The RAPT file
RAPT stands for "Republicans Are Patriots Too". John Dean came out with a new book this week, "Conservatives Without Conscience". In it, he examines the willingness of most elected Republicans and...
View ArticleCalico Women and Larry Summers
(Today's diary is a chimera: a sociopolitical head grafted onto a genomics tail.) I don't usually get very exercised over feminist issues. I don't know why, unless it's a vague feeling that the...
View ArticleTom Coburn puts a hold on genetic justice
In the past couple of months, as a side effect of Harry Reid's contemptuous dismissal of Chris Dodd's attempted hold on the AT&T Out Of Jail Free bill, we've all learned that the king of holds is...
View ArticleHe's Karl Rove, and he approved this ad
All of us who have been watching Republican tactics over the years understand well enough what McCain's "Kindergarten" ad is for. Though it purports to be about Obama's education policy - and though it...
View ArticleOffice of Legal Counsel secretly eliminates church/state barrier
Bush has secretly invalidated another set of laws. In this installment, Junior set out to tear down Congress's church-state barrier, and the incomparable Charlie Savage is once again on the case.
View ArticleIran cures global warming! at least a little
It's going to take a lot of little victories, a lot of technological innovations both expected and unexpected, to deliver some relief to Mother Earth from the greenhouse gas onslaught. Word of one such...
View ArticleWhy expiring Monsanto Protection Act is huge
The Monsanto Protection Act, thankfully allowed to expire in December thanks to Senator Tester and associates, would turn government approval of any particular GM crop into a one-way gate, irreversible...
View ArticleWhy there was no nuclear option
There's been a fair bit of back and forth, even a little of it on dailykos, on whether Harry Reid has been hypocritical in exercising the nuclear option, when he spoke so forcefully against it when...
View ArticleMarx: More popular than Jesus?
I went down to my local Barnes and Noble this morning, intending to buy a copy of Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance, and Picketty's Capitalism in the Twenty First Century.The first was no problem,...
View ArticleBirds do it, paramecia do it
But how a paramecium does it turns out to be a long and tangled tale. It was finally untangled last month in the cover story of the 22 May Nature journal.Back before the Beatles, when I was taking...
View ArticleFerguson still has unreleased incident report
A couple of diaries have reported the release of the shockingly terse "incident report" for Michael Brown's death, from the St. Louis County police, in response to FOIA requests. The prosecuting...
View ArticleA note on useful GMOs
Two pieces turned up in the British journal Nature this week that shed a little more light on the potential value of genetic engineering in addressing the dangers cimate change is going to impose on...
View ArticleWar on Poverty: Declare Victory and Keep on Fighting
Christopher Jencks has a stellar piece in the April 2nd New York Review of Books, The War on Poverty: Was It Lost? (Probably behind a pay wall). He begins with quotations from two State of the Union...
View ArticleBees are getting dusted
The May 21 Nature carried a special section on bees (behind a paywall), and the heart of it was a detailed evaluation on the state of the science on the role of the insecticides known as...
View ArticleTrump among the spiders
I like to keep current on all the latest arthropod news. So I was intrigued to learn of an experiment run to determine the effect on a web when spiders of different personalities entertain dangerous...
View ArticleToni Morrison is not exaggerating
I've been an admirer of Ta-Nehisi Coates' writing for some time. It is consistently uncompromising, humane, clear-headed, original. (Maybe whoever is all of the first three can't help being original...
View ArticleWhy the Klown Kar empties slowly
It has been observed more than once that the absurd overcrowding of the GOP debate stage - excuse me, debate stages (by the current absurd crowd) is an unintended consequence of Citizens United. Any...
View ArticleMurphy's Law of Escalators
It’s been quite a few years since I was “good on stairs”— blithely bouncing up them while scarcely noticing they are there; or gamely mounting them without having to pause at the first step to collect...
View ArticleOne way to stop global warming cold
Well, we know how to do that, given the political will. The problem is the lack of political will, especially in the United States. And perusing in last week’s Nature their thumbnail descriptions of...
View ArticleThe protocol I will adopt on January 20
I have finally arrived at a resolution for the moral dilemma which has plagued me ever since waking up to the dreadful morning of November 9th.On the one hand, I have a deeply held conviction that,...
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