When The Cat Is Away…

I haven’t been able to do much blogging because Mrs. afarensis has been doing work from home in the evenings (which ended Friday – she will be returning to her office Monday allowing me to actually write some posts). While this was occurring Dr. Ben Carson popped up in the news for criticizing President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast. Which caused a flurry of searches for info about Carson and resulted in a lot of hits for the post I wrote on his views on evolution. Which leads me to ask two things. First, What is it about neurosurgeons and pseudoscientific bullshit? Second, what is it about neurosurgeons that cause them to let their inner right wing nutjob loose on the rest of the world? Actually, I have a third, what is it about a middle of the road politician like Obama that sends right wing nutjobs into absolute paroxysms of insanity (don’t answer, I know the answer to this one)?

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Republican War On Workers Comes To Missouri

I have been meaning to write about this for some time now. A bill in the Missouri Senate would make it easier for employers to fire employees and make it harder for those employees to collect unemployment. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The bill by Republican Sen. Will Kraus, of Lee’s Summit, would include accidental violations — unless the employee could prove ignorance of the rule’s existence.

The legislation would also broaden the definition of “misconduct” to include violations of an employer’s rules outside the workplace and on an employee’s own time.

You can read the bill here

How to Occupy Wall Street From Home

Interesting idea…
Occupy Wall Street from home. This seems to be interesting as well – except there seems to be some issue with the video… which was working earlier today…Try here

Your Missouri Republican Party at Work

Although I am supposed to be taking a break I could pass over this without comment. Apparently, a bill has been introduced in the Missouri Senate that basically trashes child labor laws. Totally appalling! I have to wonder what this state is coming to when no one cares about protecting children…Hopefully our governor will veto the bill – if it passes.

Doing My Civic Duty

Despite struggling with a cold that I can’t seem to shake, I drug myself out of bed yesterday at 4:00 AM. I was going to be serving as an assistant supervisor at one of the polling places and needed to be at the polls at 5:00. The polls opened at 6:00 and from then till 7:00 PM I was busy explaining how to use the various voting machines to the voters (since I was working the election I got to vote an absentee ballot). Sometime around 9:00 someone bumped the heat up and it took several hours for us to track down the custodian and have him turn down the heat. The result of which is that I got pretty dehydrated – which didn’t help my cold. Overall it was a very interesting experience – one I highly recommend. If you are interested contact your local board of elections, I am sure they will be grateful for the help.

Censoring Science and Nobody Cares

I don’t know why a bigger fuss isn’t being made over this.

Shame on the National Park Service: Will Blair Mountain Be Strip-Mined?

The National Park Service has made a horrible decision on Blair Mountain. The mountain was the scene of a battle between coal miners, coal companies and the government. The L. A. Times describes the National Park Service’s horrible decision on Blair Mountain: