Posts Tagged ‘reality is a hoax’
Your Climate Change Stat of the Day
The graph above shows that the Thames Barrier has been raised 119 times since it became operational in 1982 (76 were to protect against tidal flooding and 43 were to alleviate fluvial flooding).
Closures of the barrier have increased through the decades. During its operation, just over two thirds of closures have been since 2000. It was closed four times in the 1980s, 35 times in the 1990s, and 80 times since 2000. Thanks, @studentactivism!
How Will We Break It to the Jesuits?
IHE on Rick Santorum: …The Tampa Bay Tribune’s PolitiFact news service is reporting that Santorum — since 2008 — has linked higher education to the work of Satan. In a 2008 talk at Ave Maria University, Santorum discussed the way Satan has attacked “great institutions of America.”
Where did Satan start? According to Santorum, “The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first — first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different — pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia a long time ago fell.”
Some More Tuesday Links
* I wrote a short blog post for HASTAC compiling some recent thoughts and links on “openness” in the university system, which are likely no surprise to anyone who follows this blog but which I include here for the sake of completeness regardless.
* It’s cute that Josh Marshall thinks Bachmann just making sh!t up means her run at the GOP nomination is over. Of course, what this actually means is that it’s now an open question whether Gardasil causes mental retardation in young girls.
* Elizabeth Warren announces for Senate tomorrow.
* Here comes Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project.
* The Trash|Track Project asks: Why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little about the removal chain? Via Melody.
* And via longform.org: On Gender-Identity Disorder and the DSM.
The DSM work group assigned to gender identity disorder, a panel of specialized field experts, has already bowed to some external pressures. It has made clear that it intends to change the name of the diagnosis from “disorder” to “dysphoria”—which describes a passing mood rather than a fixed state. The work group has also made public its plans to not only preserve the core GID diagnosis, but to retain an even more controversial entry: GID in children.
… The second argument in favor of keeping GID in the diagnostic manual is where things get ethically murky. The removal of the diagnosis may also remove insurance coverage for transsexual adults who are being treated with hormonal or surgical reassignment. As of now, a diagnosis of mental illness is the only mechanism that transsexuals have for medical insurance to cover mastectomies, testosterone injections, and genital reconstruction surgeries (though very few insurance companies cover any sort of gender reassignment, because it is most often considered “cosmetic”).
Megan Smith, a Nebraska-based psychotherapist and an advocate for the removal of GID from the DSM, claims that the insurance argument is the one she most often encounters. Smith believes keeping the diagnosis for the sake of insurance coverage is “unethical and unscientific.” Smith argues, “I don’t believe it’s our obligation as mental health professionals to change psychiatric evaluations in order to play ball with insurance companies.”
Scenes from the Apocalypse
Thousands of dead fish have washed up on beaches in New Jersey and Massachusetts. Low oxygen levels in warm water is believed to be to blame.
Mad Men Season 11, Hallucinogenic Spores, and Adamantium Bones
* Put This One finds a wonderful image from Mad Men, Season 11. (Thanks, Jacob!)
* The Chicago Tribune explains why doing research in the archives is so fun. The answer may surprise you! Hint: Fungus on books, they say, is a likely source of hallucinogenic spores.
* The American Family Association ups the ante on the whole “Ground Zero mosque” pseudo-scandal: No more mosques in America, period.
* Rachel Maddow on the war on brains.
* And Political Wire brings the news that we’re actually going to eliminate birthright citizenship: 49% of Americans already want to, before the fools and liars in the media have even had their chance to beat the drum.
* The climate situation is just obscenely dire.
* And just in time for our triumphant return: Huge hand-drawn panorama of London, 1845.
Meanwhile, in Russia (and Greenland)
Record temperatures and historic drought have led to hundreds of wildfires all across the country. Climate change is a hoax.
UPDATE: Over the weekend I completely forgot to mention the slab of ice that broke off Greenland, thereby proving climate change’s hoaxitude for all time.