The Guardian spoke to some of the women, all volunteers, to find out why they decided to come out in support of a conservative whom the mainstream Republican party and many women in the US consider a pariah …
Asked what she thought about the science behind Akin’s comments over a rape victim shutting down a potential pregnancy, [Missouri Baptist student Kelly Burrell said: “I’m not a scientist, but there are a lot of contradictions. There was a time in the world when scientist thought the world was flat. I don’t buy into science.”
Coincidentally, Todd Akin is on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
Missouri Women Standing with Todd Akin
“Akin, who enjoys gospel music, brought his guitar and played,” reads the Guardian piece.
Every week YouTube/Google editors find some dogshit to highlight, always by celebrity musicians or someone who really doesn’t need any more fame or publicity.
Today, it’s “Pyschedelic Music!”
From YouTube:
The ’60s might be long gone, but a new crop of musicians is embracing the era’s experimental, anything-goes aesthetic. Whether it’s through mind-expanding visuals or adventurous songs, psychedelic music is alive and well. Even Neil Young’s doing it!
Neil Young, a ‘new crop-type of musician,’ whose ‘new’ shtick is low-res videos cobbled together from other old pieces of film downloaded from YouTube. Only when you and I do it, no bonus points.
People who don’t know anything about science, including journalists, often labor under the assumption that the US military is whiz-bang at it.
Not so. Most of the great achievements in American science do not, and did not, come from the US military. The Manhattan Project, for example, while conducted by the military in World War II, was the product of the finest minds in high-energy physics, chemistry and other related fields.
Today, a doofus editor at an NBC News blog called “Futuretech,” allowed someone to go forward with a story on how the US Navy wants to make jet fuel from sea water.
It takes one small torpedo to send this story to the bottom.
The only way to make fuel from water is by electrolysis, which yields burnable hydrogen gas. And the reason our fuel problems are not over is because splitting it is not trivial, energy wise.
Which is a very good thing for the planet since good ol’ H20 is the solvent in which the chemistry of all life on Earth occurs. (I kinda like that sentence.)
But leave it to stupid journalists to mess this up with incomprehension for an equally benighted audience.
The U.S. Navy may need to look no further than the water around its ships to produce jet fuel, according to a program underway at its research laboratory …
The technology involves extracting carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from seawater and then using catalysts to convert them into a class of jet fuel called J-5 that meets Navy safety specifications.
The journalist, John Roach, never really gets around to explaining the bit about cracking water, instead relying on some double-talk from the Navy boffins pushing their quack schemes:
This can all be done for between $3 to $6 per gallon, according to a feasibility study published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
“This cost includes capital costs, operation and maintenance, and electrical generation cost for synthesizing the fuel,??? Heather Willauer, the study’s lead author at the Naval Research Laboratory, told NBC News in an email …
The team elaborates in the paper that the “though the energy balance is unfavorable, electricity cannot and never will be able to fuel jet turbines.???
The electricity to produce the fuel would come from either ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology or onboard nuclear power technologies.
Took a giant step toward solving the world’s energy problems in one e-mail, a press release, some vague jargon (OTEC) and an article in an obscure journal, did ya?
There might be an Ig Nobel Prize in it.
From Barry Commoner’s obit at the Times, today:
Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.
Basic science helps one understand why the Navy’s fuel from seawater project is a waste of time. And is intelligence-insulting.
In a “Last Word??? interview with The New York Times in 2006, videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Dr. Barry Commoner elaborated on his holistic views and lamented the inability of society to connect the dots among its multitude of challenges, “an unfortunate feature of political development in this country.???
— the New York Times
The Times obit provides a 12 minute interview, conducted by Pulitzer-winner Tim Weiner, with Commoner. It traces his career as a scientist and environmentalist.
As the former, Commoner discusses his major role in the cessation of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing during the Kennedy administration, achieved through assaying the levels of strontium 90, an element in radioactive fallout, in children’s teeth. He, along with others, had determined early that the generation of radio-isotopes during atmospheric testing posed a distinct and measurable threat to everyone. And then he went forward with a scientific plan to measure and prove it, by tracking strontium-90, which is taken up like calcium in bones and teeth.
Commoner discusses global warming as a dire threat as well as things that have been lasting environmental achievements in this country. Commoner cites the removal of lead from gasoline in 1970, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency the same year to enforce the Clean Air Act which had been made more effective through amendments, as something which has made life demonstrably better.
Reality tv for the Psychopath Vote. Or to paraphrase Paul Fussell, catering to the audience of shallow pocket that gets erections dreaming about shooting or shoving a bayonet into someone foreign or liberal, preferably smaller and not white.
The more indecent and infamous Nugent gets, the more atrocious television he makes. Like a perpetual motion machine of BAD — that which is puerile, odious or both, publicized as if it is the opposite, a defiantly burning example of freedom and liberty.
A show devoted to showing how tricked up semi-automatic long range assault rifles and machine guns to shoot antelope, pop mannequin heads and blow up vehicles. In case you’re attacked by zombies or, uh, real people. What a pitch that must have been.
As said previously, I grew up in a community of hunters. But there came a point where excess became celebrated simply because it was excessive. And now all the straining white flab in too-small camouflage clothes, all the paramilitary gear, the creepy obsession with private ownership of heavy weapons by men who rant about tyrannical government, just shows the rest of the world how psychotic much of this country has turned.
60 Minutes did Afghanistan last night. Fifteen minutes of total cock-up from the war that will never end until we have a President who will do it. And Barack Obama is probably not that guy.
General John Allen: “I am completely devoted to these magnificent troops …”
60 Minutes showed we’ve managed to make Afghanistan into a shit magnet for the remains of al Qaeda. Like insignificant iron filings, they’re all drawn to the lodestone of American soldiers.
Did Pete Seeger’s old song achieve any result during the Vietnam War?
He reflects on the linked page: “No one can prove a damned thing. It took tens of millions of people speaking out, before the Vietnam War was over. A defeat for the Pentagon, but a victory for the American people.”
As I’ve written before, for at least the past 50 years the Democratic Party has intentionally engineered a class of political “victims??? who have been bamboozled into being dependent on the federal government for their subsistence, including food, housing and now health care. They get this without paying any federal income taxes, and that’s wrong. Something for nothing is always a scam. This is how you buy votes, plain and simple.
“No able-bodied American should get anything for free while doing nothing to earn it,” he concludes.
Work crews are the answer, presumably: “Put a rake, shovel, paint brush or broom in their hands …That will instill some pride back in their lives…”
In the face of such irresistible logic it would seem pointless to say: “But almost all of them are already working.”
If they could personally touch off a war with Iran before the election, they would.
From the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, and the anti-shariah law/get Huma Abedin crew, this — timed for Netanyahu’s “red line” speech at the UN.
It’s useful to see how the Cult is doing its best to start another war in the Middle East.
Times are hard for the Cult of EMP Crazy. It’s old Congressional main man, Republican Roscoe Bartlett, may lose his House re-election bid in November.
Bartlett, whose career cause has been one warning about electromagnetic pulse doom after another and getting ignored or having his legislation on it wiped off bills by other more powerful pols in his own party, stepped in it earlier this month at a town meeting in his district.
“I’m for student loans. I want kids to have an education,??? Bartlett responded. But he explained that he had read through the Constitution carefully and could find no evidence “that the federal government should be involved in education.??? Then Bartlett expanded on that point (at the 3:35 mark in the clip above, which was passed along by a Democrat).
“Not that it’s not a good idea to give students loans; it certainly is a good idea to give them loans,??? Bartlett said. “But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope.???
Loosely comparing the granting of student loans to American German citizens, Hitler and the terror that led to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany probably lost him a few votes. If anyone was paying attention.
Someone should probably purchase Bartlett an old used copy of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It is a thick book but Roscoe Bartlett will have time to read it when he continues prepping for the coming collapse after the election. The book makes it hard to square the alleged problem of more school loans with, say, the burning of the Reichstag, the murder and imprisonment of thousands of the Nazi Party’s enemies, and the bestial reduction of German Jews to non-citizen “objects” while the Fuhrer was taking dictatorial power in the final days of Weimar Germany.
The Washington Post may have unintentionally written Bartlett’s political obituary, in August, here.
The article was a laundry list of right-wing survivalist/electromagnetic pulse doom crazy: “The idea that the end of the world is near, and that people will be judged, is a key tenet of [Roscoe Bartlett’s] Adventist beliefs.”
Mr. Herbert Lom had the title role in a not very successful remake of “The Phantom of the Opera??? (1962); he was Van Helsing in “Count Dracula??? (1970), one of many movies starring Christopher Lee as the notorious vampire; and he played a bloodthirsty witch hunter in 18th-century Austria in the ultra-gory German-made “Mark of the Devil??? (1970), which developed a cult following for its explicit torture scenes; audiences were handed “stomach distress bags??? at cinemas around the world. — the New York Times
While I remember the vomit bags at the Pine Grove matinee, I don’t recall much about the movie. However, Chief Inspector Dreyfus was unforgettable. Would Peter Sellers have been quite as funny without him in the alternating scenes?
They all cluster around computer science, engineering and hard science degrees.
Lehigh, my alma mater, is number six in the list.
As far as LU went, the benefits of the school reputation, when it came to immediate hiring, went exclusively to the civil, mech and chemical engineers. Those were the only students corporate America deigned to send recruiting scouts to the school for.
During this time the student body and athletes were “the Engineers.”
Today, the school is the home of the much less inspiring “Mountain Hawks,” changed because it now has more non-engineers enrolled than the real thing.
Also in the list, the obvious — CalTech, here in Pasadena, MIT, the Ivy League schools … (Harvard’s there, where you must go and learn to be a lawyer to have any chance of being among America’s nobility, or at least one of its immediate shoeshiners.)
Surprisingly, the service academies at Annapolis and West Point are included, again for their undergraduate engineering degrees. (The inclusion of Stevens Tech in Hoboken, and a couple other old but small relative unknowns made me laugh, names that show the editors were pooching their list to add a few surprises.)
So if the only measuring stick is bucks on hiring and at mid-career, perhaps all the schools are a good bet, if you’ve the right degree and can survive the four years with a reasonable record.
Otherwise, I’m jaundiced. Monetarily, Lehigh has never been of even the slightest value. And of the majority of the peers I recall in my classes, not so much, initially, for them, either.
However, I was able to make a difference at the school. Unlike the vast majority of engineers who there at the same time.
Missouri Women Standing with Todd Akin