Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List - New York Times
«If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said students seeking the grants went first to their college registrar, who determined whether they were full-time students majoring in an eligible field.
“If a field is missing, that student would not even get into the process,” he said.
That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution.»
Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List - New York Times
RFK Jr. Puts on the Tinfoil Hat
…and catalogs the many, many discrepancies in the last Presidential election:
Indeed, the extent of the GOP’s effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ”Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,” Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ”You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.”
My favorite part of this article has to do with the accuracy of exit polling (remember, the exit polls from the last election predicted a Kerry victory, by a landslide?)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science… ”Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ‘’so reliable,” he added, ”that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.”
…But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey… scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ”corrected” numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count…
”The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,” says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ”They were really screwed up — the old models just don’t work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.”
I think a lot of Democrats were wary of crying foul after Kerry’s defeat; but this article is full of citations, so you can check up on the facts yourself if you like. Very depressing, when you consider all the implications. I’m not sure I believe in a true “conspiracy,” but it seemed pretty obvious to me that the last election was a real mess, with half the country using outdated equipment, and the other half using buggy, untested new digital machines. And why, in this day and age, is gerrymandering still the norm?
How to read fruit
Here’s an amazing bit of information: you can tell whether a fruit is organic or GMO by looking at the number on the little sticker:
- Conventionally grown fruit has four digits
- Genetically modified fruit has five digits, beginning with 8
- Organically grown fruit has five digits, beginning with 9
Unfortunately, Bush changed the USDA guidelines for organic growers to allow certain pesticides, so “organic” doesn’t always mean organic (unless it’s certified by California or another state.) But, it’s great to be able to avoid genetically-modified foods if you so wish.
UPDATE: Apparently there’s only one genetically-modified fruit currently being sold.
The Corporation as Psychopath
I just saw an amazing documentary movie last night, The Corporation. I remember when this film came out in 2003, and I remember dismissing it as just another preachy and hysterical rant. Well, I was very wrong.
The movie’s rather sensational “hook” is that if you observe the behavior of modern-day corporations in the context of an individual (since corporations are, in a certain legal sense, people) you get a personality profile not unlike criminal sociopathy. What’s great about the film, though, is that they let the Captains of Industry speak out in their own words. These guys are really deluded– one exec (sorry, I can’t remember from which company because I am a flake) waxes rhapsodic about a world in which every natural resource, from the air we breathe to rainwater from the sky, is bought and sold in a global marketplace. Basically, these guys tell themselves that they are protecting the environment by attempting to own every molecule of it. (This is the basic idea behind the “emissions credits” that Bush has been yakking about.)
On the other hand, there’s also an interview with Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, one of the world’s largest carpet manufacturers, who’s on a personal mission to bring “100% sustainability” to his industry. He’s actually been fairly successful in the past ten years reducing things like oil consumption and water use in his own company, while increasing profits. This guy is leading the good fight– but all of this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the marketplace.
Anyway, none of these issues is in and of itself new to me, but this is the first time I’d seen it all brought together in such an entertaining whole. Depressing, but entertaining. Rent it!
‘Pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms or dispense contraceptives.’
Tom Managhan, co-director of Domino’s Pizza, is trying to build a Catholic paradise in the Florida swamps:
“‘We’ve already had about 3500 people inquire on our Web site about buying a home there — you know, they’re all Catholic,’ Monaghan says excitedly. ‘We’re going to control all the commercial real estate, so there’s not going to be any pornography sold in this town. We’re controlling the cable system. The pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms or dispense contraceptives.’ A private chapel will be located within walking distance of each home. At the stunning church in the center of town, Mass will be said hourly, seven days a week, from 6 a.m. on. ‘So,’ Monaghan concludes, with just a hint of understatement, ‘it’ll be a unique town.’”
…the same way that Nazi Germany was a “unique” nation, I suppose.
