Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad’s bread and water’s going cold

Mountains of books become mountains — (Snurched from Myke Cole.)

New Google tool lets you PROBE YOURSELF — There have always been tools for- Oh, wait. Never mind. An alternate view on this.

Experimental antibody drug stalls 7 kinds of cancer, study shows

Space exploration and the culture of innovation: an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos aims to bring up Apollo 11′s sunken engines

Researcher publishes specs for real Linux-powered Star Trek tricorder — Captain, my tricorder appears to be wearing a red hat.

Satellite-jamming becoming a big problem in the Middle East and North Africa — Talk about your modern problems.

Born in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death

Parsing the Pill’s impact on women’s wage — Interesting. (Via danjite.)

We have universal healthcare — by default — Some sanity on the healthcare “debate”. It isn’t really much of a debate, of course, when one side’s talking points are mostly counterfactual.

Justices don’t understand insurance, health care, economics … — This is depressing. It’s been obvious at least since Bush v. Gore that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court is nakedly partisan at the expense of both law and justice, but now they’re not even pretending to impartiality of any sort.

How Much of the Health-Care Law Will the Justices Leave Intact? — Wednesday’s argument over how to split up the health-care law may give some of its supporters hope — but not much. Because the same conservatives who want the government to come between women and their doctors don’t want the government to come between themselves and their doctors. Or something. Intellectual consistency isn’t exactly a cardinal virtue on the American right.

The Case for Gay Acceptance in the Catholic Church — The death penalty no longer applies to people who divorce or sleep with women during their periods, as described in the Bible. So why can’t attitudes on homosexuality change as well? In two words: conservative bigotry.

?otd: Is your hair is too short and neat?

3/29/2012
Writing time yesterday: 5.5 hours (Sunspin)
Body movement: 60 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 6.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: Art, Books, Cancer, Cool, Culture, gender, healthcare, Links, Personal, Politics, Religion, Science, sex, Tech

Posted: 4:16 am Thu March 29 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad comes from somewhere back in your long ago

Dear Science Fiction Writers: Stop Being So Pessimistic! — Neal Stephenson created the Hieroglyph Project to convince sci-fi writers to stop worrying and learn to love the future. (Via Dale Smith.)

The World’s Largest Atlas: Cheers Bests Klencke — Mmm, books.

Air Ship No. 9: 1904 — Coney Island, back in the day.

The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of — (Via danjite.)

NASA re-creates huge Mars dust devil in 3-D video — Taz!

‘Thermal cloak’ hides objects from heat

Single molecule circuit controlled through quantum interference

Alien viruses from outer space and the great Archaeopteryx forgery

Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible — The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday. Those pesky facts, biased against the conservative position. That’s what happens when you build your ideology on opposing the reality-based community.

Get the lead out: Have we already forgotten this lesson? — The elimination of lead from gasoline is a paradigmatic triumph of American environmentalism. A danger to health was discovered by scientists. Public-health advocates and greens pushed and pushed for decades, often futilely, to get the government to take action. When EPA finally cranked up efforts to do something about it, the agency was viciously attacked. Industry shills said it was an agenda to control Americans’ lives, driven by scientists who wanted research money and a cabal of extreme environmentalists. They said there were no viable alternatives to lead and the regulations would raise gas prices and destroy the economy. They paid their own scientists to produce counter-evidence. They flooded politicians with money. Sound familiar? Climate change denial, anyone?

Pro-Compassion — Of course I hated Planned Parenthood. The thing is, I didn’t know anything about Planned Parenthood. There wasn’t one in my town. I didn’t know anyone who had visited one. I certainly didn’t know anyone who worked at one. My anger and hatred was borne completely out of my ignorance. I chose only to listen to one set of stories, rather than to all of the stories. Modern conservatism in a nutshell.

‘Drive a wedge between gays and blacks’ — And the reason we’re supposed to vote Republican is because liberals and atheists are immoral?

‘Obamacare’ and the Right’s Own Private Universe — We have half the country living in its own universe of belief, with its own history, its own politics, and its own physical laws. It’s like running elections against the anti-gravity party. It is not healthy for any of us. The Right explicitly and in so many words opted out of the reality-based community years ago. Unfortunately the rest of us still live here, suffering the consequences of blatantly counterfactual conservative delusions on a vast array of topics.

Dr Strangelove: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Rick Santorum — Charlie Stross on American politics.

?otd: Do you have the power to reason away what seems to be?

3/28/2012
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (0.5 hours on a nonfiction piece, 1.5 hours on Sunspin)
Body movement: 60 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 6.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: Books, climate, Cool, Culture, Links, Mars, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, race, Religion, Science, sex, Tech, Videos, Writing

Posted: 3:59 am Wed March 28 2012 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad is off to the cornfields of the Midwest

Tested by a Picturesque Dystopia — The New York Times reviews The Hunger Games movie.

Expelled for a tweeted syntactic observation

Avalanches of Words, Sifted and Sorted — (Via my Dad.)

Living in the Margins — Medieval annotations. (Via danjite.)

Why black (or blue, or red) plants might be the key to finding life beyond Earth

Praying to be skinny and straight — An expert explains what evangelical weight-loss and ex-gay movements say about America — and us. Oh, I could say a thing or two.

Christian Sex Toy Store Offers Smut-Free Dildo Shopping Online — Heh. Good for them. (Via danjite.)

Rethinking His Religion — [The clinic protestor] needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled. She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”

Basic Facts on Clothing and Murder for American Bigots

An Even Warmer Future Ahead — A new model finds that the world could be up to 5.5 degrees warmer in 2050 than it was in the 1990′s.

GOP Slams Dems For Medicare Cuts Republicans Support — Because being a conservative means never having to bow to basic logic or intellectual consistency.

?otd: Sarpy County or Douglas County?

3/26/2012
Writing time yesterday: 3.5 hours (2.75 hours on Little Dog, 0.75 hours of WRPA)
Body movement: n/a (airport walking to come)
Hours slept: 5.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a (forgot to weigh in)
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: Books, climate, gay, gender, healthcare, Language, Links, Movies, Personal, Politics, Publishing, Religion, reviews, Science, sex

Posted: 3:52 am Mon March 26 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad drives to Seattle

Hot Dog Heroes — Some frank statistics.

Being ‘Born-Again’ Linked to More Brain Atrophy: Study — Sometimes the jokes just write themselves. (And no, I don’t take this very seriously.)

Space junk forces astronauts into escape capsules on International Space Station

National Ignition Facility fires record laser shot

U.S. Inches Toward Goal of Energy Independence

Defend the change, don’t deny that it happened — Slacktivist Fred Clark on the Orwellian worldview of conservative Evangelicals. Look back 35 years and you won’t find evangelicals saying, thinking, believing or voting the same way. Roe v. Wade did not spark this change, it came later than that and apart from that. But something did, in fact, change. […] But achieving disagreement isn’t an option with those who claim not that this was a change for the better, but that it was not a change at all. That is an unreal and unserious claim. “We have always been at war with Eastasia.”

Toward justice for Trayvon Martin — and for all children

Allen West On Trayvon Martin Case: ‘This Is An Outrage’ — A black Republican says and does the right thing. Good for him.

The GOP’s Dated and Shallow Foreign Policy Criticism — Given that Obama is largely governing as a 1990s conservative, even on HCR, this amounts to “B-b-but it’s bad because he did it! Look! Kenyan Muslim socialism!”

On campaign trail, Gingrich often ties Obama, Islam — While claiming he believes President Barack Obama is a Christian, presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is increasingly connecting Obama to Islam, playing into a commonly held myth in the Republican primary electorate. Truth is always the first casualty of conservative rhetoric. Lying is what you do when you can’t win on ideas.

Does cutting taxes create jobs? — In a word, no. And it never did. Supply side economics has always been a knowing conservative scam. Reagan’s first budget director, David Stockman, later admitted to journalist William Greider that he pushed through the 1981 tax cuts knowing full well they would lead to massive federal budget deficits. He hoped this would keep Congress from spending on domestic programs. In other words, Reagan’s people cynically and knowingly lied to meet a political goal, a lie that has since become one of the “truths” of the conservative movement.

?otd: Ever been to Vader?

3/24/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.5 hours (WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bicycle ride
Hours slept: 7.0 (fitful)
Weight: 240.2
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: Culture, Food, Funny, healthcare, Links, Personal, Politics, race, Religion, Science, sex, Tech

Posted: 5:15 am Sat March 24 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is working for the weekend

DIALOGUE: Between the Lines — Podcast of yesterday’s radio interview of me with Susan Wingate and Joshua Graham.

Satisfactory Sub-plots, Now With Pictures — Howard Tayler blogs at Inkpunks.

Science Finds Fiction Is Good for Us — Nancy Jane Moore is interesting over at Book View Cafe.

GAMA Announces 38th Annual Origins Awards Nominees — This is cool. A Wizards of the Coast anthology that I have a novelette in has been nominated.

Supercomputer Watson takes on cancer care with Memorial Sloan-Kettering

What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT? —

In Texas Tradition, Museums That Enshrine the Quirky — (Thanks to my Dad.)

Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald’s Entire Menu, Survives — Mining thousands of calories of food isn’t so different from parsing terabytes of tweets.

Is It Time to Embrace Pink Slime?

The White Savior Industrial Complex — (Via danjite.)

Starbucks’ Gay Marriage Support Endorsed By HRC Despite National Organization For Marriage Protest — To quote Shanna Germain: “We will not tolerate an international company attempting to force its misguided values on citizens. The majority of Americans and virtually every consumer in some countries in which Starbucks operates believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. They will not be pleased to learn that their money is being used to advance gay marriage in society.” ~NOM President Brian Brown — I love how he makes it sound like Starbucks is going to go into foreign countries and try to convert people to a specific belief system. Because, you know, what kind of assholes do that?

Mischief follows in partisan Bible translations — American politics had changed between 1977 and 1995. It had polarized and radicalized millions of American Protestants, rallying them around a single issue and thus, as intended, rallying them behind a single political party. In 1977, the sort of American Protestants who purchased most Bibles couldn’t be summed up in a single word. But by 1995, they could be: “abortion.” And for anti-abortion American evangelicals, Exodus 21:12-27 was unacceptable. It suggested that striking and killing an unborn fetus was in a separate category from striking and killing a “person.” Strike and kill a free person, you get the death penalty. Strike and kill an unborn fetus, you get a fine. And so in 1995, like those earlier translators who invented and inserted “Junias,” the translators of the NASB reshaped this passage. Yep, the infallible and inerrant word of God.

Tennessee legislature boldly sets the science clocks back 150 years — I also wonder how the Tennessee lawmakers would feel if, say, teachers used this potential law to teach about Islam, or astrology, or Wiccan beliefs. I do not understand why conservatives hate America so much that they’re intent on destroying the education of everyone’s children.

The Republican Base Exposed — Charles Johnson at LGF once again dives into the comments at FoxNews.com so the rest of us don’t have to. This time it’s about the murder of Trayvon Martin, and we get to see the real driving animus behind the politics of Fox News viewers. To my conservative friends still wonder why the rest of America thinks your party is utterly nuts: this disgusting evil is a core portion of your Republican voting base, validated and cultivated carefully by years of your party’s political and media strategy.

Komen foundation continues to see fallout from Planned Parenthood controversy — It’s so rare to see any meaningful consequences for typical conservative dishonesty and shenanigans.

The Utter Incompetence Of Romney’s Rivals

Barack Obama and the oddballs — An Australian view of the US presidential race. Conservatives claim they are not hobbled by doctrine and ideology. Wow is that a bizarre statement. Conservatives will demonstrably choose doctrine and ideology over facts on the ground every single time. The political history of the last 20 years has proven this ad nauseam.

?otd: Tomato or tomahto?

3/23/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.25 hours (WRPA (Norwescon workshop critique))
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bicycle ride
Hours slept: 8.75 (solid)
Weight: 238.4
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: audio, Awards, Books, Cancer, Culture, education, Food, Funny, gay, gender, healthcare, interviews, Language, Links, media, Personal, podcasts, Politics, Process, Religion, sex, stories, Texas, weird, Writing

Posted: 7:56 am Fri March 23 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad flies away like a little bird

My story “The Speed of Time” is up in podcast and Web reprint at Escape Pod

Darth Vader In A Kilt On A Unicycle Playing Bagpipes — This video will make your brain hurt, I promise. (Thanks to Scrivener’s Error.)

How to piss off a frog — Hahahahahahah.

Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks (Via Emily Siskin.)

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) — (Via my aunt.)

How Not to Attract Tourists — Ah, the romance of cross-border travel. I will observe that in my experience entering the US is a more intimidating and unfriendly process than anywhere else I’ve been in my adult life, including various Communist countries.

This Explains a Lot — A trenchant LA graffito. (Via mlerules.)

The Abominable Shellfish — Why some Christians hate gays but love bacon.

What now for Republicans? — Between oppressing gays and waging war on science and pushing women back into the nineteenth century and making sure kids grow up undereducated and proudly ignorant, how’s a busy Republican to find time to get back to ruining the economy and creating new military disasters, just like our last GOP administration?

Ariz. bill could require reason for birth control — Because conservatives are so rational, and have your best interests at heart. (Speaking of pushing women back to the nineteenth century…)

The Limits of Santorum’s Politics of Resentment — Who knew there were limits to the politics of resentment? Surely not the GOP.

2012 or Never — Republicans are worried this election could be their last chance to stop history. This is fear talking. But not paranoia. (Via ilya187

?otd: Ever been part of an emergency landing?

3/17/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (trip prep)
Body movement: Airport walking to come
Hours slept: 6.0 (solid)
Weight: 238.0
Currently reading: The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy

Tags: Art, Fiction, Food, Funny, gender, healthcare, Links, music, Personal, podcasts, Politics, Religion, sex, stories, Tech, Travel, Videos

Posted: 3:34 am Sat March 17 2012 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad just is

How to Deal with Writers Effectively in One Easy Lesson — (Snurched from kradical here.)

Botanists finally ditch Latin and paper, enter 21st century — That was seriously retrograde. (Snurched from Fragano Ledgister.)

ChronoZoom takes you through 14 billion years of space-time via HTML5

Fundamental Law of High Speed Flying Manoeuvrability Discovered — That opens up the possibility of autonomous micro-air vehicles swooping and diving through cluttered environments like sparrowhawks through a forest. And doing it in the not too distant future. What could possibly go wrong?

Giant squid eyes are sperm whale defence

Sexually deprived Drosophila become bar flies — [S]exually frustrated flies choose to consume more alcohol than their happily mated peers[.]

Do Statins Make It Tough to Exercise? — Why and how exercise interacts with statins to cause muscle problems remains unknown, in part because it’s more difficult to study molecular responses in people than in animals. (People generally dislike muscle biopsies.)

The Forgotten History of Gay Marriage — In ancient church liturgical documents, he found the existence of an “Office of Same Sex Union” (10th and 11th century Greek) and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century Slavonic). That old time religion is good enough for me. (Via danjite.)

Feds to Halt Texas Women’s Health Program Funding — I am sorry it has come to this in my former home state. Thanks, conservative America, for holding women everywhere hostage to your personal religious beliefs.

Hey, kids! Anybody here not heard the F-word? — Roger Ebert on the movie Bully and MPAA ratings in general.

Mitt Romney meets ‘peasants with pitchforks’

Signs of financial stress emerge for Mitt Romney as the long GOP campaign keeps getting longer

Obama compares Republicans to ‘Flat Earth Society’ for stance on green energy — “Why would someone who wants to lead the country ignore the facts?” Um, Mr. President, have you paid any attention to the GOP these past few decades? Evolution? Climate change? Supply side economics? Their entire worldview is based on willful ignorance and ignoring the facts.

The World According to Santorum — The insinuation that making our society more sustainable is favoring the environment over humans is absurd, especially because environmental activists are among those most concerned for our species’ future. Renewable energy, less reliance on fossil fuels—these are causes that should appeal to any thinking person, regardless of their religious beliefs. “Thinking” would be the key word here. The conservatism of the Republican base is reactionary and fear-driven, and proudly anti-intellectual and anti-science. Thinking really doesn’t come into the politics of those GOP voters at all. If it did, we’d live in a much better world right now, because we wouldn’t have experienced the economic, social and military disaster that was the Bush administration, and we would be responding far more sensibly to everything from economic pressures to climate change.

?otd: Tired yet?

3/16/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (Dad time)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.0 (solid)
Weight: 235.6
Currently reading: The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy

Tags: Culture, energy, Funny, gay, gender, healthcare, Language, Links, Movies, nature, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, Science, sex, weird

Posted: 5:26 am Fri March 16 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is a regular Frankie fan

Subterranean announces their Spring, 2012 table of contents — Including my Sunspin novella, “The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future”.

A photo of me and my siblings ca. 1974 — (Via lillypond, a/k/a my sister.)

Girls’ Time Travel Attempt Leads To Suicide In China

Cube laser virtual keyboard for iPhone & iPad — :: wants ::

Cloning and resurrecting the mammoth? Not so fast

Human fossils hint at new species — The accompanying photo of a skull looks a lot like Darth Vader. Homo sith, anyone?

Disturbing and poignant video about a self-aware robot tests game-engine’s limitations — (Via willyumtx.)

A 77-year-old man from Oklahoma cannot deny human-caused climate change — Slacktivist Fred Clark on Republican Senator Inhofe’s allegedly Bible based climate change denial.

Abortion bill raises KU Med accreditation concerns — Why would anti-science conservatives even care?

Georgia Republican Compares Women to Cows, Pigs, And Chickens — Stay classy, conservative America. It’s what you do best. And people, when you vote GOP, whatever your reasons, you’re enabling and endorsing a hell of a lot of very destructive crazy, just like this. Are you proud of your Republican party?

Democrats ride Romney’s Planned Parenthood remark — As well they should. Romney was being honest about the destructive GOP agenda. Keeping that in the minds of voters is the right thing to do.

Under what party did gasoline and oil prices reach their peak? Republican, of course — Not that the historical record stops the GOP from flat out lying about this.

Don’t you know that it’s different for hippies — Or why conservatives are protected from the consequences of their actions. Dixie Chicks vs Rush Limbaugh, anyone?

?otd: Was it great when it all began?

3/15/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.5 hours (WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.0 (fitful)
Weight: 236.6
Currently reading: Blood of Orange by Lizzy Shannon; Requiem by Ken Scholes

Tags: cars, China, climate, Cool, family, gender, Links, nature, Personal, Photos, Politics, Science, sex, stories, Sunspin, Videos

Posted: 5:19 am Thu March 15 2012 | Comments(2) |

[religion] Who’s persecuting whom?

Yesterday in the course of an only tangentially related discussion on a mailing list I participate in, one of the other writers (who is a friend of mine) made an offhand comment that of course Christians were under attack right now, and that it had become socially acceptable to attack religion. They said this as if were a patently obvious truth, a self-evident problem in our culture.

Um… no.

All my adult life, I’ve been hearing variations on the theme of “the modern persecution of the Christians.” (That exact phrase cropped up on AM talk radio in Austin, Texas back in the mid 1980s.) Anyone who actually believes this is displaying both a staggering ignorance of early Christian history and a staggering ignorance of current American cultural dynamics. I suppose it’s a very comforting, self-valorizing narrative for some people, but that doesn’t make it true.

Christianity is still overwhelmingly privileged in this country. Despite explicit Constitutional declarations to the contrary, our government is overwhelmingly Christian. 89.3% of the members of Congress are Christian. (8.4% are Jewish, the rest are other or undeclared, with only one openly declared atheist.) Although I can’t readily find similar statistics for Federal judges, I strongly suspect they’re quite similar. Likewise most state and local governments. We celebrate major Christian holidays as secular holidays — when was the last time you got Hannukah or Ramadan off at work? We see a constant privileging of Christian ideals in education, in law making, in local, state and federal government. (If you want to talk about being under attack, atheists, by contrast, often poll as the most despised group in this country.)

So far as I can tell, what some Christians interpret as attacks on religion are a combination of two things.

One is the constant drumbeat from conservative politicians and media alleging such attacks. Fox’s “War on Christmas” is an example of this effect. Those declarations are almost always severely divorced from reality, but in conformance with the principles of the Big Lie, they are repeated so often and so loudly that many people come to believe their truth. (Especially people who have a significant psychological investment in seeing themselves as persecuted heroes.)

The other is the gradual lessening of the absolute grip of Christian privilege on our society. Christianity is merely overwhelming these days, as opposed to utterly dominant. Moves to restrict school prayer and government display of nativity scenes may feel like attacks to Christians, but what they are in fact is some daylight for people of other faiths and no faith at all.

Confidential to Christians in America, and especially Christianists: Not getting things your way all the time doesn’t count as persecution. It’s a rebalancing that acknowledges other strands of the culture.

Speaking from the outside of a Christian framework, that Christians see themselves as under attack is laughable. In many major debates in our culture, self-identified and high profile Christians are the aggressors, for the most part without any worthwhile moral basis. Everything from reproductive rights to teaching good science in the schools to marriage equality finds large groups of vocal Christians and their prominent political and spiritual leadership arguing vociferously for regressive repression and standing firmly on the wrong side of history. Just as many Christians stood on the wrong side of history with Bible-based beliefs on slavery and Civil Rights movement, a historical irony that seems utterly lost on Christianists arguing today against everything from gay rights to access to contraception under the rubric of “religious freedom”.

My friend’s unconscious assumption that their faith is under siege is very telling about how deeply that meme of persecution has sunk into the minds of the very same people who are daily working to limit the rights and freedoms of so many of my fellow citizens, and stunt the education of all our children. To my Christian friends: if you want to be taken seriously by people outside your own faith narrative, open your eyes and look at what people are doing in the name of you and your God.

(And no, I did not engage this question at all on the mailing list. It was off topic, and it would have been deeply rude of me. I address it here with anonymity out of respect for the source, and because I think the question is important.)

Tags: Culture, gay, Religion, sex

Posted: 5:52 am Wed March 14 2012 | Comments(4) |

[links] Link salad has a pickup truck and the devil’s eyes

A beautiful, brainy illustration

All red meat is bad for you, new study says — A long-term study finds that eating any amount and any type increases the risk of premature death.

Before the Pacific: finding the lost islands of a Pangea-era ocean

Angry Birds in Space — And the physics thereof.

Long space missions ‘may damage eyesight’ — This makes me want to write a short story called “All the Blind Old Astronauts”.

US manned spaceflight infographic

Artifacts Show Sophistication of Ancient Nomads

When Cultural Identity Is Denied — The dangers of classification by outsiders. (Via Scrivener’s Error.)

The Reproduction of Privilege — Education and the class system.

It’s un-American to silence Limbaugh — Free speech means tolerating views that you despise. Otherwise, one day, it will be your views that someone doesn’t like. If you don’t stand up for Limbaugh’s liberty today, someone may come for yours tomorrow. Discredit him, but don’t silence him.

Did ‘Game Change’ change anyone’s mind about Sarah Palin?

Palin: The First Black President Wants to Revert to Pre-Civil War Society — In her view, the very act of acknowledging or talking about race’s role in U.S. history makes one a racist. This is bizarre, even in terms of what laughingly passes for conservative ‘thought’.

Poll: GOP Voters In Deep South Think Obama Is Muslim, Unsure On Interracial Marriage — Asked whether Obama is Christian or Muslim, some 45 percent of Alabama Republican respondents picked Muslim; 14 percent correctly identified him as Christian. Another 41 percent said they were unsure. In Mississippi, a majority of Republicans, 52 percent, identified Obama as Muslim; 12 percent said he was Christian and 36 percent were undecided. This is what happens when conservatives control the media. Their lies are perceived as truth.

The Many Misleading Claims In Mitt’s Monday Medicare Memo — A GOP candidate lying about Medicare? Unpossible! Thelma, bring me my nitro.

Doonesbury strip on Texas abortion law dropped by some US newspapers — [Governor Rick Perry's spokeswoman] Catherine Frazier, asked about the Doonesbury strip, said: “The decision to end a life is not funny. There is nothing comic about this tasteless interpretation of legislation we have passed in Texas to ensure that women have all the facts when making a life-ending decision.” No, you’ve passed legislation ensuring that women have to conform to your particular narrow religious beliefs about their sexual lives and reproductive choices.

Will Deep South primaries deep six a candidate? — Oh, come on. Mitt’s going to win this in the end. Slow, messy and damaging, but barring some truly bizarre developments, I don’t see how he cannot.

?otd: Does time mean nothing? Will it ever again?

3/13/2012
Writing time yesterday: 3.5 hours (1.5 hours on nonfiction first draft unrelated to Extremes; 2.0 hours of WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.75 (solid)
Weight: 236.8
Currently reading: Blood of Orange by Lizzy Shannon

Tags: Art, Cool, Culture, education, gender, healthcare, Links, media, Movies, Personal, Politics, race, Religion, Science, sex, Tech

Posted: 5:35 am Tue March 13 2012 | Comments(1) |