Quackademic medicine comes to UIUC VetMed

A few weeks ago, I was dismayed to see this article, "UI group visits China to study veterinary acupuncture" in the News-Gazette. Two faculty and seventeen students took a 10-day trip to China to study veterinary acupuncture and learned about "'yin-yang theory,' 'five elements,' 'qi, blood and body fluid,' and the acupuncture points of the horse and dog." It's upsetting because veterinary acupuncture, like all acupuncture, doesn't work but, this time, it involves the suffering of pets and animals.

And what a waste of money this was! A ten day trip all the way to chine for nearly twenty people to study pseudoscience? The cost of the airfare alone was probably close to $20,000. God knows how much the courses to study nonexistent qi and pseudoscientific theories of disease like the five elements cost. This is irresponsible and wasteful. It's no different than a group from the Chemistry department traveling to Greece to learn about the Aristotelian four elements or students from the College of Medicine going to Italy to learn about the four humors theory of disease. 

Everything in the original article is completely credulous; no attention to a skeptical voice is given. That's not surprising considering that it is simply a word-for-word republication of a press release put out by UIUC's Office of Public Engagement. From the press release:

According to Dr. Clark-Price, acupuncture can be used on any species at any age. Dogs are his most common acupuncture patients, followed by horses and the occasional cow.

Well, yeah, it can be used on any species because it doesn't do anything. It's amusing that he mentions acupuncture on horses. The meridians (the invisible lines along which magical qi flows) for horses were drawn from those of humans, including the gallbladder meridian, even though horses don't have gallbladders.

I use the term "quackademic" in the title of this post (actually I'm stealing it from Orac, who apparently got it from someone else), because this kind of pseudoscience has been increasingly spreading throughout the medical community in recent years. I understand why; it's profitable, it poses no threat to the patient (because it does nothing), and they keep coming back for more of it (because it does nothing). But teaching pseudoscientific quackery as medicine is poisonous. Is this really the kind of education students get at VetMed? What's next, homeopathy and crystal healing?

Crappy science denialist arguments from Illinois Review

I'm only now getting around to it, but a few weeks ago, there was a rather badly-argued climate change denialist post over at Illinois Review by Nancy Thorner. It comes after President Obama's ObamaHitler's speech where he referred to global warming denialists as "the flat-earth society." (Ironically, there actually is a Flat Earth Society and their President accepts climate change.) It always kind of pisses me off when science gets distorted for political means.

Thorner, who's primary qualification is apparently that she writes a lot of Letters to the Editor of local newspapers, can't even seem to come up with a coherent argument. First she quotes the Heritage Foundation quoting a denialist think tank:

But let's pretend we were able to stop emitting all carbon immediately... No talking. The Science and Public Policy Institute found that the global temperature would decrease by 0.17 degrees Celsius -- by 2100.

What she fails to mention is that the "we" in the above quote is the US only, not worldwide. It's not at all surprising that a global problem can not be fixed by the action of one country with a fraction of the world's population. This might be an argument that global warming is irreversible, but it's not a valid argument that it's not happening.

It should be a warning sign when your first go-to authorities on a scientific matter is a bunch of interlocking political think tanks, not scientists.

Next, she punts to a video, no longer available, put out by the Heartland Institute, another right-wing think tank.

Thirdly, she quotes Alan Caruba the founder of the National Anxiety Center, which sounds like it should be a medical organization, but is actually a right-wing think tank. Caruba is also a member of -- again -- the Heartland Institute. This has got to be the dumbest fucking argument I've ever heard for anything, anywhere:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth insofar as it is vital for all plant life, from a blade of grass to a giant redwood, but most essential to the growth of the crops that are the basis of feeding humanity and the livestock it depends upon as a food source.

The Earth and of living things on it would benefit from more carbon dioxide, but the president is asserting the very opposite of this while vilifying CO2 and the business and industrial sectors that produce it in the process of manufacturing everything a society requires.

Seriously, because CO2 is used by plants, we can't possibly ever have too much of it. That's a mind-numbingly stupid as saying because sunlight is necessary for plant life, it can't cause skin cancer. Or that because we all need water, the flooding along the Missouri river the past couple of years couldn't possibly be bad for farms or homes.

And it's this next argument that really fucking pisses me off. Unfortunately, it's probably going to need a blog post of it's own because it will probably be long. But, no, NASA has not disproved global warming.

I'm calling bullshit on the "government stole my bees" story

In the past few days, a story has been circulating about Terrence Ingram, an Illinois beekeeper that had his bees "illegally" taken by Department of Agriculture officials and destroyed. Furthermore, this destroyed his "decades of research" in breeding a "Roundup immune" strain of bees. I'm sorry, but everything I've read about this story just isn't credible.

First of all, there are no sources. Or as Wikipedia would put it, no reliable sources. I've seen a couple of people post links to this article at GlobalResearch, also a 9/11 troofer site. There is exactly one hit on this in Google News, which turns out to be a blog post at SouthMilwaukeeNOW.com, which cites as its original source this article at Packalert Press, which also thinks the recent OK tornado was artificially created by Obama to distract from the IRS scandal. The site that seems to have written the most about it is Prairie Advocate, which could have published a press release written by Ingram and it probably wouldn't have looked any different.

This whole story stinks. This guy claims to have been performing "research" on the effect of Roundup on bees for decades. There's nothing in Google Scholar by this guy; not a single paper. After having done over 10 years of research, no one suddenly comes out with groundbreaking results having published nothing in the meantime. Ingram claims he was about to reveal proof(!) that Roundup, everyone's favorite bugaboo, causes colony collapse disorder. Well, I'm sorry, but it's not like that hasn't occurred to anyone before. The exact cause of colony collapse disorder is unknown, but it's likely a combination of a number of factors, including parasites, viruses, and environmental toxins like pesticides.

What's a lot more likely is that this guy's hives were infected with American foulbrood, a highly contagious and incurable disease that can spread from hive to hive. In fact, that's exactly what the Department of Agriculture found when they inspected his hives and sent samples to a lab. They notified him multiple times of the fact that foulbrood had been detected in his hives and he was ordered to burn them. He continued to refuse and months later, the DoA came in, seized the hives, and (presumably) destroyed them, as they are legally allowed to do.

Ingram is outraged (outraged, I say!) that the DoA even inspected his hives. The Prairie Advocate story quotes Ingram as saying, "The State Department of Agriculture came in and inspected our hives 4 times, 3 times when we were not home, and without due process. I have never received or found a Search Warrant." Furthermore, several of the articles and blog posts on this around the Web claim that these bees were seized "illegally."

Did you know that Illinois has a Bees and Apiaries Act? Neither did I, but yes, Illinois has an entire section of the law on the keeping of bees. 510 ILCS 20/2-4 says, "The Department shall have the power to inspect ... any bees, colonies, items of bee equipment or apiary. For the purpose of inspection, the Director is authorized during reasonable business hours to enter into or upon any property used for the purpose of beekeeping." So the DoA did not need to serve Ingram with a warrant to inspect his bee hives.

Furthermore, they were entirely within their rights to seize and destroy the infected hives. After Ingram had refused multiple times to deal with the infected hives, the DoA has the authority to do it for him (and send him a bill, at that). From 510 ILCS 20/2c, "In carrying out the provisions of this Section or any quarantine, the Director may, at the expense of the owner, when an infestation, infection or nuisance is located, seize or abate bees, colonies, or items of used bee equipment."

So there simply is no story here. There was no violation of the law. There was no illegal seizure of bees or bee hives. But the fact that this guy claims to have been doing "research" into Roundup means this story is going to be flogged by Monsanto-hating activists from one end of the Internet to the other.

Don Gerard: Vindicated

There's been a lot of speculation online about this whole kerfluffle between Mayor Don Gerard and Jim "Jammin" Bean, what caused it, who started the argument at Boneyard Creek Community Day a few weeks ago, etc. I can now say I have seen one of the social media postings involved and that, yes, Bean was talking smack about Mayor Gerard's underage daughter.

I also want to say that Mayor Gerard is under no obligation to make the details about this whole affair public. He's been taking some heat in the News-Gazette and elsewhere about it. If he is doing so because his daughter doesn't want to make a big deal about it or is just embarrassed by the attention, I commend him for putting her interests above his own defense.

Again, in this matter, I'm 110% behind Mayor Gerard.

Screenshots are forever, bitches.

Illinois Review is lying about sex education

Illinois Review is lying about the new sexual health education policy the Chicago Board of Education adopted last month. They write (emphasis mine):

It's never too young to teach your children about sex. At least that's what the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has determined. Despite what parents might decide is best for their individual child, CPS will be teaching all 5-year olds the physiology, vocabulary, and methodology of sex rather than reading, writing and arithmetic.

This is flatly, blatantly untrue. Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, you can read the new policy for yourself. First of all, the policy explicitly allows parents to opt their children out of these lessons. So much for not allowing parents to "decide what is best" for their children.

Secondly, the policy basically just says Chicago public schools will follow the National Sexuality Education Standards, put out jointly by four national health and education organizations. Again, the Internet is a wonderful thing and you can read the standards for yourself.

The standards say nothing about teaching the "methodology of sex" to kindergartners  The entirety of the section on reproduction for grades K-2 is that students will be able to "explain that all living things reproduce." That's it. No field trips to the local adult novelties store. No in-class readings of Hustler.

In other words, the policy the Chicago Board of Education adopted means that kindergartners will be able to make sense of this pornographic photo (via Flickr):

Much of the standards for the K-2 section involve teaching children how to recognize and how to respond to bad touching. It tells children that they can "tell others not to touch their body when they do not want to be touched." It also says children should know they can tell parents and other trusted adults they can tell about someone touching them.

Yokels now writing News-Gazette editorials

I had some time over the holidays and was thinking of writing a response to this editorial about Illinois's recent gay marriage bill in the News Gazette where the Editors basically say "Let's put the rights of minorities up to a vote!" I even started, but didn't get very far in it. Blogging, like math, is hard.

Oh, but then they had to go and publish, "Brace yourself for more changes to accommodate others' lifestyles" written by local yokel Ray Elliott. I've never really been sure what that word, "lifestyles" actually means, but judging by the context in which it gets thrown around, it sort of boils down to "homos having the buttsex."

Illinois has civil unions, but two lawmakers tried to introduce a bill for marriage equality just a few weeks ago. It made it out of committee, but didn't get a floor vote. It's not clear if it will get introduced this session or not.

Mr. Elliott says it's the job of legislators to put citizen's rights up to a vote:

Times and attitudes do change, no question about that. So brace yourself, as we must, for more change and more demands to fit others' desired lifestyles.

"Lifestyles." Anyway. Poor Mr. Elliott. He's got all these scary homosexual activists demanding he make all these changes to accommodate such frivolous things like inheritance and hospital visitation. The demands placed on him are so outrageous that I've compiled a comprehensive list of the changes Mr. Elliott will have to make if marriage equality comes to Illinois:

• ... 

So demanding.

Next, Elliott waxes nostalgic about The Good Ol' Days:

I grew up in a small village in southern Illinois...

Well, there's your problem right there.

... where people never locked their doors, left their keys in their cars, stayed married to one another for life but were ostracized if they divorced or dared to live together, unmarried.

Judging by what I've found online, Mr. Elliot is a white man who came of age in (I'm guessing) the 1950s. So he's talking about a time when men could beat their wives with impunity, women were second class citizens, and the colored folk knew their place. All in all, a lot of the 1950s and even 1960s wasn't so great if you weren't a white, heterosexual man.

Then he goes on this truly bizarre anecdote about this guy that rolled into town that had a lot of wives and told him and his buddies all about it while they were drinking RC Cola and put peanuts in their drink and I lost track and don't know what the fuck he's talking about at this point.

So brace yourself, as I said earlier: what about those people who want to marry up with more than one wife or one husband or a combination of both? Will they legally be allowed to follow the lifestyle of their choice, if everybody agrees?

It's sort of sad that the fact that he pulled out the "First queers, then polygamy!" trope seems restrained to me. After all, he could have gone full-on "If we let a man marry a man, then there's nothing stopping a man from marrying a duck!"

Somehow, I think we'll be OK. We managed to legalize interracial marriages without things deteriorating into man-marrying-female-goat territory. A number of other states have instituted marriage equality without becoming a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Lies, damned lies, and In The Market

I flip channels a lot when listening to the radio on my drive home and often come across In The Market With Janet Parshall, since it's played on two stations at the same time. Sometimes it's hard not to stop and listen a bit just out of sheer horror. I'm always frustrated when I hear right wing radio, because it's always full of misleading information, half truths, and out and out lies.

This bit from yesterday's show jumped out at me:

... here's Planned Parenthood marketing themselves as helping women and 'we provide pap smears and breast exams and all those other things' and you and I both know, that's a tiny, tiny percentage of what they do. Their coffers are filled through abortions.

This is flatly untrue. Only 3% of Planned Parenthood services are abortions and less than 15% of revenue comes from abortions.

Janet Parshall is a damned liar.

I have angered Mayor Rock God

All I was trying to do was point out the irony in him complaining about the state regulating away his ability to regulate my behavior.

Can we elect Krugman to something?

In today's NYT:

But here’s the thing: If Wall Streeters are spoiled brats, they are spoiled brats with immense power and wealth at their disposal. And what they’re trying to do with that power and wealth right now is buy themselves not just policies that serve their interests, but immunity from criticism.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

Krugman for Secretary of the Treasury, 2012!

My thoughts on the police investigation report

A few weeks ago, the City released the report on the investigation into last summer's pepper-spraying and accused roughing-up of a guy* on Green Street. This incident was unusual primarily in (a) that it was a video- and audio-taped by a squad car camera and microphone and (b) that the tape was anonymously leaked and posted online. Probably without this leak, no one would have given a damn about this. Here's a WILL article written after the leak, if you want the background.


Now, I've never had any law enforcement training or even contact with the police, good or bad, but I'm a blogger and am therefore an Expert on Everything™. One of the three findings from this report is that an unjustified amount of force was used to remove the guy from the squad car (i.e., grabbing the guy by the neck and pushing him out of the car onto the ground). But the concerns that I have are related to what happened earlier that evening. So here's my take on this. Numbers are timestamps from the video.

This stop was pretty clearly a pretext for hassling this guy. The report says that this guy had been loud and obnoxious earlier in the evening. Two officers are seen following him along Green Street, followed slowly by this squad car (02:24:45-02:25:33). It is only after the two officers turn away that the squad car quickly accelerates to catch up with this guy and this incident occurs.

In fact, the report pretty much comes out and admits this:

...officers and shift supervisors had been directed to focus their efforts on identify suspects and/or possible suspects in the aggravated batteries. Those efforts often involved the use of Terry Stops of problem individuals and the enforcement of ... "minor" offense such as loitering and pedestrian violations. [emphasis mine]

The problem I see with that is that a Terry Stop requires "reasonable suspicion" that the person being stopped has committed or is about to commit a crime.** This report mentions nothing about this guy being suspected of any crime other than the fact that, earlier in the evening, he had been yelling loudly. He was a "problem individual." The male and female companion of this guy, also jaywalking, were ignored.

I mean, arresting a guy for jaywalking? In Campustown? Really, if they start arresting people for jaywalking on campus, it will be empty. Half the population will be in jail and the other half will be bailing them out.

One of the things that really convinces me that it was predetermined that this was not going to go well -- and maybe this isn't fair -- is that you can hear the primary officer start to hum a little tune to himself as soon as he starts to pull his car forward to arrest this guy (02:26:43). It's not like the officer was humming to himself as he drove down the road. It starts as soon as the guy is in the street.

The thing that bothers me most about this incident is the pepper spraying. After seeing this guy jaywalk, the officer pulls his squad car into the middle of Fourth Street, jumps out of his car, crowd-sized can of pepper spray in hand.

After the guy and the officer stop walking (02:27:09), less than two seconds go by before the guy is pepper sprayed in the face (02:27:10).

I'm not suggesting this guy is anything other than an obnoxious drunk jerk. The report specifically draws attention to the fact that this guy moved his arm "to approximately shoulder level." But it's very obvious that he's just gesturing with both his hands in the same way he's been doing ever since the officer grabbed his arm and started marching him back to the squad car, protesting the whole way.

When talking about the unjustified removal of this guy from the squad car later that night, the report says officers are expected to "... use verbal persuasion, dialogue, and courtesy to gain voluntary compliance whenever possible".  So it seems to me that the immediate jump to a pain compliance technique is unwarranted (again, Expert in Everything™, see above). If this had been a different kind of force, but of roughly the same intensity, say a punch in the gut, would it still have been considered reasonable?

Anyway, it's late and I want to wrap this up. This guy was clearly a jerk. He was obnoxious to start with and increasingly obstreperous as the night went on (though who wouldn't be pissed off after having been pepper sprayed in the face, reasonably or not?). I couldn't care less that the secondary officer told him to "shut the fuck up". Hell, just while watching this video, I wanted the guy to shut the fuck up. But it doesn't seem to be that being an obnoxious jerk is enough to get a face full of pepper spray.

[*] For lack of a better term, I'm just going to call the guy that was pepper sprayed and arrested "the guy."

[**] IANAL, but I can read Wikipedia.

SQL Developer needs better font support

Warning: nerdom ahead...

SQL Developer is a pretty damn good tool for Oracle development. It has one problem that I find rather jarring, though: its text display in the editor is terrible. I've finally figured out what it is. Text isn't anti-aliased in the editor. That's a pretty significant oversight for any software written since, oh, Windows 95 or thereabouts.
Here's an example of what I mean:

That's the same two queries in SQL Developer and Notepad++ (great little text editor; if you're not using it, you should be). They look very different even though they're using the same font. Without antialiasing, SQLDev is displaying the "m" in the "from" in the second query as a freakin' square! And look at the difference in the asterisk. So moving from one program where text is nicely rendered to SQL Dev where it's, well, not, is jarring and annoying.

To be fair, I suspect this is not a limitation of SQL Developer itself, but of the Java component being used to render the text. But really, Oracle owns both. If they want SQL Dev to be the IDE for an enterprise-grade database, really, it shouldn't make my eyes hurt.

And a shout-out to @thatjeffsmith for his interesting talk on SQL Developer this week.

(In Windows XP or so, Microsoft introduced support for ClearType fonts, which is a really cool technology that provides sub-pixel antialiasing at the cost of some chromatic distortion. Since then, Consolas has been my go-to font for when I need a fixed-width font. I originally thought this was that SQL Dev didn't have support for ClearType fonts, but it's more basic than that, even.)

Update:

Kris Rice shows how to enable AA fonts. Awesome, thanks! (I didn't even realize there was a .conf file.)

A self-defeating tax?

A couple of weeks back, the Champaign City Council supported a resolution to force retailers to charge for disposable plastic bags, about $0.05 per bag. Personally, I think this is a really bad idea in support of a laudable goal.

Sure, it's good to reduce waste and litter in our community. But the only way a tax like this would work is if the fee is large enough to actually cause people to change their behavior. I don't know about you, but five or six bags adding up to an extra $0.25 on my grocery bill isn't going to make me go out of my way. (I do normally use reusable bags, but occasionally forget to bring them.) Anything under a buck, maybe $0.50 isn't going to register on my radar.

But then I noticed this quote from the mayor:

I don't know where we get extra money for education, unless we charge five cents for plastic bags, I guess.

So if the point of this tax is not to change people's behavior, but to raise money, maybe the whole point of placing the per-bag fee so low is so that it doesn't cause people to change their behavior, raising the amount of revenue.

Or am I just being paranoid?

The News-Gazette discovers women are a bunch of dirty sluts

I was thinking about coming off my long blog hiatus by bitching about the News-Gazette's recent editorial approving of the new Presidential power to assassinate American citizens he has declared to be terrorists, when they came up with an even more annoying one. In this case, it's one about how unmarried, teen girls are having all these babies and that's why you can't have nice things.

I'm certainly not going to disagree with the notion that becoming a teenage mother can have severely negative consequences for a woman. Not to mention the difficulty it places on a young woman trying to finish high school, let alone college, childbirth is a significant financial cost when it comes to health care.

After a long series of statistics about the high cost of maternity, the News-Gazette's main complaint in their editorial is that Obama has made it difficult to kick these girls off of Medicaid.

What can the state do about reducing its cost for Medicaid births? Thanks to President Barack Obama's national health care plan, the answer is nothing.

Obamacare rules forbid any reductions in eligibility requirements that might cut the Medicaid rolls. Indeed, over the new few years, many thousands more Illinois residents are expected to be added to the Medicaid rolls under Obamacare.

So, really, this editorial has nothing to with teen mothers at all. After discussing the impact teen pregnancy has to a young woman's future, the core message to their editorial is that society shouldn't be paying for the cost of their health care. After all, what an unemployed, 16-year old mother needs to go with her newborn is a $10,000 medical bill.

The editorial characterizes the problems with Medicaid funding as the "high cost of social collapse", that it's "social disintegration", and that these young women have a "dangerous social pathology." I'm honestly surprised this editorial doesn't call these girls "welfare queens."

Of course, there's one way to make sure that teenagers don't become mothers and fathers, and that's comprehensive sex education. Information about and access to birth control does, shockingly, prevent unwanted pregnancy. (Now, I swear there was another recent editorial where the N-G approved of employers being allowed the "religious freedom" to restrict their employees access to birth control, but I can't seem to find it now.) In fact, any discussion of how to prevent what the N-G claims is a scourge upon our society is conspicuous in in its absence.

It is a standard trope of the right-wing that America is deteriorating and if only we went back to 1950s social policy/enforced mandatory prayer in schools/put gays back in the closet/slut-shamed women more, everything would get better. So this teenage-pregnancy-cum-Medicaid-collapse scandal is, of course, part of that:

It's a seemingly intractable problem that reflects a slow and steady cultural decline.

Except that's not true! According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the teenage pregnancy rate in Illinois dropped 40% between 1988 and 2005. (That's the most recent data I could find.) According to this article in The Economist, not only are a lot of other factors about American life better than they have been in the past, but the teenage pregnancy rate is the lowest it's been in 40 years.

Upstaged

Did you know there was an event this Memorial Day to remember veterans, POWs, and MIAs?

If not, did you know that Sarah Palin made a big ruckus when she showed up at a biker event?

I knew about one of these things, but not the other. And that is what's wrong with our media.

Interesting blog synergy

Oh yeah, I have a blog.

In just the past few days, there's been an interesting overlap in several of the blogs I read. It all started when Believe Out Loud, a Christian group that encourages churches to become "fully inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity" tried to place an innocuous ad on the Sojourners website (a large network of progressive Christians) and was refused. Here's the ad:

This prompted two posts over at slactivist, "My hope is built on nothing less" and "Jim Wallis and Believe Out Loud, Part 2" and over at Obsidian Wings, "Authoritarianism and the Slut Who Walks", which sort of a follow up to "The Women Men Don't See", which was a really interesting response to the Jewish newspaper that edited out Hillary Clinton and another female White House staffer out of a photo because of their (Stalinesque?) "respect" for women. The slactivist posts are more about the intersection of homosexuality and Christian identity, while the OW posts are more about authoritarianism and strict gender roles. Good posts all.

I was just struct at the quality of the points raised by Fred at slactivist as well as the civility (and coherence) of the commenters. I think Fred's main points can be summed up as:

For now let me just reiterate what I’ve said above about evangelical identity in America’s evangelical subculture. It is marked, above all else, by the proper “stance” on homosexuality and abortion. Those who meet that test are regarded as insiders with a voice that will be listened to. Those who fail that test are regarded as outsiders..

The point here is that there are many, many people besides Jim Wallis who inhabit the terrain that Tony Jones describes as "conservative on issues of human sexuality" while "theologically thoughtful and progressive on other biblical and social issues." I think that Tony is right that such a position is, in the long run, untenable.

I find his first point more interesting. Abortion and anti-gay-rights are, as raised by both slactivist and OW, shibboleths for right-wing Christians. In other words, those two beliefs are almost mandatory and universal markers for inclusion in that community, which also largely defines the modern GOP.

I've often said that (and bored both readers of this blog by saying so often), current politics is driven by identity as much as it is policy. More so for the Right; there are virtually no pro-gay, or pro-choice Republicans, but plenty anti-gay-marriage Democrats. For example, Barack Obama.

I don't really have a point, but many of the commenters at slacitivst do. Many of them are excellent and it's sad that they're going not going to get attention because they're comments in some guy's blog. So I'd like to highlight a few here:

Jessica_R:

[T]his is why evangelicals are losing numbers in droves. They've made it a zero sum game where you can either be a Christian or you can love your neighbor as yourself.

Semperfiona, on whether Jim Wallis's decision not to run the ad was a choice between "the lesser of two evils:"

It's hard to be charitable toward a choice that paints "respecting my civil rights" as the greater evil... it sounds an awful lot like "I'm not a bigot but my customers are, so your kind are not welcome here" which is just a mealy-mouthed species of bigotry and reinforces the opinions of other bigots, comforting the comfortable.

Amaryllis, on gender roles:

What bothers [fundamentalists] the most about gay couples is not what they may be doing in bed; it's much more about "who wears the pants" when both wear pants. Or skirts and heels.

Because, in their view, the entire basis of social relationships, from the most private to the nation as a whole, is based on Authority. And trying to ignore the "natural" or "God-given" hierarchy is just asking for trouble, for individuals and for society as whole.

And not to bury the lede, but these are the best of the bunch:

Morgan Guyton: (emphasis mine)

[T]he reason why "conservative" views of sexuality don't have long-term viability for a Christian who's serious about the Biblical perspective on poverty is because the primary function of sexual "conservativism" is to excuse middle-class Christians from being concerned about poverty since we can label it a moral failing of welfare mamas who need to learn how to close their legs.

bad Jim, on why a conservative (wide) stance on sexuality is such a shibboleth for evangelicals:

[A] focus on sexuality doesn't threaten things that really matter, like wealth and power. Preaching that looks benignly upon getting and spending is more likely to prosper, and the ideal of self-control lends itself nicely to material pursuits. If a display of virtue and self-denial is required, what better than to condemn sins to which one is not attracted or of which one is incapable, which for most men would include homosexuality and abortion.

How often...

Out of curiosity, I was looking up how often Americans eat out, on average. Before I got that far, I found this:

Yeah, as a society, we're pretty much fucked.

Mayoral race speculation

This may be a bit incoherent, but it's late and I want to get this down.

First, there may be some shennanigans going on in the Champaign mayoral race. I forget who originally pointed this out, possibly on Twitter, but Smile Politely has an article up, "Local officials mum on alleged Schweighart campaign violation" about Schweighart campaign work possibly being done on City time and by City employees. Naughty.

I've never worked for the City, but at the later years when I was at the University, we had to go through rather silly, yet mandatory, annual ethics training that made it pretty darn clear that things like this were not appropriate. Is that true of state and city employees as well? Anyway you'd think anyone involved with a political office would be doubly sensitive to it. And then someone involved with a political office and a political campaign would be triply sensitive to it. But, then again, perhaps it's the abuse of the vast purchasing powers and powerful influence grad students and postdocs hold that is the real ethical threat.

Secondly, I've heard speculation that, if elected, Mayor Schweighart may not serve out his entire four-year term, but instead, retire and some other Republican would be appointed to finish his term. On one hand, I don't think it's fair to judge the mayor's suitability for election solely on his age. On the other hand, he is, shall we say, of a certain age and (I hear) has had some fairly serious health problems in the past. And any appointee going into an election as an incumbent would have a pretty significant advantage.

The mayoral debate is Wednesday. I mused about the idea of livetweeting the debate, then someone heard about that, and now I've learned that People Have Been Told I will be doing that, so now there's all this pressure. People, don't get your hopes up. Also, don't assume I have any idea what I'm doing.

Also, the first mayoral debate in how many decades is two days away, and still, no clue about the format, who's going to be asking questions, whether the questions will be coming from the audience, or what. But, hey, at least it's being put together by a legitimate organization, right?

Craaaazy!

Some time ago and I'm not sure how, I got put on an email list of local left-leaning bloggers and the like. It's low traffic. For example, there were a dozen messages or so about Rahm winning in Chicago, another few about anti-Wisconsin protests in Springfield the other week.

Then there's this one guy. He sends out about one email a week. It's not specific to this list, but includes around a hundred email addresses including those @foxnews.com, @sfchronicle.com. He's got a real hardon for the Dallas County News, because about half of the addresses are people there.

And these emails ... they're just nuts. Not Sarah-Palin-nuts, but a-few-Crayons-short-of-a-full-box nuts. So, of course I find them fascinating. Not working in the medical field, I don't have a lot of contact with schizophrenics, so this is very novel to me.

Here's one from December, with the formatting replicated as accurately as I can:

Loving Alphas, heaven on earth - the perfection of capitalism [the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment and innovative acts of love demonstrated are the new currencies of LIFE ] 1. Transparency a. Test b. Part 1 (Budget, etc.) c. Part 2 (Social Security, etc.) 2. three million dollarnaires club 2020 OBJECTIVES 1. Oprah Winfrey - $1 trillion personal net worth 2. Mr. Rupert Murdoch - $1 trillion personal net worth 3. 333 million three million dollarnaires 3. Lawsuit resolution 1. United States government facilitates resolution of personal injury lawsuit - President has power to pardon (healing) 2. $30 million settlement 3. pursuit of heaven on earth 4. Project Alpha - ???? [How much more powerful... Even more threatening... Let MANKIND substantiate...] - Are you smart enough and strong enough to be an Intellectual Marine? - What are WE doing to PRAXIS heaven on earth? 5. Hillary Clinton/Susan Rice 2012 vs. Condaleeza Rice/Liz Cheney 2012 - 44 male Presidents of the United States of America - 0 female Presidents of the United States of America - 0 female Vice Presidents of the United States of America 6. 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative - 40% of global business owners, politicians, CEOs, directors, and producers are female Sarah Palin Global SELF-ESTEEM champion Keli Goff Strategic link to Africa Megyn Kelly Strategic link to Europe Soledad O'Brien Strategic link to Latin America Michelle Malkin Strategic link to Asia Fran Townsend Synergy maximization Michelle Obama Synergy maximization 7. Bill Gates/Warren Buffett giving challenge - $100 billion immediate strategic development fund [suggestion] - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 8. United States economic development recommendation - global interconnected impact - suggestion of additional analysis and recommendation of euro-inspired financial model for developing countries in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 9. Inheritance/healing initiative - Slavemaster offspring Family reunions - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 10. Cry - original collection of poetry - 2nd short story written by Tony Evans will be a ONE word eBook [ LOVE ] PhoenixRising - Global list of "slumlords" - Global list of [Intellectual contradictionS] - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative Future LOVE "state" - merger of TV/Internet/TIVO/Visual Phone in ONE "application" Sincerely, [ name redacted, --Narc ] Ebony & Ivory PRAXIS - Up Where We Belong

The Internet: Enabling schizophrenics since giant lizard aliens gave it to us in 1996.

Some unofficial thoughts on Unofficial

I'm back. Blog apathy strikes again. I'm sorry, it's nothing personal.

Unofficial was this past Friday. I don't really have much to say about that subject. Most of my experience with Unofficial involved riding a bus home after work that smelled like stale beer.

Gerry Schweighart, the mayor of Champaign, and therefore the city government, appear to very much disapprove of Unofficial. They ramp up alcohol enforcement before and during the event. The News-Gazette's front article today calls the ticketed students "scofflaws", Unofficial a "bacchanal" that is "the most dreaded annual event on the UI campus."

This year, however, a 21-year-old UIUC student was struck by two cars while crossing the street Friday night and remains in critical condition. I don't know if this was Unofficial-related or not, but for the sake of pontificating, I will assume so.

This is the second significant injury that's happened during Unofficial in my time here. In 2006, a student was killed after falling off the back of a motorcycle.

I think it's time this stopped. I don't mean Unofficial; I'm not sure how you could stop that without giving the mayor dictatorial control over the city. I mean, I think it's time the city embraced Unofficial and made it safer. There are plenty of other communities that host crazy events; maybe we should look into how they do it. There's South Padre Island during Spring Break, for one. I assure you that Unofficial is the pale shadow of Mardi Gras's little brother's second banana.

For starters, I think that Campustown and possibly the roads around the main quad should be closed to street traffic.

It's important to remember that Unofficial isn't a creation of University students. It's a creation of a Campustown bar owner. It's the goal of Unofficial to get students into the bars to drink. That being said, allowing 18 to 20-year olds into bars on this weekend is just stupid. Of course they're there to drink.

I'm less concerned with creating a moral hazard involving alcohol and more interested in creating an environment where students can be their stupid selves and not be killed doing it.

UPDATE: Someone over at today's N-G article suggested making it a parents weekend. I think that's a great idea. I think the presence of a lot of students' parents would tone down the no-holds-barred partying. (Not to mention the possible expectation that they'd have to be awake before noon the next day.)

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Posted without further comment...