Fixing America’s broken political system

Former GOP congressman Mickey Edwards has an excellent column at The Atlantic about fixing the broken processes and partisan control of the United States’s political system. I’m finding myself in agreement with him on a number of issues. Eliminating partisan gerrymandering, open primaries, and reduced partisanship in committee assignments are all excellent ideas.

The Queen of Snark returns

An empty hole in the blogosphere has been filled, as JJ the Unrepentant Old Hippie has returned.

Welcome back.

Norwegian terrorist is a misogynist terrorist

Now, virtually everyone knows that the terrorist likely responsible for the attacks in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, is a wingnut–type extremist, with virulently anti–Islam and anti–atheism views. What you might not know is that he’s also an evil misogynist.

From his 1500+ page manifesto, a partly plagiarized collection of the mad ravings of a maniac mass murderer:

Abstaining from the truth

From the Huffington Post (emphasis in original, links removed):

Texas lawmakers cut sex ed from two six-month courses to a single unit of “abstinence only” education. But early indications showed that the program wasn’t working. In fact, teens in almost all high school grades were having more sex after undergoing the abstinence only program. By 2007, Texas had the highest teen birth rate in the nation.

[...]

The results [of Texas' sex miseducation]? Teen pregnancy in Texas went up — higher than before “abstinence only,” and more than 50 percent higher than the national average. Even more troubling was that repeat teen pregnancy went up — to the point that it, too, led the nation. It turns out that Texas kids thought that “if birth control doesn’t work, why use it?”

[...]

But none of this seems to matter to Gov. Rick Perry. When confronted with the dismal statistics during an October 15, 2010 televised interview with Texas Tribune reporter Evan Smith, Perry’s response was to reaffirm that “abstinence works.”

The audience laughed and Smith pointed out the state’s abysmal teen pregnancy rate. “It works,” insisted Perry. “Maybe it’s the way it’s being taught, or the way it’s being applied out there, but the fact of the matter is it is the best form of — uh — to teach our children.” Smith asked for a statistic to suggest it works, and Perry replied that “I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life, abstinence works.”

Hat tip to DAMMIT JANET!

More random stuff

In no particular order:

• Leon Panetta, the American Secretary of Defense, has signed a certification to formally end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (via).
• And bigots, the sky hasn’t fallen.
• More proof that correlation does not equal causation, or why emptying your spam folder is good for the economy (via).
• Someone Rick Perry respects is strongly urging him not to run for president.
• Too bad Michele Bachman, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum didn’t get the message.
• There were terrorist attacks in Norway, and several people have been killed. My condolences.
• This is so sad. “Half of US Social Program Recipients Believe They ‘Have Not Used A Government Social Program’“. The ignorance, I can see it.
• Team Japan won the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Congratulations to them. A major morale booster after their devastating earthquake.
• As my own team did not play like CONCACAF champs, I’ll admit to cheering for the US.
• The game was also the most tweeted event in history.
• Update: Negative aspects of and problems with gender stereotypes.

New format for World Women’s

The IIHF has announced a new format for the World Women’s Ice Hockey Championships.

The new format also divides the teams into two groups. However, it lumps the top four teams in Group A, and the remainder (plus the most recently promoted team, Germany in this case) in Group B. The top two teams in Group A advance to the semifinals, while the bottom two teams in Group A play in the quarterfinals against the top two teams from Group B. A best–of–three relegation round will be played by the bottom two teams in Group B.

Thus, the groups for the 2012 World Women’s will be:

Pool A	Pool B
United States	Sweden
Canada	Switzerland
Finland	Slovakia
Russia	Germany

This new format also ensures that Finland cannot finish worse than sixth, which is enough to qualify them for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

The 2012 Women’s World Ice Hockey Championships run from April 7 to April 12, in Burlington, Vermont. USA Hockey has also launched an official website.

Plinky Prompt FAIL

A feature recently added to WordPress is Plinky Prompts, which appear at the screen just after you publish a post. They provide suggestions as to future posts. For my last post, I got these ones (see picture [click to enlarge]):

FAIL

 For those who can’t read the circled writing, the one in the upper left says “349th post.” The one in the lower right says “Do you blog? Why or why not?”

Epic FAIL.

As for those questions, the first one is pretty obvious and is utterly unworthy of wasting any more attention on. As for the second, I blog because if enough people speak up, all will hear us.

As for the Plinky Prompts, this is another example of why dictionaries define human intelligence, animal intelligence, military intelligence, extraterrestrial intelligence, and artificial intelligence and in that order.