• Milk Run

    by  • May 19, 2012 • 0 Comments

    Milk Run

    A Global jet air­liner, en route from Lon­don to New York on an unevent­ful after­noon in the year 1961, but now reported over­due and miss­ing. By now searched for on land, sea, and air by anguished human beings, fear­ful of what they might find. But you and I know where she is. You and I know what has hap­pened. So if some moment, any moment, you hear the sound of jet engines fly­ing atop the over­cast skies, engines that sound search­ing and lost; engines that sound hun­gry for fuel, shoot up a flare or do some­thing. That would be Global 33 try­ing to get home.…from the Twi­light Zone.

    Marriage Primer

    by  • May 19, 2012 • 0 Comments

    Let’s be clear about the country’s cur­rent mar­riage issue atten­tion diver­sion. We use one word “mar­riage” to describe two dif­fer­ent events, one reli­gious and one legal. We con­flate the two in a way that pros­ti­tutes the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

    The first usage, as reli­gious, is a non-universal event. Most cou­ples have a reli­gious expe­ri­ence, some don’t. I didn’t. The reli­gious event is diverse, often strictly tra­di­tional, and in some cases an expres­sion of cre­ative jazz. But it’s a reli­gious event nonethe­less, offi­ci­ated by a clergy, and while sig­nif­i­cant to some, noth­ing more.

    The sec­ond usage, as legal, is uni­ver­sal. All cou­ples seek­ing state rec­og­nized mat­ri­mony must obtain a state con­trolled license in order to to be eli­gi­ble for the state and Fed­eral rec­og­nized rights of mat­ri­mony. Each state has dif­fer­ent require­ments, how­ever the rights of mat­ri­mony have been rec­og­nized through­out the nation. Well, except for the his­tory of dif­fer­ences on age, race, and sex­ual orientation.

    So why should the two usages be con­flated? Reli­gious respect is being con­served within the con­fines of each denom­i­na­tion. The state is nowhere requir­ing any spe­cific reli­gious process or expres­sion, or set­ting reli­gious lim­its. For both the reli­gious and non-religious vari­ants, legal rights are being con­served. It’s two sep­a­rate paths to the same legal end, but it’s not two sep­a­rate paths to the same reli­gious end.

    Reli­gious tra­di­tion­al­ists how­ever are try­ing to enforce a legal inter­pre­ta­tion of reli­gious pre­cepts, claim­ing an all encom­pass­ing own­er­ship of the inter­pre­ta­tion of mar­riage. Let’s call it an implicit patent claim. Doing so, they’ve been able enforce a cer­tain behav­ioral stric­ture which has been supra-constitutional. It could become another case requir­ing a Com­merce Clause interpretation.

    Global Unsafe Abortion Statistics

    by  • May 19, 2012 • 0 Comments

    From Twit­ter:

    Jen­nifer Gunter ‏@DrJenGunter
    Unsafe abor­tion accounts for 13% of mater­nal deaths world­wide, roughly 47,000 deaths/yr

    Jen­nifer Gunter ‏@DrJenGunter
    Make that 70,000 deaths world­wide from unsafe abor­tion. Pro-life appar­ently doesn’t apply to women.

    That’s equal to a Boe­ing 757 air­liner crash every day of the year. The global num­ber of unsafe abor­tions is esti­mated at 19 mil­lion. They can’t all be per­formed with a coat hanger by a novice in a back alley. Can they?

    I con­tinue to be amazed at the intrin­sic human desire to insti­tute pro­hi­bi­tions against prod­ucts and ser­vices in demand as a means of restrain­ing social-cultural behav­ior. Legal pro­hi­bi­tions don’t pre­vent. They take the pro­hib­ited tar­get out of legal con­tract com­merce, tax rev­enue, and over­sight, and move it into the appar­ently ever-expanding black mar­ket for inter­na­tional orga­nized crime and crim­i­nal employ­ment. Prob­a­bly the world’s fastest grow­ing mar­ket. Rarely is a full cost-benefit analy­sis done for these pro­hi­bi­tions. “There ought to be a law” is the lazy answer, not the cor­rect answer.

    Promiscuous Plasmids

    by  • May 18, 2012 • 0 Comments

    Here’s a lit­tle biol­ogy story that focuses on Chen­nai India, the old Madras, but it could be most any­where in India. I had sev­eral years of busi­ness activ­i­ties to Madras dur­ing the ‘90s, encom­pass­ing maybe a dozen trips.

    It doesn’t take long for a new­bie in India to won­der why it is that so many peo­ple can be seen excret­ing within eye­sight of dri­ving along the roads. “Open defe­ca­tion” it’s called by the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion, of which India is the over­whelm­ing cham­pion. Also within days a new­bie will usu­ally engage in their own efforts to avoid emer­gency stops by the sides of the road. At some point the ques­tion will arise; “Is it just me? Or are there no toi­lets in this country?”

    My India sto­ries have always been inter­spersed with a sta­tis­tic like; “There’s 1.2 bil­lion peo­ple and maybe 10 mil­lion toi­lets.” Of course I was wing­ing it, but the intent was sin­cere based on my expe­ri­ence. Obvi­ously that expe­ri­ence was occa­sion­ally bad. I went to visit my driver’s home one day and saw that they had a bucket which when full was dumped in the cen­ter of the street down the block.

    This is the first time I’ve had occa­sion to come across some actual statistics.

    From Bloomberg:

    India’s inad­e­quate san­i­ta­tion increases the scope of antibac­te­r­ial resis­tance. More than half of the nation’s 1.2 bil­lion res­i­dents defe­cate in the open, and 23 per­cent of city dwellers have no toi­lets, accord­ing to a 2012 report by the WHO and Unicef.

    Uncov­ered sew­ers and over­flow­ing drains in even such mod­ern cities as New Delhi spread resis­tant germs through feces, taint­ing food and water and cov­er­ing sur­faces in what Dart­mouth Med­ical School researcher Elmer Pfef­fer­korn describes as a fecal veneer.

    When I read Pfefferkorn’s term “fecal veneer”, I remem­bered hear­ing a sim­i­lar turn from a fel­low Indian trav­eler: “A per­son can’t become com­fort­able in India until they’re com­fort­able with a thin veneer of human excre­ment adher­ing to their every­thing all the time.” What’s fas­ci­nat­ing is Pfefferkorn’s the­ory of the pos­i­tive sur­vival value of the fecal veneer.

    I hap­pened to go see “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” this week, which takes place in India. I wrote on a Face­book page:

    Good happy movie. How­ever, seri­ously miss­ing props were; flies, mos­qui­tos, dust, oppres­sive heat, sweat, end­less horn honk­ing 24 hours a day, open defe­ca­tion, and unimag­in­able poverty. Admit­tedly, they all would have detracted from the storyline.

    Pur­posely not included was aroma, because the movie made two small efforts to address that. But yes, the aroma too.

    So all that to talk about plas­mids. Lit­tle thin­gies that must be alive some­how but we can’t really explain too much about how. They can trans­fer genetic infor­ma­tion between bac­te­ria. But there’s a rea­son­able chance that we’ll all know more about them in the near term. We may even be coaxed into think­ing about health care in a com­pletely new way. These plas­mids are spread­ing the genetic infor­ma­tion from one bac­te­ria to another of how to sur­vive micro­bi­cides. Bac­te­ria of all types, but par­tic­u­larly the ones bar­raged by overuse of mod­ern antibi­otics, are learn­ing how to sur­vive against all known micro­bi­cides. And it’s the plasmid’s fault.

    The caul­dron of India, with its pop­u­la­tion den­sity, rudi­men­tary hygiene, fecal veneer, unre­stricted antibi­otic access and usage, inter­na­tional med­ical tourism, and the smart lit­tle plas­mids have come together and cre­ated the super-bacteria. These super-bugs are spread­ing (40 nations per the link) and there’s very lit­tle that can be done about it. They make for ugly dis­eases that can spread when not heav­ily treated. And crit­i­cal mass would be an unfa­vor­able affair. Inter­est­ingly, like AIDS, no coun­try wants to admit to any issue for fear of los­ing eco­nomic value.

    But then we here in the United States aren’t affec­tion­ate towards any­one who can’t pay their own health care bill, either cash or insur­ance. What many small gov­ern­ment every-man-is-an-island advo­cates (well let me call them nut cases) over­look in their effu­sions is the “tragedy of the com­mons”. Because with insuf­fi­cient gov­ern­ment, the strongest do what­ever they want with the com­mons. And this world with more peo­ple than have ever existed in the his­tory of the earth, the global com­mons could become a dis­ease rid­den mess.

    via Drug-Defying Germs From India Speed Post-Antibiotic Era — Bloomberg.

    Job Creation Mirage

    by  • May 18, 2012 • 0 Comments

    I laugh when I hear peo­ple com­plain about unem­ploy­ment and attribute it to the cur­rent Pres­i­dent. As if they’re expect­ing the gov­ern­ment to some­how cre­ate mean­ing­ful jobs while Con­gress and the states are cut­ting pro­grams to reduce spend­ing. “Fewer envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions and lower tax rates are the key to job cre­ation” they’ll say. But of course, busi­ness is sit­ting on hordes of cash and no eco­nomic oppor­tu­ni­ties to deploy it. And the wealthy can only buy so much stuff before their stor­age loca­tions and phys­i­cal body begin to burst.

    We may change Pres­i­dents in 2012, but a new pol­icy won’t change the sit­u­a­tion, unless a new asset bub­ble of some kind is encour­aged. That was George W. Bush’s solu­tion. He had employ­ment prob­lems com­ing off of the 1999–2000 reces­sion. Neg­li­gi­ble new employ­ment occurred through 3 years of his first term. The nat­ural regen­er­a­tive pow­ers of the econ­omy that had been reli­ably depended on after prior reces­sions did not kick in: for rea­sons which were denied at the time, and still largely are.

    So the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion even­tu­ally real­ized the war was not kick­ing up employ­ment mean­ing­fully, and that they needed Chi­nese bor­row­ings, low cost Fed money, min­i­mal finan­cial reg­u­la­tion, and a bal­loon­ing of the hous­ing indus­try. Jobs for con­struc­tion mate­ri­als, con­struc­tion work­ers, real estate agents, apprais­ers, mort­gage orig­i­na­tors, bankers, and finan­cial pack­agers of all kinds. It was a wind­fall. Jobs built on a bub­ble, and every­one happy because of their real estate wealth increases. Thank good­ness there were no unions involved! Sound some­thing like the Inter­net bub­ble? Ooops. They both col­lapsed like a house of cards.

    All the while we’ve been futz­ing with these bub­ble games, com­pa­nies that really make stuff have shed employ­ees wher­ever and how­ever. Mul­ti­tudes have sold out to Asia or closed their man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties and out­sourced sup­ply from Asia and Mex­ico. If they couldn’t get rid of employ­ees this way, they cut quiet deals and hired undoc­u­mented work­ers rather than hire high school edu­cated Amer­i­cans. Undoc­u­mented work­ers can be han­dled at lev­els just a bit above slav­ery; work­ing all the time, no sick leave, no vaca­tion, no retire­ment, and no state labor laws. Where polit­i­cally pos­si­ble, Right-to-work laws were enacted, orga­nized labor demo­nized, ben­e­fits elim­i­nated, and social pro­grams were gamed to shift any pos­si­ble undoc­u­mented labor costs to the local tax base.

    Essen­tially since the ‘80s, our soci­ety has com­pla­cently assumed a man­tle of suc­cess, stopped being con­cerned about mid­dle class job cre­ation, and just assumed it would occur. We’ve jumped feet first into pre­tend­ing to design a ser­vice econ­omy divided between Nie­man Mar­cus and Wal­mart. Throw the money at the top, have most of it leak out to The Cay­mans and Switzer­land, and have some drops trickle down through the econ­omy. Now we’re start­ing to see the long term reper­cus­sions, with less and less peo­ple capa­ble of spend­ing to buy the things that employ­ees need to work to provide.

    There is and has been very lit­tle job cre­ation of respectable qual­ity, because busi­ness doesn’t want any. Employ­ees are a pain in the ass. Money-works have far less complaints.

    Ask your­self the sim­ple ques­tion. Can the jobs being cre­ated sup­port a cit­i­zen through health, mar­riage, child rear­ing, edu­ca­tion, and retire­ment? Some few, but on the whole, no, not really. We hate employ­ees. But how long can this sit­u­a­tion be a work­ing system?

    Just has I was writ­ing this I came across a con­tro­versy con­cern­ing the TED Talks. A ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Nick Hanauer gave a pre­sen­ta­tion that TED will not put up as a video. [The talk is avail­able on YouTube and linked above.] The talk is too con­tro­ver­sial because he sug­gests that trickle down is a fraud. The talk is basi­cally com­posed of the points in this Bloomberg opin­ion piece writ­ten by Hanauer.

    From the piece:

    I can say with con­fi­dence that rich peo­ple don’t cre­ate jobs, nor do busi­nesses, large or small. What does lead to more employ­ment is a “cir­cle of life” like feed­back loop between cus­tomers and busi­nesses. And only con­sumers can set in motion this vir­tu­ous cycle of increas­ing demand and hir­ing. In this sense, an ordi­nary middle-class con­sumer is far more of a job cre­ator than a cap­i­tal­ist like me.

    So when busi­ness­peo­ple take credit for cre­at­ing jobs, it’s a lit­tle like squir­rels tak­ing credit for cre­at­ing evo­lu­tion. In fact, it’s the other way around.

    Any­one who’s ever run a busi­ness knows that hir­ing more peo­ple is a cap­i­tal­ists course of last resort, some­thing we do only when increas­ing cus­tomer demand requires it. In this sense, call­ing our­selves job cre­ators isn’t just inac­cu­rate, it’s disingenuous.

    That’s why our cur­rent poli­cies are so upside down. When you have a tax sys­tem in which most of the exemp­tions and the low­est rates ben­e­fit the rich­est, all in the name of job cre­ation, all that hap­pens is that the rich get richer.

    Read more at Busi­ness Insider.

    Eat It Spending Complainers

    by  • May 17, 2012 • 0 Comments

    I can’t hardly have an open dis­cus­sion with­out the “Obama-spending-complainers” chim­ing in with distortions-of-reality-cum-facts. I’m not an edu­ca­tor. It’s not my job to explain or defend any­thing other than my own actions. Most of these peo­ple could use some time with the very teach­ers who they’re try­ing to get fired or laid-off.

    I’m com­fort­able know­ing that vir­tu­ally 100% of the Obama-spending-complainers were totally onboard in sup­port of prob­a­bly the great­est spend­ing blun­ders in the his­tory of the nation, if not human­ity (check sources on this). These being:

    • The knee-jerk 9/11 response to attack Iraq, attempt to democratize/modernize it and/or grab its oil,
    • To sus­tain a ten-year plus oper­a­tion in Afghanistan against the medieval Tal­iban, and
    • The gullible accep­tance and unchecked ramp-up of domes­tic secu­rity and surveillance.

    The largest chunk of this spend­ing has gone to military-government-contractor pri­vate indus­try, mak­ing it more influ­en­tial and more powerful.

    On these three blun­ders of hubris the Obama-spending-complainers are mute, or if any­thing above flac­cid they hold the posi­tion that these are not rel­e­vant to today’s 24 hour news cycle.

    This is cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance in action.

    Patriotism

    by  • May 17, 2012 • 0 Comments

    Hav­ing a debate whether “patri­o­tism” means self above coun­try, or coun­try above self? Plus the roles of ser­vice to oth­ers, stew­ard­ship of resources, and shared sac­ri­fice. It sounds kind of kum­baya. Is this stuff only for the mil­i­tary? Is a flag tie pin sufficient?

    Biopunk

    by  • May 17, 2012 • 0 Comments

    I learned a new con­cept the other day lis­ten­ing to, god-forbid, National Pub­lic Radio. I know, I know, I should have been lis­ten­ing to Rush as prac­tice for the upcom­ing National Alle­giance Dictate.

    My first degree in ’72 was in biol­ogy, empha­siz­ing the new mol­e­c­u­lar biol­ogy field. I spent the next year work­ing in the bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity in the lab of Matthew Mesel­son. He was a rather an impos­ing fig­ure in the biol­ogy world, hav­ing per­formed the famous Meselson-Stahl exper­i­ment. The adja­cent lab was James Wat­son, dis­cov­erer of DNA.

    The lab work was recom­bi­nant DNA exper­i­ments; rel­a­tively prim­i­tive work slic­ing, dic­ing, and recon­fig­ur­ing DNA. Bac­te­rio­phages and e.Coli were the daily play toys. Occa­sion­ally I’d get a chance to poke my head above water with the geniuses. It was the City of Boston that destroyed my career in biol­ogy. Boston was too much fun, and by the begin­ning of each month’s third week, I’d be broke. Ulti­mately I had my “screw this” moment, and headed back to Pur­due for an elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing degree, with which I could get a job that paid adult rates.

    Now, forty years later, recom­bi­nant genet­ics is tak­ing on a new turn, this time for the hob­by­ist and oppor­tu­nity inquirer. Maybe there’s a legit­i­mate entre­pre­neur­ial oppor­tu­nity here?

    From Wikipedia:

    The biop­unk move­ment is a small intel­lec­tual and cul­tural move­ment, which encom­passes a grow­ing num­ber of sci­en­tists, artists, and cul­tural crit­ics who are orga­niz­ing to cre­ate pub­lic aware­ness of how genomic infor­ma­tion, pro­duced by bioin­for­mat­ics, gets used and mis­used. On the basis of a pre­sumed par­al­lel between genetic and com­pu­ta­tional code, sci­ence jour­nal­ist Annalee Newitz has called for open-sourcing of genomic data­bases and declared that “Free our genetic data!” is the ral­ly­ing cry of the biop­unk. Bio­log­i­cal Inno­va­tion for Open Soci­ety is an exam­ple of an open-source ini­tia­tive in biotech­nol­ogy aim­ing to apply open license for bio­log­i­cal innovation.

    A cur­sory on Annalee Newitz. I’m think­ing Absolutely Fab­u­lous.

    via Biop­unk — Wikipedia, the free ency­clo­pe­dia.

    Notes on Hubblism™

    by  • May 15, 2012 • 0 Comments

    One of the rea­sons I like Face­book is that the dis­cus­sions pull out thoughts that I might not have both­ered to man­i­fest into sen­tences. For exam­ple, I had a reli­gious dis­cus­sion recently in which I revealed that I was a Hub­b­list, a fol­lower of Hub­b­lism™. Which I admit, I invented as some­thing from which to obtain a lav­ish finan­cial reward dur­ing my retire­ment years. I have the domains in .com, .net, and .org.  For spice I’ll include bits of Lucretius and Epi­curius to main­tain a con­struc­tive frame­work of ever-expanding thought pos­si­bil­i­ties. The next step is to get the Wikipedia entry going.

    I made a com­ment about the vicious his­tory of the Catholic church in accor­dance with a friend’s post, and so started being included in the follow-up:

    Vince: What reli­gion are you Steve?

    [Steve doesn’t imme­di­ately answer because he is on a flight trip, so I take the lib­erty to answer for him.]

    Sum­ner: My under­stand­ing is that Steve is a fel­low Hubblist.

    Vince: Sum­ner– I’m not famil­iar with Hub­b­lism, what is it?

    Sum­ner: Hub­b­lism fol­lows the teach­ings of the Hub­ble Space Telescope.

    Vince: Sum­ner– And what are the teachings?

    Sum­ner: It’s A LOT of mate­r­ial to try to under­stand, fig­u­ra­tively and lit­er­ally, how­ever you can get a sliver of insight at a web­site like http://www.spacetelescope.org/

    Vince: I give up Sum­ner, read­ing about the Hub­ble tele­scope doesn’t seem to answer my ques­tion. I love sci­ence but this is a lit­tle strange to me. I’m wait­ing for Steve.

    [Later]

    Steven: I’m a Hubblist.

    Vince: Thanks for clear­ing that up Steve. I’ll assume this is an inside joke.

    Sum­ner: What bet­ter pre­cepts for a reli­gion than the epit­ome of mod­ern sci­ence? Behold the uni­verse at a pre­vi­ously unimag­in­able scale! Far bet­ter than the mag­i­cal mean­der­ings of tribal goat herder elders from sev­eral thou­sand years ago.

    Steven: Yes, that’s right Pas­tor Sum­ner. Vince, do you really believe in talk­ing ser­pents, tak­ing ribs from one human to make another, burn­ing bushes, and the age of the earth in thou­sands of years? I believe in Dar­win and Hub­ble — cause its all proven true.

    Vince: Steve– You believe sci­ence then? Sci­ence con­stantly finds new things that prove older views incor­rect. How do we know for sure, don’t you have to have faith? Isn’t that what reli­gion is about, faith? Sci­ence is bat­tling one of the major fun­da­men­tal laws of sci­ence right now, that noth­ing can go faster then the speed of light. There is “proof” that this may not be true. If proven beyond a doubt to be true, it would change sci­ence as we know it. I don’t buy the thought that we under­stand sci­ence fully, we con­stantly learn that we know very lit­tle about our uni­verse. In fact we know so lit­tle, call it vir­tu­ally noth­ing. It would seem that the cor­rect word for you would be an athe­ist by def­i­n­i­tion: a per­son who denies or dis­be­lieves the exis­tence of a supreme being or beings. Unless I’m totally off on what you believe. If that’s what you are then just own it.

    Sum­ner: The faith in Hub­bism comes from quan­tum physics, which says we can’t know any­thing for sure, ever. That’s why if one’s going to hold fast to some arti­fi­cial belief struc­ture, why not have it at least be based on the most cur­rent data? BTW, that faster than light thing was a wiring SNAFU.

    Sources Of The Current National Deficit

    by  • May 15, 2012 • 0 Comments

    I’m so tired of this never-ending debate about the sources and attri­bu­tion of national debt. Every con­ser­v­a­tive foot sol­dier wants to con­flate “ini­ti­at­ing and exe­cut­ing the poli­cies that caused the deficit” with “exist­ing simul­ta­ne­ously and cop­ing with the reper­cus­sions of the poli­cies that caused the deficit.”

    It’s almost like the best con­tin­u­ous joke:

    Ha ha! We shat in your nest, you can’t prove it, and now you must accept respon­si­bil­ity and live in it! :-)

    So look. Until fac­tu­ally con­vinced oth­er­wise, this is my base­line. And yes I know, it doesn’t include the bloody “enti­tle­ments” and that old peo­ple aren’t dying fast enough. Talk to your par­ents about that.

    From the article:

    As the chart below reveals, the main dri­vers of pro­jected deficits over the next decade are the wars of the aughts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts and the so-called “auto­matic sta­bi­liz­ers” — unem­ploy­ment insur­ance spend­ing, lower tax bur­dens — built into exist­ing pol­icy to com­bat eco­nomic down­turns. Recov­ery mea­sures by Bush and Obama caused a short-term spike in deficits but have mostly phased out and thus rep­re­sent only mod­est frac­tions of the national debt.

    [BTW — I like that catchy term: “Wars of the Aughts.” It might last a few hun­dred years.]

    via How Bush-Fueled Deficits Con­tinue To Haunt Obama (CHART) | TPMDC.

    Hubblism™: The Cool Swan Glowing in Flight

    by  • May 12, 2012 • 0 Comments

    Click for larger image.

    Cygnus-X Image by Her­schel. Her­schel is a Euro­pean Space Agency cor­ner­stone mis­sion, with sci­ence instru­ments pro­vided by con­sor­tia of Euro­pean insti­tutes and with impor­tant par­tic­i­pa­tion by NASA. NASA’s Her­schel Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­tory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL con­tributed mission-enabling tech­nol­ogy for two of Herschel’s three sci­ence instru­ments. The NASA Her­schel Sci­ence Cen­ter, part of the Infrared Pro­cess­ing and Analy­sis Cen­ter at the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy in Pasadena, sup­ports the United States astro­nom­i­cal com­mu­nity. Cal­tech man­ages JPL for NASA.

    Cygnus-X — The Cool Swan Glow­ing in Flight

    This new view of the Cygnus-X star-formation region by Her­schel high­lights chaotic net­works of dust and gas that point to sites of mas­sive star for­ma­tion. The image com­bines far-infrared data acquired at 70 micron (cor­re­spond­ing to the blue chan­nel); 160 micron (cor­re­spond­ing to the green chan­nel); and 250 micron (cor­re­spond­ing to the red chan­nel). The obser­va­tions were made on May 24, 2010, and Decem­ber 18, 2010. North is to the lower-right and east to the upper-right.

    via NASA — Cygnus-X — The Cool Swan Glow­ing in Flight.

    GOP Pollster to GOP

    by  • May 12, 2012 • 0 Comments

    A pro­fessed Demo­c­rat from Texas who hates Obama con­fronted me and asked; “Why does Obama want to lose the elec­tion by forc­ing the states to legal­ize gay mar­riage?” Actu­ally the Demo­c­rat said it with a bit more vin­dic­tive filth. Can you see the con­cep­tual prob­lems here?

    It’s often hard to accept that it’s the weak­est link that breaks the chains of life. That link is usu­ally the weak­est because its been the most neglected as one of the least impor­tant. But it can also be the weak­est link because it’s been unpop­u­lar or uncom­fort­able for any­one to inspect and main­tain the qual­ity of that link.

    So it is with the deeply entrenched anti-gayness of the reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists of the Repub­li­can party.

    A clear tran­scrip­tion of the GOP pollster’s report ref­er­enced in the fol­low­ing quote is avail­able here. My bold below.

    Below is a remark­able doc­u­ment. It’s a memo cir­cu­lated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Repub­li­can poll­ster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to var­i­ous lead­ing Repub­li­can oper­a­tives, can­di­dates and insid­ers. It’s on the fast-shifting poll data on mar­riage equal­ity and gay rights in gen­eral, and how that should affect Repub­li­can pol­icy and lan­guage. And the pollster’s con­clu­sion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its cur­rent rhetoric and posi­tions on gays and les­bians, it is in dan­ger of mar­gin­al­iz­ing itself to irrel­e­vance or worse.

    Just say­ing.

    via Top GOP Poll­ster to GOP: Reverse On Gay Issues — The Dish | By Andrew Sul­li­van — The Daily Beast.