October, 2007
The Grandmother Hypothesis: Part 1
It started with a blurb I saw in the New York Times for October 5: “Evolution’s Secret Weapon: Grandma. Far from burdening society, aging women may have ensured our survival.” “Grandmother hypothesis,” I said to myself. “But why is it in the paper now?” I clicked on the link and was surprised to see that [...]
Yay.
I want this to be true
It’s been a tough week here in the Spirit Lounge, what with the state of humanity being such a goddamn clusterfucked trainwreck of horror and all. So when I came across this old Onion article from 2000, my heart leapt with an irrational wild hope. Let it come true, I thought. I’m a Spirit, I’m [...]
The Essence of War
I’ve written before about how the rape of women is an indissoluble part of war, but Professor Shortell makes the same point in about one-twentieth of the space. He quotes from this article in the New York Times about the war in Congo: Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show [...]
Your government in action: no, we don’t torture people, and we don’t want to hear any court cases about it either
Today the Supreme Court decided to wish the El-Masri case into the cornfield, thus providing the second half of the one-two punch that began with Torture President’s sneering TV appearance last week when he said that our government doesn’t torture people. No, it just beats them, rapes them, freezes them, waterboards them, terrorizes them. Khalid [...]
Ann Coulter meets the lizard man
Ann Coulter was in the news last week for making the following statement while plugging her latest asinine book: If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to [...]
Crockus man is back
And he’s packin’ Powerpoint: We first met Crockus man a couple of weeks ago, and now he’s back with even more craptastic pop neuroscience (and spelling errors). Mark Liberman has the corpus callosum issue under control, so I want to use my time at the mike to talk about a slightly different aspect of the [...]
Is our children learning?
And more importantly, what is they learning? I was shopping for a new head for Raoul when I came across a terrifying place called einsteins-emporium.com, “The Internet’s Largest Science and Nature Store.” Please, god, don’t let it be true. So, does that mean that a biography is the story of two people’s lives? Or is [...]
He couldn’t be bothered with a single mention of all the raped and enslaved women?
I haven’t been watching the Ken Burns documentary “The War,” but this post over at Heart’s got my attention: Where in the name of all that is holy are the comfort women? And it’s not just the “comfort” women; it’s all the enslaved and prostituted and raped women in that global apocalypse, that furnace of [...]
Eating Raoul
It’s time to come clean with the reason I’m still hanging around here in the Spirit Smoking Lounge instead of resuming my corporeal form among the living. We’re now at Death+39 days, and I’m not sure how much longer the old meat sack will stay fresh on the heart-lung machine I’ve got hooked up in [...]
