This describes how I’ve been feeling of late, I dare say.
![Randall Munroe [CC BY-NC 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/)], via xkcd](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/superlative.png "Randall Munroe [CC BY-NC 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/)], via xkcd")
Photo credit: Randall Munroe [CC BY-NC 2.5], via xkcd.
Ennui
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What I’m Reading, June 27, 2014
The Tea Party’s Embarrassing Irony: Its Ideal Nation Rejects Basic American Beliefs, Elias Isquith, Salon, via AlterNet, June 23, 2014
What I’d argue…is that the Tea Party’s philosophy of government (again, as understood by [conservative pundit Reihan] Salam) has embedded within it an aversion to basic democratic principles that goes far beyond a typical contempt for Washington, politicians and pundits. When Salam writes that Teatopia is founded on a commitment to a “robust federalism” intended to let “different states … offer different visions of the good life” and allow citizens to “vote with their feet” by moving to whichever state best reflects their values, he’s not describing a common aversion to corruption or a distaste for political theater. He’s describing a childish and essentially anti-political belief that a return to an Articles of Confederation-style U.S. order — in which each state is more of a sovereign unto itself than a member of a larger American whole — will produce 50 mini-nations where everyone basically agrees.
Have Conservatives Abandoned Rationality, Skepticism and Truth? Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet, June 19, 2014 Continue reading
DNA Testing Says What Now?
A friend posted an article to Facebook with a puzzling title: “Telling parents they’re not a child’s biological mother or father can do more harm than good, expert warns.” If the article were talking about revealing DNA test results to a child, that makes much more sense, one might think, than if they are talking about revealing the results to the parents. That seems to be where this is going, though.
Advances to genetic testing have led to medical experts questioning what they should, and shouldn’t tell parents.
And the ethical dilemma for medical professionals is likely to become more common as genetic testing more more widespread.
I mean, it’s obvious how a guy might not know he is a child’s father, but wouldn’t you think anyone with female reproductive organs would know?
As it turns out, it is entirely possible for someone to believe they are the biological mother of a child who is not actually theirs. One possible way is simple human error, which it turns out is not just a hackneyed comedy premise:
Two mothers in South Africa have discovered they are raising each other’s daughters after they were mistakenly switched at birth in a hospital four years ago.
But while one of the women wants to correct the error and reclaim her biological child, the other is refusing to give back the girl she has raised as her own, posing a huge legal dilemma.
The children in question are now four years old, so there certainly is an argument in favor of leaving well enough alone. The children only know the people who have raised them, after all.
A considerably stranger case involves a woman who gave birth to two children who, despite being conceived and gestated in, then delivered from, her uterus, are not her biological children because of some very odd biology. She was charged with welfare fraud after the DNA tests showed that someone else was the mother, but that’s not the strange part:
Further DNA analysis showed that Fairchild was more like an aunt to her children than a mother, but Fairchild didn’t have a sister. Then, the discovery of a similar case in Boston brought to light another possibility.
Thanks to a rare genetic condition, it turned out that Fairchild was a chimera — essentially a twin in her own body.
You might be a chimera, too. Biology is complicated.
Climate Change Denial as Fraud
The Booman Tribune takes on Politico‘s assertions regarding “a new mocking tone that the president is adopting on the stump to ridicule science-denying Republicans.” What caught my eye, though, is the discussion of how climate-change deniers benefit, at least in the very short term, from denial:
Ultimately, what the Republicans are doing amounts to fraud. In the example of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, denying the predicted rate of sea level rise is a way to artificially boost your property values, which is a crime against the people who will unwittingly pay too much for a house that will be under water by the end of this century.
I think we can all understand the impulse to protect the value of your property in any way you can think of, but it’s still fraud. And, since the president can’t simply prosecute every example of fraudulent political speech, his only option is to make fun of it.
Property owners in the Outer Banks should be clamoring to talk to the president about what they can do to save their property so that their grandchildren might be able to enjoy it, but they’re more interested in preventing the state of North Carolina from officially recognizing the threat. That’s short-sighted and wrong. And that’s where the whole GOP is headed on this issue.
They have earned their mockery.
Some day, maybe soon, maybe less soon, at least some of those same landowners (and/or their heirs and successors) will come asking, possibly hat-in-hand, for help offsetting the loss of their by-then-literally-underwater properties. We will all bear some responsibility for that, but not the vast majority of it. The bulk of the responsibility will remain on the people who, today, are legitimate objects of mockery for their reality-denying ways.
This isn’t mockery done for any sort of fun, mind you, because the cost is too high. It’s the sort of mockery that is the only available response to those who are being foolish.
This Week in WTF, June 27, 2014
– Once again, the headline says it all: Scientist Ejected From Classical Music Concert For Trying To Crowd Surf.
See also: Punk As Fuck Scientist Ejected From Concert For Crowdsurfing to Handel.
– Same with this one: Man pleads guilty to sexually harassing women with slices of Swiss cheese.
– The world didn’t even realize how badly it needed this, until it had it: I’m referring, of course, to the bouncy castle made entirely out of boobs (h/t Tura). (I’ll mention—although it should be obvious—that the following video is somewhat NSFW.)
– Good to know: How to catch an emu, or at least get its attention:
What I’m Reading, June 26, 2014
How Did This Ancient Civilization Avoid War for 2,000 Years? Annalee Newitz, io9, June 24, 2014
Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults. Obviously people had conflicts, sometimes with deadly results — graves reveal ample skull injuries caused by blows to the head. But there is no evidence that any Harappan city was ever burned, besieged by an army, or taken over by force from within. Sifting through the archaeological layers of these cities, scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction. There are no enormous caches of weapons, and not even any art representing warfare.
How WW I, British Greed, and Oil Distorted Modern Iran, Farhad Malekafzali Informed Comment, June 24, 2014 Continue reading
All the Sloths!
There are six species of sloth alive today. I decided to blog about all of them.
I find all that classification stuff interesting, but if you disagree, you may skip this paragraph. Sloths are mammals (duh) in the superorder Xenarthra, which also includes armadillos and anteaters, and which looks really cool because it starts with an “X.” They’re in the order Pilosa, which they share with the anteaters. The suborder Folivora contains two families of sloths, with six total species: two-toed sloths (2 species in Megalonychidae) and three-toed sloths (4 species in Bradypodidae).
The sorts of sloths that exist today tend towards the small and deceptively cuddly-looking (take a gander at those claws again), but they have some extinct relatives that were more on the megafauna side of things. (See families Megatheriidae, Nothrotheriidae, and Mylodontidae.)
Activist Judge Needed for One Lawsuit Only
We could talk about how just plain dumb it is for John Boehner to plan to sue President Obama for, uh…….um, well, for whatever it is that we know he did.
I prefer this take on it, though:
To sue the president, Republicans are tying themselves in ideological knots. After howling about excessive lawsuits, they are embracing long-shot litigation. After lamenting activist judges, they are now insisting that judges be more activist and shed their long-standing reluctance to adjudicate disputes between the elected branches.
Even some conservative scholars argue that lawmakers probably don’t have a legal standing for such a suit. If Republicans persuade the courts to grant them standing, the case could take years to work its way through the system, at which point Obama will be gone.
At minimum, this whole idea lends credence to the premise that government screws up everything it touches—at least when Republicans are left in charge. Still, you have to admire the moxie of someone who’d threaten a likely-frivolous lawsuit against a political opponent that he can’t directly challenge because of ne’er-do-wells in his own party, just to prove a point. I’m just not sure what that point even might be.
The risk he runs, of course, is winning, but then finding a future president of his own party constrained by precedent that seemed patriotic to him when Obama was in office, but are sure to be a hindrance to abstract nouns like “leadership” and “resoluteness” under a Republican president. (That’s my fancy way of saying that Boehner seemed fine with quite a bit of what Obama is allegedly doing right up until it was Obama allegedly doing it. That may just be politics, but keep it the hell out of our courts.)
Dog Abuse, Neglect in Arizona
You’ve probably heard about Green Acre Kennel, the dog-boarding facility in Gilbert, Arizona where at least twenty (the count seems to vary from one news source to another) dead dogs were discovered last weekend. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (yes, that Sheriff Joe) initially called it an “accident,” but has now announced that he will conduct a “thorough investigation.” Here’s a quick guide to the legal issues involved.
Arizona, along with every other state in the U.S., has felony provisions for animal cruelty. Arizona’s law went into effect in 1999, according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund. A report on the case at The Daily Beast looks at the civil liability angle. In many states, such as Texas, civil liability for causing injury or death to an animal—meaning a pet in this sort of case—is limited to the animal’s fair market value. It does not include other compensatory damages, nor does it includes any sort of noneconomic damages for what is, for many people, the loss of a family member. The Daily Beast‘s article discusses some of the civil claims that may arise under one Arizona lawyer’s take on that state’s laws: Continue reading
What I’m Reading, June 25, 2014
Everything Is Broken, Quinn Norton, Medium, May 20, 2014
It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.
Computers, and computing, are broken.
Chicken Littles of the Right, Gavin Mueller, Jacobin, May 21, 2014 (h/t Erik Loomis)
So that trickle of piss running down James Piereson’s leg and pooling in his wingtip is another iteration of billionaire victimology, just another boring maneuver from the Reagan playbook that kids these days are totally over. Yes, after the massive heist of the financial crisis of 2008, exactly one Wall Street executive, Kareem Serageldin, is heading to jail, while thousands of victims head to homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Serageldin’s Christ-like gesture: to do 30 months for the sins of the financial elite.
Not a bad deal — and yet how they complain. They whine about being called “banksters” — the ignominy of such disrespect is enough to make the Chateau Petrús turn bitter in one’s mouth. On the other coast, tech-overlords are so intimidated by the specter of tax-raising masses that they’ll sink millions into childish fantasies of Galt Islands, while openly disdaining democracy.