kevintkeith

kevintkeith

94p

14 comments posted · 1 followers · following 0

11 years ago @ Commentary Magazine - It's Now Public: Edito... · 1 reply · 0 points

You actually believe that making a poll more accurate is somehow suspicious?

You also claim to believe that only people who don't like poll results are interested in making them more accurate.

This as much as anything explains the Republican war on science and truth. You really think the truth is an enemy, and that actually finding out the truth is somehow arbitrary or optional.

You are very stupid and unable to think clearly.

11 years ago @ Wonkette - Watch Ann Dunham Give ... · 7 replies · +53 points

I love the fact that somebody went to the trouble to make this - and round up a cast of actors to fake it with them.

11 years ago @ BioEdge - BioEdge: A Nobel Prize... · 0 replies · +1 points

This is nonsense.

Yamanaka is free to feel however he likes about embryos, and his scientific achievements deserve honor. But it's far from true that "everybody" shared those idiosyncratic religious views. Most workers in the field, and the vast majority of ethicists (the exceptions being almost entirely right-wing Christians), were perfectly comfortable with embryonic research, and that work continues at a steady pace.

Yamanaka may have been led to his breakthrough by his peculiar religious inclinations, but that is serendipitous, not scientific nor ethical. His statement that "when I saw the embryo, I suddenly realised there was such a small difference between it and my daughters" is repulsively wrong. If he can really see no difference between his own developed, independent, thinking, feeling, autonomous daughters and an early-stage embryo, he has no business spouting off about ethics.

Yamanaka is clearly a scientist of distinction, at least in areas in which his arbitrary personal beliefs don't interfere with his work. He just as clearly knows nothing about ethics.

11 years ago @ The New Civil Rights M... - George Takei Says, Can... · 0 replies · +4 points

George, I love you more and more!

11 years ago @ thevillager.com - Shulamith Firestone, r... · 0 replies · +23 points

Truly a visionary, she nailed down one (rather extreme) part of the feminist landscape and made some of the implications of patriarchy impossible to ignore. She was part of the modern feminist vanguard; everyone today owes her a debt. So sorry to hear of her decline and death.

11 years ago @ Wonkette - PJ O’Rourke Is Ameri... · 0 replies · +1 points

Peggy Noonan, 2004: "Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world." P.J. O'Rourke, 2012: "I don't have a big idea and I don't want one. I don't like big ideas."

The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

You know it's an election year again when Republicans come out of the woodwork singing the praises of stupidity.

11 years ago @ Ladd Ehlinger Jr., Hyp... - What Did Barbara Strei... · 0 replies · +1 points

Why should anyone care about the latest obsession of the fake-scandal-a-day mongering wingut brigade?

I've tried to read a few of the posts on the blogs that started this whine-fest, and they were so illiterate and so pathologically obsessed with the tiny minutiae of what seems to be a personal dispute between equally repulsive characters that I couldn't figure out what had actually happened or why I should care. As near as I can tell, some right-wing clown has a personal beef with some criminal who is currently incarcerated, but won't let it rest, and insists that everybody else should spend their time worrying about it. And some other slime has somehow infuriated the same criminal and now claims - somewhat implausibly - that he is so unnerved that he got an angry e-mail from inside a prison that he abandoned his home and is now requesting other people to pay his moving expenses for a new life in a new state because he's just that fragile.

Jesus, grow up and go away. It's not a story that nobody cares that you have trivial personal feuds with people who can't possibly harm you. And the failure of normal people to become hysterical over your self-imagined problems is also not anything anybody needs to account for. It's just normal human behavior to ignore crazy ranters who want to make their problems your responsibility.

Please - be irrelevant less loudly, could you?

11 years ago @ The Heritage Foundry - President Obama: An Ad... · 5 replies · -7 points

How is more than 2:1 not a "strong majority" (albeit in one chamber only)? And note that, as Obama explicitly stated in the remark that the right wing has universally chosen to mis-quote, it is conservatives who have constantly criticized courts for overturning democratically enacted laws, and his remark was merely an observation that if that standard were to be applied, it should be applied to the healthcare act as well.

Obama said nothing challenging the doctrine of judicial review. He explicitly endorsed it, again in the same remarks that the right wing has universally selectively mis-quoted. This entire issue is nothing more than than another sad display of Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder.

12 years ago @ BioEdge - BioEdge: Meta-analysis... · 1 reply · +1 points

This paper has already been criticized by competent authorities. The Royal College of Gynecologists said:

"RCOG statement on BJPsych paper on mental health risks and abortion

A meta-analysis of 22 studies published today in BJPsych shows that women who have had an abortion are at an increased risk of mental health problems.

Three previously published systematic reviews and the RCOG guideline development group (who reviewed all available literature up to February 2011) have concluded that women who have an abortion are not at increased risk of mental health problems when compared with women who continue an unintended pregnancy and have a baby.

One of this paper’s findings points to increased substance misuse and suicidal behaviours among the groups of women. What this research does not fully examine is if these women had pre-existing mental health complications such as dependency issues and mood disorders before the abortion. "
http://www.rcog.org.uk/what-we-do/campaigning-and-opinions/statement/rcog-statement-bjpsych-paper-mental-health-risks-and-a

Coleman herself has been publicly criticized for publishing false results and using faulty methodology. The last time she published one of her so-called "meta-analyses", the work was unreplicatable by researchers using the same data set:

"'We were unable to reproduce the most basic tabulations of Coleman and colleagues,' Steinberg said in a statement released with the paper. 'Moreover, their findings were logically inconsistent with other published research -- for example, they found higher rates of depression in the last month than other studies found during respondents' entire lifetimes. This suggests that the results were substantially inflated.'"

Not surprisingly, a more competent analysis of that data yielded the opposite of her conclusions:

When Steinberg and Finer examined other factors, such as preexisting mental health disorders and sexual or physical violence before the abortion, they found that women who had had multiple abortions were more likely to have those risk factors before the abortion compared with women who had had one or no abortions. Once the researchers took that into consideration, they found no significant relationship between abortion history and substance abuse or mood and anxiety disorders, they reported.

'Antiabortion activists have relied on questionable science in their efforts to push inclusion of the concept of "post-abortion syndrome" in both clinical practice and law,' Finer said. 'Our inability to replicate the findings of the Coleman study makes it clear that research claiming to find relationships between abortion and poor mental health indicators should be subjected to close scrutiny.'"
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2010/12/study_disputes_abortion_mental.html

This recent publication - already disconfirmed - does not "put a cloud over previous reviews". The fact that you would suggest that a single publication, contrary to multiple similar studies over many years by leading professional bodies, would do so, is absurd. The fact that you would accept such a study from a researcher whose previous identical work has repeatedly been disproved, and who is an openly committed ideological activist for this repeatedly-disproven claim, is worse. The fact that you would publish such an uncritical endorsement a week *after* a major professional body had already published its own critical re-analysis invalidating the work, is irresponsible.

This is nothing more than the same tired lies and obfuscatory incompetence from a proven hack. It is a disservice to science, to medicine, and to women to give it credence.

12 years ago @ Wonkette - Newt Gingrich Wipes Of... · 0 replies · +7 points

On a tangential note, it appears that R2-D2 is stalking him from behind a potted palm.