Beware of people bearing gifts, if they are laptops. Why? How about software that might steal data?
Do we live in a meritocracy? Sort of...
For example: students with low test scores from high-income families are slightly more likely to finish college than students with high test scores from low-income families.
Science
Hubble Deep Field…via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:
So, will this video cause an concern on the Texas School board, as Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub suggests?
Probably not:
I know, you can’t use reason to talk someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to arrive at, anyway. But this result at least tells us the depth of the problem.
When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who think that way, and the really mind-boggling part of this is that they consider this attitude to be a virtue.
That is why so many very religious people are conservative: conservatives tend to see the adherence to an ideology as a good thing in and of itself; liberals tend to be a bit more outcome based.
Of course, some conservatives love to play the oppressed victim, even when this oppression is imaginary.
Health Care
Conservatives at a town hall: person said that he doesn’t want to “give up his social security” for “socialism”.
If you think that liberals are all with President Obama: think again:
It is the same with health industry reform. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone argues persuasively that Obama was, from the beginning, in the tank with the health insurance/drug/physician/hospital industries and was never serious about making the kinds of far-ranging changes that would improve health care, if those measures went against the interests of those industries. Jonathan Cohn already had pointed out that Obama cut a deal with the drug industry not to seek lower prices. But he did want to create an image of himself as a serious reformer and use fixing the health care system, which is obviously broken, as a vote getter. So he played his Kabuki role.
Obama started out on the campaign trail talking about the virtues of the single-payer system and then falsely asserting, without any argument, that because the employer-based system was already in place, single payer cannot be implemented now in the US, despite evidence to the contrary. This enables him to rule out, right at the beginning, single payer systems as one among the mix of options to be discussed in his health care reform panels.
Then later he says that what is most important to him is not getting good health care reform passed but that it must be bipartisan. Why on earth should bipartisan acceptance be more important than good policy? [....]
Then Obama starts signaling that he is willing to abandon even the limited public option. All this is to lead up to the final scene of the Kabuki theater in which he finally agrees to a system that the health industry would love, such as mandating that everyone buy insurance from the private, profit-seeking health insurance industry with the government paying the premiums of those who can’t afford it, while the insurance companies are given the freedom to continue the treatment-denying policies that is at the heart of their business model.
Harsh, but I don’t agree with it. We’ll see who is right.
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