Some utility or another has been doing quite a bit of work outside my apartment. There were those little flags laid out for a while, as well as some recent spray paint on the ground. Then there were strange holes dug around the yard. Then yesterday, I got a notice saying that the water company had to shut the water off for a few hours to fix a leak. So I'm under a boil order until 9 p.m. tonight. Great, what a lot of fun.
Yeah, I know, I haven't been posting much lately. I have a few things rolling around in my head and I'll get around to putting them online when I can. Or when I feel like it. Here's something to keep you entertained in the meantime. It's programmed in LabVIEW, too.
This charming letter appeared in the News-Gazette this Wednesday.
I do not understand why Schmeling thinks that he should be a priest. Apparently, he does not read the Bible. If he did, he would know the following: God said, "Ye shall be holy; for I am holy." The apostle Paul said, "What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid." Because Schmeling lives an unrighteous life, he should not be a priest.
Moreover, God demonstrated in the Bible that he does not like homosexuality. He destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of it. Ironically, the definition of the word sodomy described the same homosexual behaviors that had happened inside of Sodom. Homosexuals had polluted these cities so badly with their homosexuality that God only found three righteous people whom he could save from destruction.
Homosexuals want to use the powers of religious offices to pollute churches. Homosexuality being accepted in today's society is important to homosexuals. If homosexuals can use these powers to get society to accept homosexuality, they certainly will.
No matter how homosexuals interpret the scriptures for the homosexual movement, they cannot change how God feels about homosexuality. In the end, he will demonstrate to them how he feels.
Paul Hayes
Urbana
What is it with self-righteous Christians and the hating of the queers? It seems to be all they focus on these days. From passing Constitutional amendments, to firing journalism teachers that publish a student's letter in the school newspaper calling for an end to gay bullying, it's a wonder these Christians still have time to feed and clothe the poor.
Even I know that the story of Sodom is generally viewed by Biblical scholars to be a condemnation of the inhospitality showed by the city dwellers toward the strangers in their midst. Hospitality was of vital importance to many of these ancient cultures. The Greeks were especially aware of it, since their gods regularly traveled in human form; offending a stranger could get you the wrath of Zeus. The ancient Middle East was no different.
Frankly, Mr. Hayes, I might give your beliefs some credulity when San Francisco is destroyed by a rain of fire and sulfur. Until then, you're full of crap.
Fig has another blog post about life in the ED. Go read Like spitting into the ocean.
A commenter over at It's Matt's World had just doesn't seem to understand why anyone is so upset about the recent firing of all those US Attorneys. Yes, they are political appointees of the President, but they work in the Department of Justice. The DOJ is not the political enforcer of the President's political party.
Digby, quoting Kevin Drum in today's Washington Monthly, puts it well:
the only serious argument that Purgegate is a scandal is related to the reason for the Pearl Harbor Day massacre. If seven U.S. Attorneys were fired that day for poor performance, that would be fine. If they were fired for insufficient commitment to Bush administration policies, that would be fine too. But there's considerable reason to believe that at least some of them were fired because either (a) they were too aggressive about investigating Republican corruption or (b) they weren't aggressive enough about investigating Democrats.
That's it. That's the argument. David Iglesias: Didn't bring indictments against some local Democrats prior to the 2006 election. John McKay: Failed to invent voter fraud cases that might have prevented a Democrat from winning the 2004 governor's race in Washington... And this all comes against a background that suggests the Bush Justice Department has initiated fantastically more investigations of Democrats than Republicans over the past five years.
Although there wasn't any fellatio involved (that we know of) this leads to a suspicion that somebody was obstructing justice, which last I heard was still a crime.
He also links to this article in Washington Monthly, showing that at the local level, the DOJ has instituted seven times more investigations into Democrats than Republicans.
Sometimes, something happens or I hear something that just jolts me out of my blogponymous narcissism. For example, when I find out that some people don't at least glance at a couple of Internet news sources most days. Or when I realize that there are some people that don't even read blogs (or know what they are), let alone have one of their own. It's moments like that that make me realize just how the right-wing noise machine works.
The hard part is getting a story/smear started. Once it's planted somewhere, other, more "respectable" media outlets can report on the fact that someone else is reporting the smear. Then commentators pick it up and start using it as a talking point. Then it becomes a code word to the base. For example, Al Gore says he "invented the Internet," or that John Kerry is a coward and threw his medals away.
Greg Sargent over at The Horses Mouth shows this with the "Hillary's drawl" story. No CNN anchor reported on Hillary's drawl until the day after Drudge commented on it. Then, they were all condemning it and quoting Clinton out of context. Elsewhere, Sargent even blogs about a Washington Post article about how Drudge is the "launching post" for stories.
So I was listening to C-SPAN the other day, and this caller calls into Washington Journal:
CALLER: Good morning and thank you for taking my call. I have a question about a news article that was on two or three TV stations approximately a month ago. Senator Clinton made a comment that Mr. Obama attended a madrassa as a child and I was just wondering if he ... I haven't heard anybody say if he is a practicing Muslim, or if he isn't affiliated with any particular religion.
The caller is of course referring to the story that was reported by InsightMag.com, without any named sources, that associates of Clinton had discovered that Senator Obama had attended an extremist Muslim madrassa. The story was thoroughly debunked, but persists in the right-wing media, in soundbite and code word form, if nothing else. This poor guy heard probably about it initially, and didn't catch any of the followup stories (probably on other networks, if he heard about it on FOX), so he still thinks it's true. How many other people do?
So we have a completely unsourced story on a right-wing website (not only were there no sources in the article, no reporter or author is listed). The story is immediately picked up by FOX News, where anchors and commentators talk about it for several days. Little followup is done to show the story is a complete falsehood. The story has now entered the zeitgeist, and people accept it as true, even though it's not.
If you go to the FOX News site now, and search for "Obama madrassa," three pages come up in the results. Two are transcripts of John Gibson reporting the InsightMag.com smear. The other is an AP story refuting it, but there's no indication that this made it to air.
Clearly, the story has accomplished its purpose, namely to smear Obama. Whether or not it's true is unimportant; the only thing that matters is to get it out onto the airwaves.
The local blogging community is fairly small, so I'm making some attempt at a comprehensive list. Below are all the blogs local to Champaign-Urbana I've been able to find. If one is missing or has gone inactive, please let me know.
Update 2007-06-23: Removed a number of blogs that had not been updated in three months.
So it turns out that the FBI has been using its new USA PATRIOT Act powers inappropriately. From the NY Times:
The report found many instances when national security letters, which allow the bureau to obtain records from telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit companies and other businesses without a judge’s approval, were improperly, and sometimes illegally, used.
Moreover, record keeping was so slipshod, the report found, that the actual number of national security letters exercised was often understated when the bureau reported on them to Congress, as required.
Oh, if only someone had forseen the possibility of this abuse! If only there were some way to place some sort of check on the powers of the executive, or at least to balance them with the powers of the other branches of government. There just doesn't seem to be any way of doing that, at least not in the minds of the Bush administration. Woe! Woe is us.
Jill Stanek is the conservative columnist that has been arguing against the HPV vaccine because it will encourage promiscuity in young women. Debbie Halvorson, the Majority Leader in the Illinois State Senate, recently spoke out about her own HPV infection, precancerous cells, and hysterectomy and is speaking out in support of the HPV vaccine. Jill Stanek then likened her to a porn star in a column.
In a recent post on her website, Stanek now is proposing that male circumcision be mandated for boys if the HPV vaccine becomes mandated for girls. Her justification is a recent Lancet study in Africa that shows a significant reduction in HIV infection rates in men due to circumcision. The reduction was so significant that the study had to be terminated prematurely because to continue with it would have been unethical.
I'm not writing this because I want to discuss circumcision and HIV prevention. (Though the fact that a simple procedure could save many lives is nothing but good news.) I want to point out the fact that Stanek has now disproved her own argument.
The whole premise that girls will become promiscuous if the get the HPV vaccine is fairly ludicrous on its face, but it's the standard argument conservatives put forward for anything that helps prevent STD infection (other than celibacy). Now that we have determined that circumcision protects against HIV infection, will we see an explosion in promiscuity in circumcised men? Of course not. Looking at the same Lancet study, the rate at which the men had sex was basically the same for the circumcised and uncircumcised men.
So, what I don't get is, if giving girls a vaccine to protect them against HPV makes girls slutty, why is Stanek calling for the circumcision of boys to protect them from HIV?
UPDATE: Stanek appears in the comments and writes:
You clearly don't understand sarcasm.
Oh, don't be silly. Of course I understand sarcasm. I was trying to point out in this post that if circumcision protects against HIV, then -- by Stanek's very own argument -- circumcised men and boys should be more promiscuous the uncircumcised men and boys. As such, Stanek should be arguing against the circumcision of young boys. After all, if a girl views getting the HPV vaccine as license to have sex, then it is reasonable to conclude that a boy protected against HIV will do the same. Yet there is no anti-circumcision campaign among conservatives.
The conservative argument against the vaccine says the girls who have been vaccinated will be more likely to be promiscuous. One could also make an argument that girls who have had the HPV vaccine are more likely to be aware of the dangers, prevalence, and infectiousness of HPV, and may actually avoid sexual contact. Conservatives have produce no actual evidence that their argument is correct. As far as I know, they haven't even attempted any studies. Data collected by rhetorical argument is not valid data.
For the record, I'm very much pro-vaccine. I think its existence is a great thing and I hope it saves many lives. I'm also mildly anti-mandate.
After the Daily Illini's recent redesign, readers can now post comments on articles and editorials. Basically, they've enabled blog comments in the online version of the newspaper. This isn't exclusive to the DI; Salon has done the same thing. Frankly, I don't think it's a good idea, for reasons I'm not going to go into here.
Today, the DI had an editorial about the board's decision to get rid of Chief Illiniwek. There were a handful of comments. A commenter named "lyn" left this:
how about we do that and then we do something more than just symbolic. Why not a lasuit agaisnt the NCAA funded by the money from fans, alumsm students and faculty who intend to withhold said money from the U in protest of the CHief decision. There are to start with 12,400 signaturs on the web petition pledging to so scuh.
We can go afterafter the NCAA for capricious implementation of subjective policy that exceeded their (Ncaa"s) authority and resulted in the violation of first amendment rights. The damages to the reputation and image of the UICU as well depriving 10s of thousands of a meaningful tradition could be a beginning. Dan Maloney was deprived of his 1st amendment rights also...
It goes on. She posts two more times. The third time was in ALL CAPS BECAUSE SHE HAS SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY.
Seriously, this is just embarrassing. I hope to God that lyn is not a UIUC student. In the above quote, I was going to point out each misspelling, grammatical mistake, and other error that a moment's proofreading would have caught, but realized that would be every single word. Parts of it are so incoherent I actually can't figure out what she's trying to say.
The ineptness of the writing aside, she seems to be claiming that there's some First Amendment issue with the Chief. I'm sorry, but that's just bunk. The NCAA is a private organization. UIUC was welcome to keep the Chief, but the NCAA didn't want to associate with us if it did. End of story. They were well within their rights to do so.
Getting back to lyn's comments, if this is the quality of writing our undergraduates display, we need to attract a better caliber of student. I don't care if you're studying nuclear physics, political science, or freaking physical education, decent communication skills are imperative. UIUC is ranked as the 25th best university in the world, for crying out loud. Our students should be able to throw together half a dozen coherent sentences, even on the spur of the moment.
Then again, I should probably just look on the bright side. Maybe she was just drunk.
I have a feeling most people don't know about this, so I thought I'd bring it up. As of mid-2006, after a series of losses in federal court, the Treasury Department decided to stop collecting a federal excise tax on long distance telephone calls. A tax that was instituted in 1898. To pay for the Spanish-American War. Seriously.
The good news is that all the taxes collected to pay for the Spanish-American War since 2003 will be refunded to you this year. Basically, if you had a long-distance carrier since then, there will be a line on your tax return giving you back $30 (for single people, more for people with more exemptions). The IRS has more information.
I'd just like to point out that this isn't a new deduction or even a credit. This is a refund of tax you have already paid. It sounds like anyone with a long distance phone bill is eligible.
Fig has put up a post about a day in her life as an ER doctor. Go read Pictures, pinesol, pregnancy, progeny - a night in the ED. It's fascinating. One thing that struck me today is just how much of what goes on isn't just medical but human. The bit about the mother that was antsy until she was made to feel "part of the process," especially.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this Houston Chronicle article about the state of education in Texas. (The article is in their archives by now; you'll have to register.) It's rather frightening:
...between one-fourth and one-third of Texas students leave school before graduating. Texans must be grateful the rate is not higher.
In urban areas such as Houston, the dropout rate climbs to 50 percent. For black, Hispanic and low-income students of any race or ethnicity, according to Eileen Coppola, a researcher with Rice University's Center for Education, the rate climbs to 60 percent.
I had no idea the problem was that bad. That means that a majority of the poor don't even get a high-school education. It's hard enough getting by with just a HS degree, and these kids won't even have that.
Now, I don't actually know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit that a big factor of whether a kid finishes his education is whether his parents did. That means that this low dropout rate will echo into future generations, possibly creating a semi-permanent underclass.
One of the big things that President Bush did while in office is get the No Child Left Behind Act passed. I believe that is at least partly based on the changes he made in the Texas educational system while he was governor. Just something to think about.
Every year, Texas Monthly publishes their Bum Steer Awards, where they point out all the stupid things politicians, celebrities, and random other people have done. This year was no exception. I think this is my favorite magazine cover ever:
It's Sunday. I don't feel like being particularly insightful.
I'm a sucker for pictures of cute animals doing cute things. I Can Has Cheeseburger? takes it to an almost dangerous level of cute.
This geeky picture is my favorite. Honorable mentions go to this one, this one, this one, and this one.
(Via the Detonating Armadillo. Or something.)
Anna Nicole Smith died yesterday. I can't say much for the other networks, but this has basically been running on CNN constantly for two days now. It's overshadowed every other piece of news. It's sad, of course, but why does anyone care? She was a two-bit celebrity that really never did anything of substance.
I'm so glad the press is covering this story non-stop rather than bothering with boring stuff like the fact that the Pentagon distorted pre-war intelligence to make the case to go to war in Iraq.
A good engineering design is fault tolerant. A designer must realize that components are not always reliable and design accordingly. A suspension bridge shouldn't fail because a single cable breaks.
A good software design fails gracefully. In other words, when faced with unexpected or intelligible input, the program reacts in a predictable manner. The case of the USS Yorktown going dead in the water when a sailor left an unexpected zero in a database field is a great example of software that was not well-designed.
When it might be possible for a piece of equipment to be put in a state where injury or death could occur to the user, an engineer must take this into account. As a simple example, my coffee grinder can't be run with the lid off. There's an interlock that prevents it from turning on when it is possible for my hands to be near the blades.
Lastly, a good designer must take into the possibility of human error. Any potentially lethal piece of equipment, even any policy which could lead to damaging consequences, that does not take this into account is a poor one. This is why we mandate that truck drivers work at most eight hour shifts -- we acknowledge that a tired human being at the wheel is unreliable.
I guess this is why abstinence-only sex education pisses me off: it fails all these criteria. It is not fault tolerant, nor does it fail gracefully. If a kid screws up and has sex before being really ready for it, then it's more likely that he or she will wind up with an STD or a bun in the oven while still in high school (or earlier).
Abstinence education also doesn't acknowledge the possibility of human error. In my last blog post, I quoted the rather repugnant Jill Stanek where she said in a recent column decrying the HPV vaccine that she can't understand why a "virtuous young woman" would want to marry a man who wasn't a virgin. Really? She honestly can't fathom why? One can't help but wonder what Stanek's reasons for getting married actually are.
Abstinence educators are always quick to quote condom failure rates (they almost always use misleading and inaccurate information, when it's not outright falsehoods, but that's a blog post for a different day). What you never hear them cite is the failure rate for a vow of celibacy. Abstinence-only programs do not protect kids from STDs.
Not only do the religious conservatives that push abstinence-only education completely ignore the existence of gay kids, but they're pushing an unsafe agenda. There is no other activity in our society where we consider deliberate ignorance a safety strategy.
All of this is because these religiously-based programs aren't intended to stop STDs and unwanted pregnancy. They're intended to prevent sex. They're intended to prevent sin.
I her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Michelle Goldberg tells of a speech given by celibacy advocate Pam Stenzel. Stenzel was appointed by President Bush to an abstinence task force at the Department of Health and Human Services. This is how Goldberg describes Stenzel's speech at the 2003 Reclaiming America for Christ conference:
Stenzel told her audience about a conversation she’d had with a skeptical businessman on an airplane. The man had asked about abstinence education’s success rate—a question she regarded as risible. "What he’s asking," she said, "is does it work. You know what? Doesn’t matter. Cause guess what. My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex. The public schools’ job should not be to keep teens from having sex." Then her voice rose and turned angry as she shouted, "Our job should be to tell kids the truth!"
"People of God," she cried, "can I beg you, to commit yourself to truth, not what works! To truth! I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day I’m not answering to you, I'm answering to God!"
Later in the same talk, she explained further why what "works" isn’t what’s important—and gave some insight into what she means by "truth." "Let me tell you something, people of God, that is radical, and I can only say it here," she said. "AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy. I will not teach my child that they can sin safely."
These are the sorts of people Republicans want to turn our country over to. People who aren't interested in the actual effects of their policies, so long as they are consistent with their supernatural beliefs.
ArchPundit reads WorldNetDaily so I don't have to. Today, he linked to a column written by nutjob Jill Stanek, who in turn wrote about how horrible the HPV vaccine is. I'm almost starting to think that conservative Christians want there to be horrible consequences for sex, because it makes it dangerous. Stanek says:
Aside from the fact Winokur has no business telling other people's children about "precautions" to avoid pitfalls of promiscuous sex, her advice stinks. Let's not address the real cause. Let's try to avoid the ramifications of the cause.
Winokur or People magazine are fueling the exploitation and health demise of women by refusing to acknowledge the only full-proof [sic] way to avoid HPV or cervical cancer: abstinence.
Let's ignore the fact that she calls any sex before marriage "promiscuous." No, Jill, actually, that's not the only full-proof way to avoid HPV. Twenty percent of women are forced to have sex before they reach their twenties. So I guess you have to add "not getting raped" to that list of "full-proof" (dumbass) ways to avoid HPV.
Fig has pointed out that HPV can live on surfaces for a short while. It's possible to infect yourself by touching an HPV-laden surface, and then touching yourself. So we also have to add "not touching things" to the list of foolproof ways to avoid HPV.
Then Stanek gets into full-self-righteous mode and gets all judgmental on the slutties:
There is only one good reason a virtuous young woman should consider getting the HPV vaccination. That is if the man she plans to marry has had sex with other women, meaning he could be infected with HPV or an array of other STDs. I don't know why a virtuous young woman would want to marry such a man, but there you go.
Seriously, Stanek has absolutely no idea why a woman would want to marry a man who has had sex? "I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you. What, you're not a virgin? Get lost, tramp!" Is this really what goes through the mind of conservative Christians? Fewer than 10% of Americans are virgins when they get married. So when a woman meets a guy, she has a roughly 90% chance of picking one that has had sex at some point in his life. Those really aren't such great odds when we're talking about a disease that's (a) incredibly common, (b) easy to catch, (c) easy to prevent, and (d) can kill you.
UPDATE: Stanek shows up in the comments and largely apologizes for her attitude towards non-virgins at the end. What she doesn't mention is that many thousands of women are exposed to this virus, even though they do everything "right." This is a simple way to protect a woman from a virus that she is very likely to be exposed to during her life, possibly even against her will. Remember, even, that the adultery rate in American marriage is roughly 40%.
(This was originally written while I was away for Christmas. I'm only now getting around to posting it. Yes, I really am that lazy.)
I have a couple of hours here in Chicago's Union Station. So I'm killing time sitting in the food court with a cup of coffee and my first-ever Krispy Kreme doughnut. (Not bad, but over-hyped.)
There's a restaurant right next to my seat with an older Asian man and a younger Asian woman hawking their food in broken English. "Yummy, yummy, right here" is his line and he's been repeating it every thirty seconds for the past hour. "You try sample" is her cry to the passers-by, along with a proffered toothpick topped with some sort of meat.
I just watched a guy walk up and order an egg roll and something else that I don't know what it is because he only pointed to it. The name of the restaurant? Kelly's Cajun Grill. Now that's fusion cuisine.
(This was written while I was traveling recently. I'm only now posting it.)
Matt brings up the issue of the HPV vaccine. (As always, the good discussions happen while I'm out of town.) There seems to be a sentiment among many of the commenters there that the vaccine should not be required to attend school, and I'm not sure I disagree. I am, however, confused about why any parent would not want their daughter to have this vaccine. So I'm trying to think of likely reasons.
So let me point out that HPV:
In a private email to me (and I hope she will forgive me for sharing this here), Fig wrote:
I think Merck made a HUGE marketing error. What they should have said was:
Hey, guys - did you know that this year alone 1500 men will get penis cancer? It looks like this [horrible yucky picture]. And the only cure? Surgery. Penis and testicle off and scraped down to the bone. You will pee sitting down for the rest of your life. You'll never have sex again. People in locker rooms will sneak looks at your deformed body and missing maleness and be horrified.
But there is hope! If this vaccine is administered to all boys and girls, penile cancer rates will be slashed by 90%.
If I ever get off my lazy ass and see a doctor, I may have to get this vaccine myself.
UPDATE: This post was picked up by Buzzfeed, so welcome everyone coming from there. This was one in a series of posts I did on the HPV vaccine. (I don't normally harp on about things like this.) If you were interested in this, you may also wish to read:
