Banks and Republicans are blocking short-sales of homes

A middle-aged couple who bought a home in my neighborhood are in a terrible situation. They paid too much for their new house, which needed a lot of repairs, and they failed to aggressively work to sell their existing home. Therefore, they now have two houses. They continue to live in their original home while their new house (two houses away from where I live) has been vacant for three years and it is falling apart. I’m not talking about chipped paint. There are huge holes in the roof that are causing the house to rot out. Check out the garage roof too: Image by Erich Vieth[/caption] People who know a lot about rehabbing houses tell me that if this house and garage don’t get immediate attention, they will need to be completely torn down.

Continue ReadingBanks and Republicans are blocking short-sales of homes

More Catholic than the Pope

With many American Catholics outraged that Notre Dame university has invited Barack Obama to deliver its commencement address -- a position the Pope himself apparently finds untroubling -- one wonders if America's Catholic conservatives are more concerned about politics than about any genuine religious doctrine. Indeed, the Vatican's own official publication, L'Osservatore Romano has labeled Obama's first three months in office as "One hundred days that didn't shake the world." Meanwhile, the American anti-abortion-rights group, National Right to Life Committee, has moved to criticize the Vatican's "surprisingly positive assessment" of President Obama's approach to life issues and called on Notre Dame university to rescind the Obama invitation. According to the NRLC, Notre Dame's invitation is "an affront to all who believe in the sanctity and dignity of human life." Since Pope Benedict does not seem to consider the Obama invitation "an affront," the NRLC would apparently exclude Pope Benedict from its list of those who believe in the sanctity and dignity of human life. If extremism like that informs America's Republican party, America's conservatives should perhaps anticipate a much longer period of Democratic rule. And for good reason.

Continue ReadingMore Catholic than the Pope

Obama strikes all funding for abstinence-only sex education

As reported at Daily Kos:

Yesterday, President Obama struck a blow to the abstinence-only community, cutting ALL of their funding streams in his new 2010 budget. Obama made it clear that our government should no longer fund these failed programs that promote misinformation, misogyny, discrimination and, of course, juggling and cinder block wielding abstinence clowns.

Watch the videos posted at Daily Kos to get a real flavor for the opposition (Ms. Unruh), who repeatdly claims that babies are good, we need babies, and that birth control pills are attempts by the pharmaceutical companies to oppress women. She claims that using real birth control is an attempt to turn women into men.

Continue ReadingObama strikes all funding for abstinence-only sex education

Evolutionary explanations: historical trajectory versus convergence

In the April 16, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers), Johan J. Bolhuis and Clive L. Wynne asked "Can Evolution Explain How Minds Work? Their answer is that we need to be careful. Traits don't always smoothly work their way up from ancestors to contemporary species. Sometimes, traits appear as a result of "convergence," namely, these traits arise in species that are not closely related because these species were independently subjected to similar selection pressures. A good example of convergence would be the wings of birds and bats, which are not closely related species. Both species, however, were subjected to similar selection pressures, accounting for the existence of their wings. The authors argue that many studies suggesting that humanlike traits existed in lower primates lacked sufficient controls. Maybe those capuchin monkeys were not reacting on the basis of assessing "fairness" when they shared or rejected slices of cucumbers. Maybe they were rejecting an inferior reward simply because better rewards were potentially available. The authors suggest that their reanalysis of these experiments suggests that it is a mistake to assume the continuous development of mind up through the lower primates, culminating in human beings.

Continue ReadingEvolutionary explanations: historical trajectory versus convergence