McCain and reproductive rights

For those who are pro-choice and considering voting for McCain, please note the following from The New Republic:

Life Sentence
by Sarah Blustain
Stop kidding yourself: John McCain is a pro-life zealot.
Post Date Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Moreover, say advocates, he is not open to dialogue. "Whether it's abortion care, birth control, or comprehensive sex education, McCain is not moderate or a maverick," says Donna Crane, policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America and a key lobbyist on these questions. "We never ask--and we never hear pro-choice Republicans question--whether McCain will be with us on a vote. He's always on the wrong side."

read more

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Police shoot and kill dogs in botched drug raid

The nanny government has added yet another pair of innocent lives to its list of those mistakenly killed in the name of the "war on drugs" (see here for an exciting interactive map from the Cato Institute of botched police raids of all kinds!), in this case a pair of dogs. This story is several days old, and still developing, but here's the short of it: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, in Prince George's County, Maryland (it's a part-time job), was delivered a package of marijuana (32 lbs., apparently) in a (clever) scheme used by drug dealers in which drugs are sent to innocents and intercepted by dealers. Mayor Calvo, upon arriving home, brought the package inside, and shortly thereafter P.G. County police burst into his home (critically, they did not knock and announce their intentions), shot the dogs (the cops felt "threatened"; the dogs were black labs), handcuffed Calvo and his mother-in-law on the floor by the dead, bleeding dogs, and interrogated the two (the people, not the dead dogs) for an extended period of time.

Apparently the cops did not have a no-knock warrant (although a spokeperson initially claimed they did; but such warrants are not issued in Maryland), and did not produce a warrant after entering when Calvo requested to see one. They have been exceptionally unapologetic about their actions. They did not inform the Berwyn Heights police of their intention to raid the Calvo household. Et cetera. They fucked up in many ways, violating not only decency and common sense, but also the law. All because of a 32-pound package of pot. Calvo has since asked the FBI to investigate the P.G. County police's actions, and they will do so.

In addition the Washington Post story linked above, there is additional big-media coverage of this story on CNN, and a very informative blog post on the Nation Builder blog.

This is a tragedy in many ways, but for those who are more moved by animals being killed than by the same happening to humans, maybe this will get your dander up enough for you to be worried about the way the government operates in the name of fighting the use of marijuana.

Via Metafilter, of course.

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Grounds for immediate dismissal

From NewScientist.com (via Metafilter): "Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles." (continue reading)

This is no surprise, of course, but shouldn't teaching religion in a science classroom be grounds for firing, or at least a declaration of incompetence?

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Proper dissent; or, One way to stop the insane "war on drugs"

In Time magazine, the creators of The Wire (which can be viewed as a several-season long [and compellingly entertaining] argument against the insanity of the so-called "war" on drugs) along with some frequent writers, briefly and eloquently urge US citizens to exercise their power to do something sane (no worries, there are no spoilers in the article!):

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest ...

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Garfield

I truly loved Garfield when I was a kid. I'm sure many kids (and maybe some lucky adults) still love the comic. But it loses virtually all of its oomph when viewed through adult eyes (which is really sad, if I think about it too long). Thankfully, today on Metafilter, someone posted a link to a site that has many Garfield comics with Garfield and his thoughts removed. The result is variably weird, sad, funny, indescribable, and on and on.









Along with this link were many others that revive Garfield in various ways:

• Garfield without his thought balloons (a likely precursor)
• The Garfield randomizer (coherence is a virtual lock!)
• A Garfield Comic Creator (on the National Institutes of Health website!)

And then there's one of the longest-running World Wide Wonderful Web sites, The Dysfunctional Family Circus.

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Fuck the Senate

The Senate gave the telecom industry legal protection for its (illegal) eavesdropping activities today. Retroactively. Assholes, especially the spineless Democratic weasels who voted to give the telecom industry immunity. From the Salon link:

"The Senate today -- led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus -- will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration's years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans."

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-5 > -6 (the > symbol means "greater than")

This is awesomely pathetic, and wonderful, and depressing as hell. It's bad enough that people waste their money on lottery tickets; it's even worse when they can't even figure out if they've fecking won.

From the November 3, 2007 Manchester Evening News:

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

The rest of the article is here. For those who are confused by the apparently very cold temperatures, those are in degrees Celsius.

Via Chance News.

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Negation = cephalopods

Laurence Horn, a linguist (and Larry to his friends), wrote the book on negation, A Natural History of Negation. On the Barnes & Noble entry for Horn's magnum opus appears the following "Booknews": "An exquisite natural history of this unique cephalopod by a paleontologist (who overmodestly professes limited zoological training)." This was noted by Mark Liberman on Language Log back in 2003, but, wonderfully, remains intact to this day.

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Linguistics humor

A stacked relative clause construction (or, simply, a stacked relative) is a construction in which a relative clause modifies a nominal construction already containing a relative clause. A cleft sentence is a sentence one of whose constituents is introduced by anticipatory IT. A sentence which exhibits simultaneously stackedness and cleavage is the following:

It's my buxom cousin who's wearing a low-cut sweater that's a good example of a cleft stacked relative.

Lifted from Charles Fillmore's contribution to Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday, via John Lawler.

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Lite-Brite phrenology

"If a thought happens in a forest of neural dendrites, and no one is there to measure it, did you really think it?" -from Matt Hutson's blog. (The title is from his blog, too.)

Hutson had an article in the NY Times Magazine on Sunday, in their "Year in Ideas" issue, in which he discussed the term neurorealism (which means, roughly, "swallowing an fMRI scan whole"), which was coined by biomedical ethicist Eric Racine (and his colleagues) in an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Racine et al. defined three terms that could use some more exposure:

neurorealism - how coverage of fMRI investigations can make a phenomenon uncritically real, objective or effective in the eyes of the public

neuroessentialism - how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain (see also neurobollocks)

neuropolicy - attempts to use fMRI results to promote political and personal agendas

Try to work these into everyday conversation.

(Via Language Log!)

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