Crikey, another fundie dingbat:

McCain's VP Wants Creationism Taught in School
Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants creationism taught in science classes.

In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, the soon-to-be governor of Alaska said of evolution and creation education, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."...

...Asked by the Anchorage Daily News whether she believed in evolution, Palin declined to answer, but said that "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class."

"I'm not going to pretend I know how all this came to be," she said...

Source: Wired News

...her husband is an oil field worker who takes seasonal work as a commercial fisherman. I can see him and the President of France at a state dinner, swapping tales about life on the fo'c'sle of the Time Bandit, 200 miles out of Dutch Harbor, fishing for crab on "The Deadliest Catch."

An impulsive and stupid decision on John McSame's part.

Here's a prediction—there will be outraged blowback from the right-wing punditocracy, and it may begin as soon as this Sunday morning. But no later than a week from today. McCain has just shafted the GOP, big time...

posted Fri 29 Aug 2008 6:33 pm - permalink | comments[0]

Lots of guys will be sitting around and suddenly think, "You know, I like sex too much. I've got to do something about that." Uh-huh. David, what did you get caught doing? Or (more to the point) who:

Sex files: David Duchovny in rehab
In a move that Hank Moody, the writer whose mid-life crisis he chronicles in Californication, should have taken years ago, David Duchovny has checked himself into rehab to seek treatment for sex addiction.

The actor today confirmed that he'd been admitted to a clinic near the Malibu home he shares with his wife of eleven years, the actress Tea Leoni, and their two children.

"I have voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction," read a statement released by his lawyer, Stanton "Larry" Stein. "I ask for respect and privacy for my wife and children as we deal with this situation as a family."...

Source: UK Independent

...babysitter? Pool boy? Ah, the pressures of wealth and fame...

posted Fri 29 Aug 2008 2:02 pm - permalink | comments[0]

This one's for you, girlies:

Change Over ExperienceThe Palin pick sure will win headlines. It wasn't completely out of the blue, but it's a little mystifying for one obvious reason. If McCain's entire argument so far has been that Obama is too untested to be president, then how can he pick a 44-year-old first-term governor of a state with 600,000 people with no foreign policy experience whatsoever?

What this means, it seems to me, is that McCain has decided he cannot win without Clinton Democrats, and this is his attempt to win them over. He has decided that he cannot win on the experience card, so he is trying to pick the change card. Palin's record on climate change is certainly impressive - and she seems a charming, capable person. She is certainly a different kind of pick for a Southern-based GOP. But McCain will be the oldest first term president in history with a history of health concerns. If America is concerned that Obama isn't ready, how could anyone say Palin is?

Source: Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish

...besides the lifelong desire to be President, does "Grandpa" McCain have any consistent approach to all this governance stuff?.

This is the Harriet Miers of VP choices, and will turn out to be a disaster for McCain...

posted Fri 29 Aug 2008 11:54 am - permalink | comments[0]

This is just too unexpected for me to wrap my mind around on a Friday morning. I think I'll go mow the lawn instead:

Nuclear Decay May Vary With Earth-Sun Distance
We've long thought that nuclear decay rates are constant regardless of ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain two puzzling experiments from the 1980s that found periodic variations over many years in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226. Now a new analysis of the raw data says that changes in the decay rate are synchronized with each other and with Earth's distance from the sun. The physicists behind this work offer two theories to explain why this might be happening (abstract). First, some theorists think the sun produces a field that changes the value of the fine structure constant on Earth as its distance from the sun varies. That would certainly affect the rate of nuclear decay. Another idea is that the effect is caused by some kind of interaction with the neutrino flux from the sun's interior which also varies with distance. Take your pick. What makes the whole story even more intriguing is that for years physicists have disagreed over the decay rates of several isotopes such as titanium-44, silicon-32, and cesium-137. Perhaps they took their data at different times of the year?

Source: Slashdot

...wtf?...

posted Fri 29 Aug 2008 9:51 am - permalink | comments[0]

One thing I won't do on your website is play along with this dodge. When I visit a tech site to see "Six IT Mistakes That Can Cause Your Computer To Explode," and each of the items is listed on a separate page in order to falsely inflate your page visit/ad revenue numbers. I leave. Immediately. Screw you, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, eWeek, et al.

posted Fri 29 Aug 2008 9:21 am - permalink | comments[0]

If you absolutely, positively have to have four more years of stupid, by all means, vote for John "Grandpa" McCain:

Texas still leads nation in rate of uninsured residents
...But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."...

Source: Dallas News

...arrogant, boneheaded, ignorant, disparaging, dismissive and just plain wrong...

posted Thu 28 Aug 2008 7:49 pm - permalink | comments[0]

Hahahaha .. I'll take two, over easy, and let that yeller stuff run:

Two-egg diet cracks cholesterol issue
Research published in The European Journal of Nutrition this week has finally cracked the myths surrounding eggs and cholesterol. The new study showed that people who ate two eggs per day, while on a calorie-restricted diet, not only lost weight but also reduced their blood cholesterol levels.

A research team from the University of Surrey headed by Dr Bruce Griffin fed two eggs per day to overweight but otherwise healthy volunteers for 12 weeks while they simultaneously followed a reduced calorie diet prescribed by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) – who normally restrict egg intake to 3-4 per week. A control group followed the same BHF diet but cut out eggs altogether.

Both groups lost between 3 to 4kg (7- 9lbs) in weight and saw a fall in the average level of blood cholesterol.

Research leader Dr Bruce Griffin stated: "When blood cholesterol was measured at both six weeks and twelve weeks, both groups showed either no change or a reduction, particularly in their LDL (bad) cholesterol levels, despite the egg group increasing their dietary cholesterol intake to around four times that of the control."

This research provides further evidence to support the now established scientific understanding that saturated fat in the diet (most often found in pastry, processed meats, biscuits and cakes) is more responsible for raising blood cholesterol than cholesterol-rich foods, such as eggs...

Source: PhysOrg

...and kill me some pig while you're at it...

posted Thu 28 Aug 2008 5:59 pm - permalink | comments[0]

Mike Luckovich bangs it out of the park almost every day. He's the best political cartoonist I've seen over the last decades:

McCain and the POW Card

Source: Mike Luckovich

...and his art is, well, art...

posted Thu 28 Aug 2008 9:40 am - permalink | comments[0]

Life itself being an IQ Test:

Inquiring Minds Still Want to Know
The Godfather of Tabloid By Jack Vitek

Long after its fabled Elvis, O.J. and Monica splashes, the National Enquirer made news last week when Democratic pol John Edwards admitted that he'd cheated on his cancer-stricken wife with a blond campaign aide and lied about it, although he insisted he wasn't the father of what the Enquirer inevitably called her "love child."

Like people and anthrax spores, publications have their unique DNA. And, as it turns out, the Enquirer is still true in its fashion to the genetic heritage Generoso Pope Jr. endowed it with 55 years ago.

Pope was the oddball New Yorker who created the National Enquirer, the rag that gave the world headlines like "Mom Uses Son's Face for an Ashtray" and sold 6.7 million copies in August 1977 with a sneaked cover photo of Elvis Presley laid out in his coffin at Graceland. Pope, who went to the Horace Mann prep school in New York and to MIT and worked in psy-ops for the CIA before starting the National Enquirer in 1952, is the subject of a respectful biography that argues that he belongs in the populist-press pantheon with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

Maybe not. Still, "The Godfather of Tabloid" is an engaging saga of one man's obsessive devotion to creating an entertaining alternative universe each week for four or five million Americans clutching their quarters at the supermarket check-out racks (which he conveniently owned). Pope's Boswell, Jack Vitek, a onetime newspaperman now a journalism professor, gives him a little too much of the dubious credit for the tabloid bent of much of American pop culture today. But it's fair to say that the man who sold 6.3 million copies with the headline "Drinking Beer Prevents Heart Attacks" deserves his due...

Source: WSJ Book Review

...lol...

posted Thu 28 Aug 2008 8:59 am - permalink | comments[0]

You just have to understand your role, your place in the bigger picture:

Study outcome won't sway company on eye drug
WASHINGTON -- What does a company do when there's anecdotal evidence that two of its drugs are equally effective in treating a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, one costing patients $60 per treatment and the other $2,000?

In the case of Genentech Inc., nothing.

The company declined to seek federal approval for the cheaper drug, Avastin, to treat the wet form of age-related macular degeneration. Nor would it help finance _ or cooperate with _ a National Eye Institute study comparing the effectiveness and safety of Avastin, a cancer drug, and the more expensive eye drug, Lucentis.

The financial stakes stemming from the study are huge. Medicare officials estimate there could be 50,000 or more additional cases of macular degeneration a year. Treating just one year's worth of new patients with Lucentis would cost $1.2 billion a year, compared with $60 million if they're treated with Avastin, Medicare officials said...

Source: Washington Post

...it's like you're viewed as a host body, something to be invaded and fed upon. A legitimate government would act to protect its citizens...

posted Thu 28 Aug 2008 8:51 am - permalink | comments[0]