Lounging About

So I’m sitting in the lounge at the Science Online 09 conference.

Just so y’know, I’m sitting right next to GrrlScientist. I think I wore Greg Laden out, and he needs a little rest.

You should be jealous.

Filed under: About, Education, Science

A Little Quiet

So I know I’ve been a little quiet lately.  Much of my creative energy has been tied up on a few things, and The Boy has been hogging the computer.  He’s gearing up to go back to college, and tracking down books and writing up scholarship applications and stuff is sucking up a lot of our time, really.

I have a few little pieces of erotica in the works, so don’t totally bail on me yet.  We just don’t want any crossover mistakes.

I deserve this scholarship because I would make a great student.  I would see you after class, in your office, and I would be wondering what you are wearing under that dress, how your flesh would feel under my hand.  How your tongue might…

Yeah, that might cause a few problems.  (On the other hand…)

Anyway, hang in there just a bit longer.  We’re not on extended hiatus or nuthin’.

From whence came the art:

That image it titled quiet I’m thinking, by Grant MacDonald and is licensed by the artist under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 license.

Filed under: About, Biology, Education, Science , We'll let it slide this time, Worthy Distractions

Why I Deserve to be on Pharyngula’s Blogroll

Dr. PZ had an open call for requests to be included on his blogroll.  I think a few words to justify my place there are probably in order, as it may not be readily apparent.

I write mostly about sex and science, sometimes the intersection thereof, the the Christian theocracy movement, the Intelligent Design Creationism Hoax, and I have some experience at blaspheming against the Catholic Church.  (CrackerGate was nuthin’!)

I was the blogger who awarded Slimy Sal the 2008 Asshole of the Year Award.  (On January 2nd, a new record!)

I’ve written poetry about Dr. PZ.

I am a BBWAD.  (Banned By William A. Dembski – from his blog at Uncommonly Dense – Getting banned there was my original raison d’être.)

And finally, I quite literally would not exist were it not for Dr. PZ.

And that, briefly, is why I deserve to be on Dr. PZ’s blogroll at Phayngula.

Filed under: About, Antiscience, Biology, Blogs In Our MonkeySphere, Education, Fundies, Politics, Religion, Science, Science Links, Sex, Woo and Random Crazy People

Well, Crap

Now I have to think up something good to post.

I admit, I’ve been busy and coasting for a week or so, and haven’t really put up any of my best stuff.  Then Dr. PZ went and put up an open enrollment thread, and I got all excited and my brain shut down and I just threw up a comment without thinking.

I should have put up a good post first, to make a good impression, damn it.

It’s like stealing a first kiss from that hottie and suddenly realizing that you just had liver and onions for lunch.

Crap.

Filed under: About, Biology, Blogs In Our MonkeySphere, Science , Crap., Liver and Onions, Phayngula Blogroll

Hawt! (Also brilliant, try to pay attention)

PZ and Abbie

But I totally get it if you’re completely distracted.  Do the best you can, and watch it a few times, if you have to.

PZ Myers and Abbie Smith discussing epigenetics on video.

It’s like science porn for your brain.  Feel free to touch yourself.

I did.

Filed under: A Rollcall of Science Chicks, Biology, Blogs In Our MonkeySphere, Education, Friends, Science, Video , Abbie Smith, Brains are Hawt, EndogenousRetroVirus, ERV, Pharyngula, Porn for your brain, PZ Myers, ScienceBlogs.com

Yet More Editing of Reality

Parodia de propaganda militar en la novela de ficción by Jaume d'Urgell @ Flickr

Don’t like reality?  Rewrite it.

It’s long been the policy of the Republican party at large, and the George W. Bush administration in specific, to screw with science and edit out the parts of it they don’t like.  They’ve done it at the EPA, NIH, NASA, wherever they’ve been able to get a political hack to use as a mouthpiece between the scientists and the people.

It’s very Orwellian.

Guess what?  Yeah, still at it.

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was involved in removing statements on health risks posed by global warming from a draft of a health official’s Senate testimony last year, a former senior government environmental official said on Tuesday.

The former official, Jason Burnett, made the assertion and described similar incidents in a three-page letter to Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who is the chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He then stood with her at a news conference at which she excoriated the Bush administration.

“History will judge this Bush administration harshly for recklessly covering up a real threat to the people they are supposed to protect,” Boxer said.

Only if we manage to get them out of power before they rewrite it, Senator.  What have you done lately to facilitate that?

From whence came the art:

That image is titled Parodia de propaganda militar en la novela de ficción “1984″ by Jaume d’Urgell and is licensed by the artist under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 license.

Filed under: Biology, Education, Environment, Fundies, Politics, Rants, Religion, Science , 1984, Ignorance is Strength, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Religion is Science, George Orwell

If We Had Wanted More Republicans…

Please follow directions. by tread @ Flickr

…we’d have voted for them, damn it.  We didn’t.  We voted for you.

In 2006, We The People of the United States of America, as a group, decided we had finally had enough of the raping of the Constitution by the Republican party.  In no uncertain terms we threw them down from their high and lofty pedestal of power, from whence they had been dictating this republic into a theocracy.

It should have told you something.  Apparently, you’re as deaf as a rock to the subtleties of a sea-change election.  Let me make this a little more clear for you then.

Stop.  Get up off your knees, Congresspeople and Senators of These United States.  The time for sychophancy and capitulation is long over.  The man in the White House is no longer the defacto dictator in these parts.  You are not required to march to the beat of his drum.

Get us out of Iraq.  Now.  Not later.

Desist supporting the hair-brained religious pandering, the head-in-the-sand sex mis-education programs, the promotion of mythology over reality, and the invasion of our most intimate moments.  Get out of our bedrooms, and get Jesus out of our legal system, our marriage laws, and our taxpayer supported programs.  Bring back the secular republic our forefathers bled and died for, and so meticulously set up for us.

End the “Domestic Surveillance Program“, which is clearly a violation of the Constitution.  You remember that thing, right?  The piece of paper that stands as a wall betwixt us and him?  The supreme law of the land that he’s been ignoring since he took up residency in the nation’s capital?  Remember that?  Remember your promises to us that you would put an end to his shredding of the contents of that document?

Apparently, a bunch of you forgot all that stuff, that cool November night the election results came in.

Fortunately, we didn’t.  And equally fortunately, some of us are about to remind you.

From whence came the art:

That image it titled Please follow directions, by tread, and is licensed by the artist under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 license.

Filed under: Antiscience, Biology, Education, Equality, Fundies, Peace, Politics, Rants, Religion, Science, Sex , Get off your knees now., Impeach Bush, Liberty and Justice for All, Republican War on the Constitution, Stand up and be counted, Stop Capitulating, The Glorified Houseplanet Who Would Be Caesar, Where are the Democrats we elected?

Puss ‘n Boots and Other Odds ‘n Ends

There are a couple little things that have accumulated in my files, things that I wanted to mention on the blog here at UDoJ, but are short little things more amenable to being Tweeted at Twitter, really. I’m going to round some of them up and sort of make a grab bag for you.

First and foremost, Kate needs good head. She’s changed the look of her blog, which is really cool looking now. But she needs a header graphic. I’ve thought about doing it myself, but in all honesty, I’m afraid there will be too much ‘me’ in it, and not enough Kate.

Molly suggested holding a contest, to see who can come up with the most Kate-like header graphic. I’m kind of liking that idea, and maybe if she feels a little more at home, she’ll post more. (Knee high leather boots would help with that, just so y’know.)  If there’s interest, maybe that’s just what we’ll do. Plus, giving Molly a peek above our garters is sure to get us a peek above hers. Well, that’s more like a long stare, actually…

(more gossip below the fold)

Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Blogs In Our MonkeySphere, Corporal Kate, Education, Erotica, Friends, Images, Literature, Literature and Literotica, Photos, Romance, Science, Sex , Almost Diamonds, BadAstronomy, Blogosphere Gossip, Celluloid Blonde, ERV, Greg Laden's Blog, Kissing Corporal Kate, Molly's Mirror, Redheaded Blackbelt, Science After Sunclipse, Tangled Up in Blue Guy, The Last Road

Jindal obfuscates, Grace calls him out

Recently, dishonest Creationists, dressed in their latest cheap tuxedo, managed to obfuscate and prevaricate enough to get a bill through the Louisiana legislature for the express purpose of bringing Fundamentalist Religion into Louisiana public high school Science classrooms, in direct violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and a ton of Federal and Supreme Court precedent.

(See Epperson v. Arkansas, Daniel v. Waters, Edwards v Aguilard, and especially Kitzmiller v. Dover for a good idea of the evolution of the increasingly deceptive tactics of Creationists to circumvent the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  There’s even a transitional fossil that bears undeniable evidential witness to the outright dishonesty of the Intelligent Design Creationism Hoax.  It’s taxonomically correct name is the cdesign proponentsists.)

In this morning’s Times-Picayune, Stephanie Grace calls Jindal on his dishonesty, his evasions, and his deception in supporting and signing this bill into law.

The bill never mentions that evolution is almost universally accepted among scientists as the basis for modern biology.

And it skips right over the key fact that the effort is backed by the same archconservatives who’ve trying to force religiously based doubts over the theory, either in the form of creationism or its successor “intelligent design,” into science classrooms for years now.

Those efforts have been consistently rejected by the courts, which explains another artful bit of misdirection: The bill explicitly disavows the promotion of any particular set of religious beliefs. That directly contradicts the goal of its most ardent supporters, including the Louisiana Family Forum, which in and of itself should raise plenty of questions over just what was going on here.

Still, the obfuscation made it hard to argue the merits of the bill, and in the end, even many of the lawmakers who knew better threw up their hands and voted yes.

When asked about Darwinism, Jindal responds with his own fuzzy catch phrase, which he trotted out on the campaign trail last fall and again during a recent appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He claims he wants students to be exposed to “the very best science.”

On the television show, he went further, arguing that he didn’t want facts and theories withheld from students out of “political correctness.” It was all part of a circular response to a direct question that he never answered: whether he himself has doubts about the theory of evolution.

Please click the little Digg icon and Digg this story up.  Stephanie Grace’s story needs national attention.

From whence came the art:

That image is titled Creationism renaming contest, by cpurrin1, and is licensed by the artist under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license.

Filed under: Biology, Education, Fundies, Politics, Rants, Religion, Science , Bobby Jindal, Digg it up, Lies Damned Lies and Creationists, Stephanie Grace calls it like it is

Historic Pwnage. Richard Lenski’s E. coli, 1 : Andrew Schlafly, Compete Zilch

A peek above our garters to Dr. BA for this.

Dr. Richard Lenski, Hannah Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, recently published the results of a twenty year long experiment with E. coli where he definitively demonstrated some really cool evolutionary adaptations.  The results were subsequently discussed in a NewScientist article.

Among other really neat results, one of the descendant colonies of E. coli developed a mutation that enabled it to feed off citrate, part of the solution in which it was growing, while other colonies, also descended from the same parent colony, did not.

The paper is well documented and well executed by all accounts of scientists in the relevant fields who’ve read the paper.  It’s elegant, it’s meticulous, and it’s conclusive.

Infamously dunderheaded creationist Andrew Schlafly, creator of Conservapedia (AKA the Idiot’s Alternative to Reality), was not about to stand for the results of said experiment.  In what appears to have been an attempt to intimidate Dr. Lenski into altering his conclusion as far as I can tell, he fired off an Email, ostensibly challenging the results.  Unfortunately for Schlafly, Dr. Lenski was neither intimidated nor deceived into believing that Schlafly either actually read the paper or had the faintest clue about what he was blathering.

(Continued below the fold)

Filed under: Biology, Education, Entertainment, Fundies, Religion, Science , Andrew Schlafly has his ass handed to him, Do not Frack with Richard Lenski, E. coli, Evolution, Having Dr. Lenski's babies, Momentous Smackdowns, Pwnage, The Lenski Affair