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- 2009/07/27 [L..T] Science Is in the Details “...it is important that we understand Dr. Collins and his faith as they relate to scientific inquiry.”
- 2009/08/08 [L..T] Reply to critics of "Bait and switch: How the 'public option' was sold" >“Several "yes buts" took issue with a comment I posted on July 20 on this blog entitled "Bait and switch: How the 'public option' was sold."”
- 2009/08/11 [L..T] Woman sues to get men to play her “Three years ago, league members voted to rescind a rule that penalized them for refusing to compete against [Nancy Griffin, a woman who has beaten many top male players] or anyone else. [Some] men have invoked both their wives and God to avoid matches against her”, while others have signed a petition supporting her case.
- 2009/08/14 [L..T] The Senate HELP Committee "public option" will be multiple "options," and these will be run by insurance companies “Section 3106 is difficult to read. ... I will tell you first what I derive from it in the plainest language possible, and then discuss some of its provisions so you can judge for yourself whether I got it right.”
- 2009/11/04 [L..T] The Public Option Fight Continues – But How Exactly Does Reform Work? “The basic theme of health care reform is that insurance would be mandatory, subsidized and regulated.” - an overview of the bills currently being reconciled
- 2009/11/30 [L..T] Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense “Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. ... What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians' bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.”
- 2009/12/14 [L..T] visiting the Amazon warehouse Julia Sweeney recounts her trip to the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitesville, Indiana to deliver shipping stock of her CD and DVD Letting Go of God.
- 2009/12/16 [L..T] Who are the climate change skeptics? “...a 2008 study that examined 141 "English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005" found that over 92% of them were connected to conservative think tanks, either published by them or authored by persons directly affiliated with them...”
- 2009/04/01 [L..T] Assessment of Minimum Income Schemes in Spain "...this report points out the need to make progress in cover for situations of social exclusion and need. It also makes clear that wide-reaching protective cover (such as Spain's) for situations of need is not enough if unaccompanied by quality services or enhanced protective intensity with a view to surmounting the situation of relative poverty. Nor is it sufficient if unaccompanied by real opportunities to enter the labour market."
- 2009/11/18 [L..T] How we discovered Verizon's Spamdetector could be twisted into a disguise for censorship “According to the laws of Verizon Central, once you've been labeled spam, there is only one course of action and it goes like this:...”
- 2010/01/29 [L..T] Rebutting (Again!) the 9/11 Truthers “The belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (that includes, in addition to Holocaust denial, creationism and crank theories of physics), and is easily refuted by noting that beliefs and theories are not built on single facts alone, but on a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry. All of the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.”
- 2010/03/27 [L..T] The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters
- 2010/04/18 [L..T] Right-wing radio host calls tea parties 'the Sarah Palin movement' «As right-wing radio host Matt Walsh learned recently, if you challenge mob mentality, you get the mob itself. In this case, if you trash Sarah Palin in front of her biggest fans, you might just get called an "infiltrator" and booed off stage.»
- 2010/07/05 [L..T] Sex, Lies and Oil Spills «A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina. .. In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep.»
- 2010/05/17 [L..T] Protesters Take Over Banks, K St. “It didn't take long for the handful of irritated Bank of America employees to abandon their desks and make for the doors. Their office, a small Bank of America branch on Massachusetts Avenue, had been more or less taken over by a boisterous rally of 75 or so protesters from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the organizer behind two days' worth of Wall Street-themed protests in or near Washington.”
- 2010/05/20 [L..T] Dear Andres Duany: Money, not millennials, hurting cities “But you know what really kills a city? Keeping people out. Making it prohibitively expensive by demanding it look or feel a certain way. A city cannot be planned all at once or dropped from the sky. A city is the accumulation of years and years of small changes made by many, many people of all kinds, creating a unique, irreplaceable product.”
- 2010/06/04 [L..T] No mosque at Ground Zero Pat Condell throws his lot in with the US right-wing media on the issue of the Ground Zero Mosque, warning that it is the first major step towards the Islamic cultural invasion of America.
- 2010/01/29 [L..T] Victim Blaming and Transgender Rape Victims "Last year, we dredged the ugliest depths of victim-blaming when a middle-school girl was gang-raped outside her homecoming dance, and a bunch of assholes got on the Internet to shame her for drinking alcohol. Thought that was bad? Consider what happens when a rape accusation is coming from a trans woman."
- 2010/09/30 [L..T] Wealth Inequality “[...] Mike Norton and I recently conducted a study in which we asked Americans to first guess at the distribution of wealth in the United States, and then we asked them to perform the thought experiment and lay out what they think would be the ideal distribution of wealth if they were to enter society and be placed randomly in a class.”
- 2011/01/05 [L..T] Doctor faked data linking autism to vaccines, British Medical Journal says “The British Medical Journal on Wednesday accused [disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield of committing an "elaborate fraud" by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.”
- 2011/01/19 [L..T] Fuller Memorial Presbyterian / Durham Rescue Mission “Plans submitted to the City / County Planning department with the rezoning demonstrated several worrisome elements to neighbors. The scale had grown considerably from the single multipurpose building discussed in previous years; it now stretched over portions of five city blocks, involved the demolition of 9 houses in historic district, and contemplated the closing of two streets, creating a fenced/gated facility stretching over three blocks.”
- 2011/01/19 [L..T] How many ways has K&L Gates touched you today? “{K&L Gates's} high-stakes cases are well documented, and so is its slick, and often aggressive, brand of lawyering. To win, the attorneys have used clever legal tactics to steamroll opponents, impugned the ethics of some government officials and singed relationships with allies.”
- 2011/04/16 [L..T] To all Ladies: Free Protection and Safety System, (Long Island Killer) - m4w - 29 (NYC) This is the New York Initiative's Craig's List ad offering assistance to New York City sex workers in defending themselves from the Long Island Serial Killer.
- 2011/04/26 [L..T] Real-Life Superheroes Offer Sex Workers Protection From the Long Island Serial Killer “Real life superhero vigilantes in New York – the New York Initiative – have decided to step in and have sworn to do everything they can to protect sex workers from the Long Island Serial Killer. They are offering brute-force, no questions asked protection – because they believe police are inadequate...”
- 2011/05/03 [L..T] Yes, you should join Anonymous “despite [Anonymous's] somewhat ironic transparency, there remain a few points of misunderstanding that we encounter when it comes time to recruit [...] I've composed the following FAQ by which to address those myths along with common questions and concerns that we often encounter.”
- 2011/05/13 [L..T] Court denies right to resist illegal cop entry into home
- 2011/02/03 [L..T] Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time “First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups – even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy – desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.”
- 2011/02/22 [L..T] Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden Conclusions: “Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.”
- 2011/03/01 [L..T] It's the Inequality, Stupid “Eleven charts that explain what’s wrong with America.”
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] The Political Lessons Of "Harry Potter" eight moral/political lessons taught by the Harry Potter series
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] Computers Learn To Play Civilization By Reading Instruction Manual lead paragraph::Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have taught a computer how to play strategy game Civilization by providing it with the game's instruction manual.
- 2011/07/17 [L..T] "Why does she stay with that jerk?" 19 common reasons that people stay with abusers
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] Getting to Crazy The insanity of the GOP, which many people are finally just noticing, has been building gradually for a long time.
- 2024/06/29 [L..T] Hacker group Anonymous gets blocked from Google+, will develop their own social network lead paragraph::Renowned hacker group Anonymous revealed yesterday that its Google+ profile has been removed and that their Gmail account has been blocked as well. Google claims that the profile and account go against "Community Standards" and has shut down most, if not all, profiles related to Anonymous.
- 2011/07/16 [L..T] headline::Will you be a "known traveller"? lead paragraph::Earlier this month, the US Travel Association released the results of a survey that found that 45 percent of respondents would pay a fee of "up to" $150 for a background check and verification program that would allow them to speed through airport security. On Friday, America's Transportation Security Administration announced that this Fall, it will move ahead with a plan to test just such a program.
- 2011/07/16 [L..T] The Google+ Controversy & Virtual Worlds – A Question Of Identity excerpt::The avalanche of news last weekend was triggered by the story that Opensource Obscure, a Second Life resident from Italy, had his profile suspended by Google+ because his name "violated community standards." This was followed by reports of the accounts of Second Life users being culled, much in the same fashion as had happened at Facebook weeks ago.
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] headline::A research revolution to save the planet
- 2007/01/03 [L..T] Executing Saddam Hussein was an Act of Vandalism The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. ... But I want to add another and less obvious reason why we should not have executed Saddam Hussein. His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] Cousin admits role in NYC subway terror plot lead paragraph::A cousin of admitted terrorist Najibullah Zazi publicly revealed for the first time Monday that he was in on Zazi's chilling 2009 plot to attack New York City subways with suicide bombers.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] Finland's Internet service provider refuses to block The Pirate Bay In May, copyright holders sued Internet service provider Elisa, one of Finland's largest, to get the provider to block access to torrent site The Pirate Bay due to charges of media piracy. Finnish public service media company YLE reports that Elisa refuses to comply with such claims, however, citing the technical difficulty of compliance.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] headline::News of the World phone-hacking whistleblower found dead lead paragraph::Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] News Corp shares fall as pressure grows Shares in News Corporation have fallen 4.3% in New York amid mounting pressure as the phone-hacking scandal develops.
- 2011/07/17 [L..T] Pilot drives 6,000 mi to protest TSA
- 2024/06/29 [L..T] Too Big To Fail?: 10 Banks Own 77 Percent Of All U.S. Banking Assets Congress was told that if the "too big to fail" banks did not receive bailouts that there would be chaos in the streets and this country would plunge into another Great Depression. Since that time, however, essentially no efforts have been made to decentralize the U.S. banking system. Instead, the "too big to fail" banks just keep getting larger and larger and larger.
- 2011/07/17 [L..T] Woman boards plane with 3-inch knife TWICE but TSA plays it down because explosives are 'biggest threat' An Indianapolis woman was shocked to discover she had been able to board a plane with a three-inch knife in her carry-on bag not once, but twice.
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] GOP Rep. Steve King Would Reject Debt Ceiling Deal With $3 Trillion In Cuts And Just $8 In Revenue Increases
- 2011/07/13 [L..T] headline::Cantor Says Obama Stormed Out Of Debt Ceiling Meeting, As All Progress In Talks "Erased" House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told reporters that President Obama walked out "angrily" from a meeting on the debt ceiling; Democratic aides say that Cantor was rude and Obama merely ended the meeting for the day.
- 2011/06/24 [L..T] The Debt Ceiling: Why Obama Should Just Ignore It The argument goes like this: Because Congress already appropriated the funds in question, it is the executive branch's duty to enact those appropriations. The debt ceiling, then, is legislative "double-counting," because the executive branch is obligated to spend the money Congress appropriates, without having to go back and ask again for permission.
- 2011/04/29 [L..T] The Debt Limit Option President Obama Can Use
- 2011/05/04 [L..T] headline::Our National Debt 'Shall Not Be Questioned,' the Constitution Says For the Obama administration to adopt the broad reading of Section Four would be bold (and I hasten to say I don't expect them to do it); but it would hardly be unusual in the recent discourse of presidential power--especially the Republican party's theory of the presidency.