• There is (still) something very wrong with our healthcare system. Via Yglesias Man Dies Of Toothache | ThinkProgress.
  

  “…Now, clearly, this man made some sub-optimal choices here he’s not purely a victim of lack of health insurance. At the same time you have right before you a no-longer-living, no-longer-breathing example of the “push the patient to the edge of financial desperation” theory of health care cost controls. It turns out that the quality of a frightened, pain-wracked young man asked to make technical medical decisions under severe financial constraints is not very high. The social cost of 24 year-old fathers dying of eminently treatable tooth infections, by contrast, is gigantic.”

• The Austerity Economy – NYTimes.com
• Atheists and Sex Offenders – YouTube
  
• Fla. Pastor Draws Fire for Considering ‘National Registry’ for Atheists, Christian News
• Real Sceptic » Australia: The Next Great Hope For Our Planets Climate
• The Important Whoops, or Climategategate | The Moderate Voice A good overview of how the Spencer-Braswell paper creates a controversy for climate change deniers.
• Spencer Braswell: This is not New. This is the Way it’s Done. « Climate Denial Crock of the Week Peter Sinclair reminds us that Chris Mooney was prescient when he describes the climate change denial M.O. back in 2004 in CSI | Déjà vu All Over Again.
• CloudGate: Denialism Gets Dirty, Reputations Are At Stake : Greg Laden’s Blog
• Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing agrees that Spencer and Braswell (2011) should not have been published; resigns : Deltoid
• Holy editor resignation, Batman! : Stoat
• Oops : Class M
• Journal editor resigns over ‘fundamentally flawed’ paper by Roy Spencer
• Little Green Footballs – Scientific Journal Editor Resigns Over Climate Change Deniers Paper.
• Haydn Washington interviewed : Deltoid
  
• Perry’s campaign against the New Deal – The Washington Post
• Michael Ruse: Denying Evolution and Denying Global Warming: Is There a Biblical Link?
• Robert Shiller on the Economy | The Big Picture
  
• Global Warming: Separating the noise from the signal : Greg Laden’s Blog.
• Robert Shiller on U.S. Housing, Economy, Stimulus – Video – Bloomberg
  
• The Sickness Beneath the Slump – Economic View – NYTimes.com by Robert Shiller
  

  THE origins of the current economic crisis can be traced to a particular kind of social epidemic: a speculative bubble that generated pervasive optimism and complacency. That epidemic has run its course. But we are now living with the malaise it caused….

• Weekend Business Podcast: Job Creation, Cantor Fitzgerald and Keynes – NYTimes.com
• Disproofs of God #1: Creationism | Alethian Worldview An arguement that a biblically based God is basically imncompatible with “a successfully engineered evolutionary system.”
• Myth-Making: People Doubt Global Climate Change or Evolution Because Doubters Say it So Often – ABC News Explores the Questions: Why are people so eager to embrace myths, even if there is not a shred of evidence to support them? Why are so many so eager to believe the unbelievable?

Still playing catch up with work and my reading after Irene.

• A great divide holds back the relevance of economists | The Great Debate. by Mark Thoma
• and this article about Mark Thoma: The Importance of Mark Thoma « The Baseline Scenario
• Ron Paul and evolution, the sequal | The Zingularity As interesting as this post about Ron Paul is I thought Stephen Andrew’s description of Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul fits with my feeling about him too:
  

  “…his son Rand Paul, a full on ignorant anti-government sociopath who seems hell bent on stealing the Social Security and Medicare I’ve paid into for almost 40 years and feeding it to Paris Hilton as tax cuts, and who claims to believe we can really run the world’s greatest super-power on a loosely confederated state government system that doesn’t work anywhere else in the world and didn’t work here for more than a few decades.”

• Case closed: “Climategate” was manufactured | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine Phil Plait delivers a thorough takedown of the climate change deniers who have hyped the wholly manufactured Climategate controversy. And he conlcludes with:
  

  “…Here are the facts: the Earth is warming up. The rate of warming has increased in the past century or so. This corresponds to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when we started dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet (hence the name) — if they didn’t we’d have an average temperature below the freezing point of water. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which is dumped into the atmosphere by humans to the tune of 30 billion tons per year, 100 times the amount from volcanoes. And finally, approximately 97% of climatologists who actually study climate agree that global warming is real, and caused by humans.

  Those are simply the facts. It’s not hard to connect them, as long as you stick to reality and don’t let ideology sway you.

  Climate Change, it is what it is. Thanks Phil.

• Leo Behe On His Father | Camels With Hammers
• Month Passes With No U.S. Soldier Killed in Iraq – NYTimes.com
• Never-Wrong Pundit Picks Obama to Win in 2012 – Washington Whispers (usnews.com) I wonder but I think I agree with the reasoning
• What Steve Jobs did really well | Pharyngula
• It’s Texas shootout! | The Zingularity
  

  “…Someone help me understand what goes through the mind of a likely Republican voter with any critical thinking skills whatsoever? We tried conservative foreign policy in Iraq; it was a spectacular bloody failure costing a trillion dollars, thousands of lives and limbs, and still counting (And Obama’s efforts have been far more effective and literally magnitudes of order less expensive in every way measurable). We’ve tried conservative economic policy, slashing taxes and deregulating virtually every type of business. The end result of that was record deficits and the worst economic cluster-fuck since the days of Hoover.

  What mental process is it that leads from those undisputed empirical facts of recent history above to the ineffable conclusion that the best way forward is to elect people promising to those very same things again and again?”

• Minimum Wage Laws and the Labor Market: What Have We Learned Since Card and Krueger’s Book Myth and Measurement? » New Deal 2.0
• Fox Business Host Accuses Bill Nye of ‘Confusing Viewers’ with Science | Video Cafe
• No, a new study does not show cosmic-rays are connected to global warming | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine“The way some of the media report on climate change can be simply stunning. For example, an opinion piece in The Financial Post has the headline “New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans”.There’s only one problem: that’s completely wrong. In reality the study shows nothing of the sort. The evidence, as far as the limitations of the experiment go (that’s important, see below), do not show any effect of cosmic rays on global warming, and say nothing at all about the effect humans are having on the environment. (read the full article)
• CapitalClimate: U.S. Heat Records Continue Crushing Cold: Incredible 22 to 1 Ratio in August
• Rick Perry and religion: Does the Texas governor believe his idiotic God talk, or is he just pandering for votes? – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine
• Texas Miracle: Can other states replicate Texas’ economic success? – By Annie Lowrey – Slate Magazine
• Rick Perry: Not a Libertarian | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
• Fox News Attacks Google As Anti-Church? – YouTube
  
  Does “Fox and Friends” owe Google a correction for making 3 factual errors in under a minute to support the false claim that Google’s non-profit restrictions exclusively target religions and churches?
• 9 Vital Points About The Public Relevance of Political Candidates’ Religious Beliefs | Camels With Hammers
• And Klem did you see this post Jason Thibeault wrote for specifically for you? Kirkby on cosmic rays and climate change | Lousy Canuck.

Irene forced me back into reading the old fashioned books these past couple of days (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming ). But electrical power, internet and phone service just came back a couple of hours ago so I’m catching up again. Whewwww! So okay what am I reading tonight:

• Politics Overtaking Science in Global Warming Debate | USA | English.
• A denial piece from Heartland Institute propaganda writer James Taylor Yes, There’s A Link Between Hurricane Irene And Global Warming – Forbes
• RealClimate: Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
• Finding The Humility Alcoholics Anonymous Requires, But Without A “Higher Power” | Camels With Hammers I got sober in AA some 26 years ago and ironically while I was in the program I woke up and began my journey to atheism.
• Taking hostages in a hurricane? A hat tip my friend Jeff Nash for bringing me in on this one. Please click on the link and sign the petition to Tell Eric Cantor to Stop Blocking Disaster Relief Funds.
• This one is really great,…Bang Goes the Theory: Evolution Made Simple – YouTube
  
  Thanks to my friend Bob Walker for this one.
• Why the Evolution Question Matters | Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• Talking about the weather | Pharyngula PZ gives us a clue to a hilarious Fox News segment What Do Atheists Do in Crisis? – Fox Business Video – FoxBusiness.com. It’s especially entertaining to watch the woman Fox anchor really lose it.
• This blog article The Gospel of Rick Perry | The Zingularity pointed me to this Miami-Herald article:
• Texas Gov. Perry became a millionaire while serving in office – Political Currents – MiamiHerald.com
• Ham is rich in irony | Pharyngula
• Loaded dice and loaded guns | The Zingularity
• The Origianal Autographs | Unreasonable Faith Hilarious, a autographed copy of the bible!
• Someone has taken the Coulter Challenge! | Pharyngula PZ at his best!
  

  “…Egnor is no exception. He can’t possibly make a simple point lucidly, but has to throw out a lot of frenzied chum to distract and give him an escape hatch: so he babbles about evolution being a religion, atheists, obnoxious Darwinists, Scientology, falsifiability, yadda yadda yadda. It’s badly written, sloppy thinking, and I give him a D on form alone. Any other people taking the challenge, learn from this: try to write something coherent and on point. I’m asking for a scalpel, and when you yank out the kitchen silverware drawer and turn it upside down making a noisy clatter, you aren’tanswering the request.

  So I picked through the puke and found one chunk from Egnor that seems relevant to Coulter’s claim, so I’ll address that…” (read the whole post to see PZ shred the arguement)

• Prose and Cons: How We Believe | The Digital Cuttlefish