Green Day and a Monday poem

I was up in NH for a while and didn’t put up anything on Friday, so today I’ve decided to give a trillion dollars to the first person who can write a song based on one of my poems (ok, more like $3). To get you in the mood, here are a couple videos by [...]

Krauthammer concerned

Charles Krauthammer is doing a bit of concern trolling in his column today:
(1) Forget the public option. Whatever the merits, and they are few, it is political poison.  …
(2) Jettison any reference to end-of-life counseling. People see (correctly) such Medicare-paid advice as subtle encouragement to voluntarily refuse treatment. …
(3) Soft-pedal the idea of government committees [...]

Ted Kennedy

I’m a day late, but I wanted to salute one of the great men–Ted Kennedy. My take is very much like the one given here:
I realized that the real lesson, for me, anyway, of Ted Kennedy’s life wasn’t about his achievements as a public figure, after all. Instead, it was about how he conducted himself [...]

LaRouche: an entertaining crazy

I remember back in the 1980 election watching 30 minute specials put on by Lyndon LaRouche. They were entertaining in short intervals, he would swing from some coherent point to a crazy point. The crazy point usually involved the Queen of England, Kissinger, or Rockefeller (who were leaders in the international drug trade–it seems that [...]

Abortion providers

Here’s what the pro-life contingent wanted (via here):
For thirty-six years, Warren Hern has been one of the few doctors in America to specialize in late abortions. George Tiller was another. And when Dr. Tiller was murdered that Sunday in church, Warren Hern became the only one left.
There is one doctor in the US who will [...]

Galaxies, a black hole, and a poem

This week, I present (via NASA) two pictures of galaxies. The first is a coiled galaxy around a black hole (the area around the black hole is in the middle, coded a light blue, Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech):

The second is really a nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, taken by the Chandra and Hubble telescopes (Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/UIUC/Y.Chu [...]

Wow–Bolt, fast

Usain Bolt must be from a different planet or something:
After being pushed close to the finish line in the 100 on Sunday by Tyson Gay as Bolt won in a record-setting 9.58 seconds, Bolt had to do the pushing himself in the final straightaway of the 200 on Thursday. Running alone — strikingly alone — [...]

Mercury and cocaine

Here are a couple of interesting bits:
When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in 291 streams around the nation, they found it in every fish they tested, the Interior Department said, even in isolated rural waterways.
and:
A study by Yuegang Zuo of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and colleagues has found that about [...]

Women of the world

The New York Times Magazine has a really good article about how aid to women might help to reduce poverty and violence:
Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, [...]

More DR Congo

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the Congo. Back then it looked like things might be looking up, but not anymore. The number of women and men being raped is still going up and 500,000 people have been displaced by the combined Rwanda/Congo forces that were supposed to bring calm.
Secretary of State Clinton seems [...]

More healthcare craziness

Now that the lies about ‘death panels’ have lead to the elimination of funding for end of life counselling, what’s next? It seems we might go to the start of life (via here):
Now conservative opponents of health reform have found a new threat: home nurse visits to low-income parents. “We are setting up a situation where [...]

Karzai signs law that makes women second class

The updating of the infamous law for Shia women has now been published and thus is law. Human Rights Watch talks about it here:
A copy of the final law seen by Human Rights Watch shows that many regressive articles remain, which strip away women’s rights that are enshrined in Afghanistan’s constitution. The law gives a husband the [...]

Rep. Broun says ‘I’m an idiot’

Ok, he didn’t actually say that. He wrote:
Obama has created a new $2 billion federal bureaucracy — a national health care rationing board — that will decide if the medical care you need is “cost efficient.”
And if these federal bureaucrats decide that your treatment is not “Government Approved,” then your doctor will be ordered to [...]

Part 2 and a poem

I’m a little slow, but here’s the second installment of some sort of story (the first part is here or you can see it in one place in the Stories tab):

And when the fog had lifted, she had found herself here. Which was weird because there was no fog to lift and she hadn’t been a [...]

Charter Schools

The Boston Globe had an article a few days ago talking about charter schools. It found that charter schools in Massachusetts:
But a Globe analysis shows that charter schools in cities targeted by the proposal tend to enroll few special education students or English language learners.
The article then asks if charter schools do better than regular [...]

Aloisi, Patrick against Grabauskas

The spat between Massachusetts Transportation Secretary James A. Aloisi and, now ex, MBTA chief Grabauskas that resulted in Grabauskas being forced out has been entertaining. I’m not really sure what I think of Grabauskas–I do think the T is a bit better now than when he started, but I haven’t really looked at all the details.
The [...]

Republicans want uninsured to die

Ok, I don’t really believe my headline. It’s just hard not to get angry and frustrated when the other side makes ludicrous claims (see here for example). And this isn’t fringe elements, the Republican candidate for VP claims that the legislation includes death panels that would not have allowed her baby to be born (and then [...]

End of life conversation=euthanasia?

As usual, there’s a lot of crazy talk from some rightwingers about healthcare (via Pandagon). One of the craziest is that the new healthcare plans will lead to euthanasia of the elderly. This would be a joke except it’s being pushed by people in Congress–here’s a statement from Reps Boehner and McCotter:
Section 1233 of the House-drafted legislation [...]

Stars, planets, and a poem

It’s Friday, so let’s get to some pictures. The first is really more of a chart, it gives the size and orbital distance of planets that have been discovered. It includes a span for ‘habitable’ planets. I’m not quite sure how they decided this, but the only one in that region right now is Earth [...]

Karzai and women

I found this bit in Afghanistan President Karzai’s speech about Afghanis held in American detention camps to be funny:
“The Afghan people are happy because you have paved roads, built schools, and the salaries of the government are paid by the international community and United States,’’ he told the crowd in a field before a mosque. [...]