Blogwatch
Our fire, at latest report, was up to 65% contained, from 40% on Saturday and 30% for days before. The estimate of Tuesday for 100% containment has been revised till Friday. Portola Hills is now altogether off the evacuation list (we stayed voluntary while we were on the list), but thousands of people in the canyon communities remain evacuated. Joel continues to do better fire blogging than me.
In non-fire news:
Drima, the Sudanese Thinker, attended a conference organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on ”Overcoming Extremism: Protecting Civilians from Terrorist Violence.“ He writes about his conference experience. Also from Drima, Iraq.DailyVoices.com and More Launched!
Want to use your computer’s spare cycles in projects that benefit humanity? Check out World Community Grid. Via my sister.
18th Erase Racism Carnival over at Kill Bigotry!
Waterboarding round up: From Balkinization, we have A Severe Insult to the Brain…, What Should Mukasey Do? and What Do the OLC Opinions Justifying Waterboarding Look Like? hilzoy also comments on the Mukasey confirmation hearings. And over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, d argues that a Giuliani presidency would be like a Nixon presidency on crystal meth.
In Rich State, Poor State, Henry of Crooked Timber discusses some political differences between the states.
These maps show some obvious class differences (as well as illustrating the importance of poor voters to Democratic electoral prospects), but also suggest (as does the paper) some interesting relationships between how people at different income levels vote in rich and poor states.
For poor voters, there is no systematic difference between rich and poor states. But for middle-income and especially for rich voters, there is a very strong pattern of rich states supporting the Democrats and poor states supporting the Republicans.
In short, rich people and poor people who live in poor states have very different voting preferences from each other. Rich people and poor people who live in rich states have much more similar voting preferences. Gelman et al. don’t have any hard and fast explanation for this (they note that race explains about half of this disparity, but only half). However, their results do suggest that some of the conventional wisdom of American journalists on class, voting and geographic location stands in sore need of revisiting.
“Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?” A study says no.
Untwirling a Photoshopped Photo.
Elliot on Archimedes rediscovered. He also has an atheist’s comments on Religious books, what level of respect atheists owe them and where that respect stops.
Father Jake on Bishop Tutu: “Is God a Christian?”
Get your Pope in a tie dye outfit here. Via *Christopher.
Jean Raber at dotCommonweal on Dumbledore’s gay! Should we care?
Robert P. Imbelli at dotCommonweal has a story of Muslim-Christian dialogue, while Lauren at Unsprung, For the Love of God, has a more disturbing story of Christian intolerance.
What Color Are the Holes in Your Parachute? La Lubu blogs at Feministe about having a micro-premie baby, and then losing her job and health insurance. Also, a speech she gave for the April 2006 Workers’ Memorial in Illinous. And Lauren comments further on La Lubu’s holes in your parachute post.
Echidne of the Snakes on Fixing Health Insurance and Link To A Short Refresher Course in Phony Gender Science Posted by olvlzl.
belledame222 on penguin prostitutes and on Blackwater angling to come to San Diego, post-fire.
One thing that California and New Orleans do have in common however, is that Blackwater is ready to “rescue.” In fact, Blackwater has been lobbying to get into San Diego to start their own “border training camp” to privatize border patrolling for years in Congress. All though they have the go ahead from the company from whom they bought the land and the support of many conservative Californians, the fires in the same region may usher in the perfect way to circumvent the opposition.
Stentor on why transexuality should be part of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
Peterson Toscano on Ex-Gay Harm–Let Me Count the Ways.
Community Marriage Policies May Lower Divorce Rates.
More from the LA Times on Genarlow Wilson’s release. (Note: there have been conflicting media reports on whether the fifteen-year-old with whom 17-year-old Wilson had consensual sex was white or black. I had her as white in my Saturday post based on one article, but the LA Times has her as black. FWIW. The Marcus Dixon case definitely involved a black boy and a white girl – I’ve seen photos for that one.)
An almost-mayor teen alarms Ohio city.
James Flynn spoke recently on the well-known Flynn effect; IQs rise, but are children really smarter?
Richardson’s Latin America plan.
Via Dar Kush, a Discover Magazine article on How Not to Be a Racist.
Whether out in polite society or answering the questions of nosy psychologists, most people insist to the utmost that they’re not racist. But when those same psychologists test people’s subconscious feelings, they find a much different story. More than 80 percent of white people show some measurable prejudice (pdf) against black people, for instance.
About 7 percent of white people, though, actually show a distinct lack of racism on probing psychological tests, says psychologist Robert Livingston of Northwestern University. Recently Livingston and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin studied these people to find out why they’re not racist and, by implication, why the rest of us are. It turns out that the nonracists share a unique emotional style: They rarely form any negative associations, whether they’re thinking about meaningless symbols or real human beings.