink the basic foundations of how science is funded. Could we stimulate more discovery and creativity if more scientists had the security of their own salary and a long-term commitment to a minimal level of research support? Would this encourage risk-taking and lead to an overall improvement in the quality of science?
The NIH model Quake describes – which sets aside specific funding sources for out-of-the-box proposals – seems sensible, given additional funds for such use.
