• 1 tbsp butter
• generous dash of ground cloves
• 1.5 tsp of molasses
• earl grey tea packet
• rye (any whiskey) to taste

Melt the butter in your mug, add in the cloves and mix em up good. Stir in the molasses. Take a big whiff–it should smell good. If it doesn’t, you screwed something up.

Make the tea in this same mug, and let it sit for a little while. There should be white foamy stuff on top. If not, you screwed something up, but it’ll probably still taste decent.

Add in an ounce or two of the whiskey.

Imbibe and rejoice.

I for one applaud Canada’s federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear for refusing to answer reporters questions regarding his belief in evolution. Such conversations are indeed “not worth having.” The personal beliefs of a politician are simply irrelevant to his or her ability to successfully manage public affairs.

We have seen this amply demonstrated already by the Canadian federal conservatives in their succession of Minsters of the Environment, none of whom know the least thing about environmental science nor care a whit for sustainability, yet who have all excelled in their ability to run a tight ship.

Whether Goodyear “believes in science” is a total red herring. Goodyear could be a voodoo-practicing astrology columnist who tries to convert humours into gold on the weekends for all I care. The role of government is simply the bureaucratic allotment of resources to the right people at the right time, an entirely neutral science, which depends not at all for its success upon concrete knowledge of the issues concerned.

I actually think Goodyear erred in referring to his chiropractic expertise as providing him with a scientific knowledge of the body. To re-iterate, the man’s understanding of science is neither here nor there. All that matters is that his reasoning is sound, and this was amply attested by his grasp of the fact that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack:

“I do believe that just because you can’t see it under a microscope doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It could mean we don’t have a powerful enough microscope yet. So I’m not fussy on this business that we already know everything. … I think we need to recognize that we don’t know.”

Goodyear is clearly referring to our current and lamentable inability to see God in a microscope. It is my private hope that some of the funds he oversees will be funneled to those humble and hard-working scientists seeking to achieve this holy grail of microscopy. I will readily admit to being encouraged by this beautiful vision of science and religion working together in the most productive of ways.

Only good can come of this.

Vow

Vow also has extended glyph and European character support. Too bad I’m too poor to pay the (eminently reasonable) ~$50 for each one

Click here to view the embedded video.

offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. digress.it is based on the architecture of weblogs, but is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length. With digress.it, you can annotate, gloss, workshop and debate on a fine-grained level, turning a document into a conversation.

I worked on the old Commentpress platform to get it running in English and French, and contributed some minor bug fixes, and really liked the idea behind the project, so this is an exciting development to see. I haven’t explored the plugin yet, but hopefully it will make the functionality much easier to integrate into an existing Wordpress installation.

The New Deal is usually told as a history of F.D.R., she said, but we don’t talk enough about the pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted neighbors’ furniture was put on the streets they moved it back into their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The other thing that’s important to remember, she said, is that the organizers were a threat—of socialist revolution—and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, “We have to compromise, or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.” Now, these market shocks are opportunities for the same reason that the crash was in the thirties, because we are seeing the failures of laissez-faire before our eyes. “It’s time to say, ‘Your model failed,’ ” she said. “This is a progressive moment: it’s ours to lose.”

As Slavoj Zizek says, events do not impose their own interpretation. It is up to the left to ensure that the financial crisis is seen for what it is: a significant blow to laissez-faire ideology. Unfortunately, the situation is, as far as I can tell, entirely lacking the sort of roiling, potentially revolutionary zeal that is, both A) an appropriate response to the grossly criminal acts of speculation, fraud and exploitation that have been perpetrated (largely) upon the American population at the hands of the right-wing elite; and B), if Klein is on to something, a prerequisite for the causes of this crisis to be taken seriously.

The Government Accounting Office report that came out in late 2008 has already found, sadly but unsurprisingly, that the bailout is being handled with insufficient oversight.

this is going to get worse before it gets better

In related news that makes this development even more timely, a study from UC Berkeley has found that the negative effects of poverty on children’s brains can in some cases be so severe that they resemble the impact of a stroke.