So you cannot make much headway convincing your swing-voter friend not to vote for Bush on the basis of Iraq alone? Here is the rest of the scorecard for the worst president of the postwar epoch.
Daily Archives: 13 Sep 04
Somatic medicine abuses psychiatry…
…and neglects causal research. ”Since I am a psychiatrist, I have for a long time been intrigued by the extraordinary use of psychiatric causal explanations for illnesses that not only go with predominantly somatic symptoms, but also lack any basic similarity to known mental disorders.” — Per Dalen (The Art Bin)
NASCAR, How Proud a Sound!
“Many commentators have remarked that the United States is a nation of rank buffoons. Few, however, have carefully measured our nation’s recent and steep tumble into idiocy, much less attempted a unified theory to explain it. In its sixteenth issue, ‘Nascar, How Proud a Sound,’ The Baffler reveals the shocking breadth of American ignorance, and argues that the nation’s mental and moral decline-like that of the Roman Empire-is spreading from the better classes downward. In this highly readable issue, Tom Frank gets to the root of Ann Coulter’s mental infirmity. Nick Cohen examines Britain’s outbreak of millennial lunacy. Paul Maliszewski details the delusional narcissism of ‘the creative class’ and its theorist, Richard Florida. Jamie Kalven chronicles Mayor Daley’s Neronian cruelty to the poor of Chicago…”
Winning minds, not hearts
Missile defense: “Why are countries falling in line with the Bush administration plan to field a yet-unproven missile defense system? Will the world’s complacency lead to more nuclear weapons, especially in Russia and China?” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
List of misquotations
Wikipedia’s Wikiquote project has compiled this list of what you thought were famous quotations… but aren’t.
Round One for Women’s Health
“Three federal judges across the breadth of the country have now delivered a stinging rebuke to the potentially far-reaching assault by the White House and Congress on women’s health and reproductive freedom, declaring the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 to be unconstitutional.
In the latest ruling, last week in Nebraska, Judge Richard Kopf found that the politicians who crafted the statute erred by failing to provide any exception for instances where a woman’s health is at stake – replicating a key defect that led the Supreme Court to invalidate a similar abortion ban in Nebraska in 2000. Judge Kopf, an appointee of President Bush’s father, also presided at the trial stage in that earlier case.
He devoted much of his lengthy new decision to a meticulous review of the extensive, freshly amassed evidence. He refuted Congress’s flimsy legislative ‘finding’ that the ill-defined procedure it bans ‘is never necessary to protect the health of the mother,’ and therefore no exception was needed. Judge Kopf said the evidence, to the contrary, was ‘overwhelming.’ He wrote, ‘In the absence of an exception for the health of a woman, banning the procedure constitutes a significant heath hazard to women.'” (New York Times op-ed)
Generic Names for Soft Drinks by County
This US map uses color to depict the most popular term used in every county of the US — ‘pop’, ‘coke’, ‘soda’ or something else. The gross regional differences are pretty clear but what grabs my attention are the anomalies. Why are there single counties in the middle of Nebraska, North Dakota, Colorado and Idaho, for example, where ‘soda’ predominates in the midst of ‘pop’? And what is going on in the large, circumscribed regions of Nevada, northern Minnesota and New Mexico where some other term predominates, as well as scattered counties in North Carolina and Texas? Anyone from any of those regions reading? How do you refer to soft drinks there?? (via Incoming Signals)
Hepster’s Dictionary
“Are you hep to the jive? Cab Calloway did not invent Jive (the expressions, words, and general patois used by the musicians of Harlem in the Swing Era), but he was definitely the hardest jack with the greatest jive in the joint. I mean that old Cab Calloway had a hard spiel and a kopasetic line that was a killer-diller. You would never hear him comin’ up on the wrong riff or talkin’ in dribbles or comin’ up with no off-time jive. And if he ever did melt out, he’d just blasé up and say, ‘Mash me a fin, gate, so I can cop me a fry’. Then everything would be straight, with his fry, and his fine vines, and his main queen on his arm.” (via Incoming Signals)
Coalition of the Disgusted
Kevin Murphy advises: “Aside from the Philippines, Nigeria, and Poland, the world wants John Kerry by a landslide. Undecided voters out there, you know how you can ‘Ask the Audience’ on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire when you’re stumped? Consider it like that.” (ghost in the machine)
