Semantic search
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
- 2017/08/11 [L..T] From a logical point of view ... “To translate this into practical language, if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees, who had been hired by a process biased in their favour despite being inadequate to the task. Whatever the author of the manifesto thinks, Google does not believe this to be the case and as far as I can tell from industry blogs, it isn’t – female employees in tech are generally very good. This would, of course, be consistent with the hypothesis that the current selection process is biased against them.”
- 2017/08/10 [L..T] Google town hall meeting canceled after days of online harassment “The cancellation of the town hall meeting caps off nearly a week of escalating anxiety around the targeted harassment of various Google employees. Very shortly after Motherboard first reported the existence of a controversial memo circulating inside Google, the memo's author was identified as James Damore. (Damore was fired on Monday). Since then, various corners of the internet have targeted Googlers who have been openly critical of the memo.”
- 2017/08/10 [L..T] James Damore's shoddy defense “I keep getting told that James Damore loves diversity. It’s the first thing he says in his manifesto. [...] Simply put, Damore's conclusions are not backed up by the scientific consensus.”
- 2017/08/09 [L..T] Sorry, Google memo man: women were in tech long before you “James Damore's controversial manifesto says women are genetically unsuited to tech roles. Doesn't he know they were the original computer programmers?”
- 2017/08/08 [L..T] No, the Google manifesto isn't sexist or anti-diversity. It's science “Despite how it's been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.”
- 2017/08/08 [L..T] Conservatives Outraged After Google Fires Engineer Whose 'Manifestbro' Says Women Biologically Less Suited for Leadership “Conservatives, especially those who seemingly don't understand the First Amendment or concepts of free speech, are outraged.”
- 2017/08/08 [L..T] The Guy Who Wrote the 'Google Memo' Just Might Sue “The former Google employee who was fired after posting a missive criticizing the company's diversity efforts calls his dismissal illegal and says he is "exploring all possible legal remedies."”
- 2017/08/08 [L..T] The free speech absolutists have a martyr in James Damore “James Damore, the author of that dumbass Google manifesto, has been fired. Now he wants to sue Google, and all the usual suspects are howling about “Free Speech!” [but] It's absurd. This really isn’t a free speech issue.”
- 2017/08/06 [L..T] What differentiates a good engineer from a clueless ignoramus? “Have you read the manifesto published internally at Google that has thrown many people into a tizzy? It’s amazingly stupid. Yet another blinkered male engineer babbling about his biases as if they are factual.”
- 2017/08/05 [L..T] So, about this Googler’s manifesto. “You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it.”
- 2017/08/05 [L..T] Exclusive: Here's The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google (Updated) Article reports the full text of the memo, minus some graphics and links. “I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”
- 2017/08/02 [L..T] Allen Pucket: A Case Study In Creeping Fascism As Facilitated By Joey Gibson In this article, we will highlight a member of the far-right that moved over to explicit white supremacy: self-described white nationalist, Allen Wesley Pucket.
- 2017/07/17 [L..T] Transgender People and “Biological Sex” Myths “...sometimes, efforts to undermine or exclude trans women rely on a somewhat different tactic which takes the following form: A case will be made that sex is distinct from gender – the former being purely biological in nature, the latter being entirely social. Upon making this claim, it will then be argued that, while trans women may indeed be women (because “woman” is a gender category), we nevertheless remain “biologically male” (a sex category).”
- 2017/06/27 [L..T] Debunking “Trans Women Are Not Women” Arguments “...since these trans-women-are-not-women claims recur on a regular basis (and are often forwarded by people who self-identify as feminists), I thought that it would be worthwhile to compile all my relevant counterarguments in one essay.”
- 2017/04/17 [L..T] VIDEO: Pro-Trump Oregon Street Preacher Kicks Guy at Crazy Berkeley Rally “The man wearing a "JESUS WILL JUDGE YOU" sweatshirt while kicking a person on the ground – standing next to a noted white supremacist sucker punching a woman in the face – is antagonistic Oregon street preacher Allen Wesley Pucket. He traveled with his associates down to Berkeley, California, on Saturday for a pro-Donald Trump "Patriot Day" [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pg5bnm/violent-protests-turned-berkeley-into-a-battleground rally that turned violent
- 2017/04/06 [L..T] Breitbart publishes multiple anti-Kushner stories in the wake of Steve Bannon's NSC ouster As Media Matters notes, Breitbart published four negative stories about Kushner on the same day that news broke that Bannon was out at the NSC.
- 2017/04/05 [L..T] Bannon threatened to quit if removed from National Security Council role: report Chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon was unhappy with the decision to remove him from his role on the National Security Council and threatened to quit, according to a new report.
- 2017/04/05 [L..T] Kushner Hires Hollywood PR Exec To Help Run White House Campaign To Privatize Government Functions The Office of American Innovation is intended to be non-partisan and is working with several industry leaders such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates to make government more efficient and forward-looking. Trump won the presidency in part because he promised to bring an entrepreneurial style to the White House.
- 2017/04/04 [L..T] Are Butches Disappearing? (video) "I've had enough of anti-trans lesbians attacking me, or trying to "save" me, which is incredibly condescending and erases the years of research and soul-searching (I actually prefer soul-creation) I have done. So I wanted to put all my thoughts down into a (big) “bite sized” chunk here to direct them to when they start to vomit a word salad at me."
- 2017/03/30 [L..T] I worked for Jared Kushner. He’s the wrong businessman to reinvent government. That same obsession with the tech world permeates Kushner's new project. Cost-cutting is important in situations where there is excess, but it is not what catalyzes evolution; if the point here is to make government more effective, not just more efficient, cuts alone won’t do it.
- 2017/03/27 [L..T] The Civil War is Here “The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule.”
- 2017/03/06 [L..T] Steve Bannon in 2013: Joseph McCarthy was right in crusade against Communist infiltration Donald Trump's chief White House strategist Steve Bannon said in 2013 that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was right in his 1950s campaign claiming widespread Communist infiltration into the United States government.
- 2017/03/04 [L..T] 'Gun for hire': how Jeff Sessions used his prosecuting power to target Democrats As the justice department’s man in Alabama, Trump's attorney general indicted political opponents in remarkably thin cases, court filings show.
- 2017/02/10 [L..T] Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is reportedly a reader of neoreactionary political theory. A tour through the pro-authoritarian philosophy gaining visibility on the right.
- 2017/01/31 [L..T] Tumultuous Tillamook street preacher in Portland Airport brawl A former Tillamook street preacher is back making headlines, this time entrenched in the recent social unrest at Portland International Airport (PDX).
- 2016/12/09 [L..T] Trump's pick for White House counsel is wrong for the job "The White House counsel operates out of the public eye but has the president's ear. In the Trump administration, with the unprecedented multiplicity of conflict-of-interest challenges facing the businessman-president, the job will take on added importance. As a Democratic commissioner at the Federal Election Commission, I served five years alongside Donald F. McGahn, President-elect Donald Trump's choice for the post. My experience may be instructive – and disquieting."
- 2016/11/25 [L..T] Trump fills White House counsel and deputy national security posts "President-elect Donald Trump on Friday named a libertarian election lawyer as his White House counsel and a hard-line former Reagan administration official to a top post on his national security staff."
- 2016/10/01 [L..T] Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences «...this report shows that some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence. The report has a special focus on the higher rates of mental health problems among LGBT populations, and it questions the scientific basis of trends in the treatment of children who do not identify with their biological sex.» This report also appears to be the entire contents of issue #50, Fall 2016, a "special issue" of The New Atlantis, "A Journal of Technology and Society" which is published by the US conservatist advocacy group Ethics and Public Policy Center.
- 2016/09/11 [L..T] The TSA is a Waste of Money That Doesn't Save Lives and Might Actually Cost Them “As a test, Homeland Security officials tried to sneak guns and bombs through TSA checkpoints. They succeeded almost every time.”
- 2016/08/31 [L..T] Revealed: Conway, Bannon Members of Secretive Group "The two political operatives chosen earlier this month to lead Donald Trump's presidential campaign after two former managers departed have been members of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), Hatewatch has learned"
- 2016/07/01 [L..T] The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews Mahmoud Abbas may not be able to stop the knife attacks. But he shouldn't pay the killers' families.
- 2016/06/22 [L..T] The most overrated intellect in Washington "So Ryan's latest health care package is at war with itself. It rails against top-down decrees from Washington, all while imposing a structure on states that would effectively neuter their insurance laws. And it's only the latest in a comedy of errors that includes a proposal to phase out Medicare and an accidental effort to nationalize the means of production. Nor are these the only examples of Ryan's allergic response to math – we haven't even discussed the multi-trillion dollar "magic asterisk" Ryan relies upon to pay for his tax proposals."
- 2016/06/13 [L..T] Six questions we should ask after Orlando The questions:
- 1) Are there more home-grown terrorists than we realize?
- 2) Are lone wolves avoidable?
- 3) Why guns?
- 4) Who can buy a gun?
- 5) Why a gay nightclub?
- 6) Should we bar all Muslims?
- 2016/05/13 [L..T] Transgender Surgery Isn't the Solution “...policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”
- 2016/03/01 [L..T] Gender Ideology Harms Children This is one of several credible-seeming pseudo-scientifi studies often cited by anti-LGBT activists, but its conclusions fly in the face of an overwhelming body of evidence.
- 2016/03/01 [L..T] Get Ready to Say President Trump Unless something changes dramatically between now and November, Donald Trump will be the next president.
- 2015/10/29 [L..T] GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge "Ben Carson's rise to the top of the Republican presidential field shows that many Republicans, especially Christian fundamentalists, have decoupled from the real world – and are proud of it. The more that GOP candidates embrace "anti-knowledge" the more popular they become, as Mike Lofgren explains."
- 2015/09/10 [L..T] Message -- Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks “The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues. For this reason, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect after September 14, 2015, the national emergency with respect to the terrorist threat.”
- 2015/07/20 [L..T] ‘Stand-To:’ Holding The Line Against Christian Fascism "Yes, they are liars. They are lying little liars who tell wicked lies. How do you know that a forced-birth activist is lying? Simple: if they carry a sign or open their mouths, they are lying. They are never not lying. They only ever lie. Fibbing and fraud are their primary weapons."
- 2015/06/22 [L..T] Gaslighting Is a Common Victim-Blaming Abuse Tactic – Here Are 4 Ways to Recognize It in Your Life “If something happened that upset me, hurt me, or angered me, my reaction was often met with some variation of "That didn't happen! I never said that! You're overreacting!"”
- 2015/05/14 [L..T] The Story of How Bernie Sanders Became Famous Will Make You Love Him Even More Now, as his campaign for president ramps up, he's already making a splash. He's in Iowa talking about the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. He's on Sunday morning talk shows talking about free college and health care. He is waging a rhetorical war against "the billionaire class," whom he believes Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton will side with at the expense of the middle class.
- 2015/04/13 [L..T] I guess I'm an MRA now First let me point out that the little tweet I chirped out was because the TERFs were flocking to me — I hadn’t barged into one of their conversations, or invited them to explain to me what makes for a real woman, but there they were, in my space. So she doesn’t get to complain about me violating boundaries.
- 2015/04/12 [L..T] Hillary Clinton: I'm running for president "Hillary Clinton announced on Sunday that she was running for president of the United States, promising to be a champion of middle-class Americans if she made it to the White House as the country’s first female commander in chief."
- 2015/04/07 [L..T] Rand Paul declares presidential bid "It’s official: "Libertarian Conservative" Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) says he'll be running for president of the United States in 2016. [..] Paul, 52, announced Tuesday morning that he'll indeed be pursuing the Republican Party's nomination for president ahead of next year’s election.
- 2015/04/03 [L..T] Fatwah envy, again "Both of these people are committing a kind of rhetorical extortion, using the threat of murder elsewhere as a club to silence those who strive for respect and dignity in their lives. And in that sense both Ali and Cotton are happily exploiting atrocities to justify continued injustices."
- 2015/03/23 [L..T] Students upset they had to attend Ted Cruz's Liberty University event or face a fine "While Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) received a very warm welcome from most of the 10,000 Liberty University students present at his presidential campaign kickoff, not all were happy that they had to attend the event or face a fine."
- 2015/02/24 [L..T] Arkansas, Kentucky See Most Improvement in Uninsured Rates "Of the 11 states with the greatest reductions, 10 expanded Medicaid and established a state-based marketplace exchange or state-federal partnership. Montana, which is tied for 10th, is the only exception."
- 2015/02/24 [L..T] A letter from the property owner "As a queer radical disabled trans* person who has a history of housing insecurity, it is incredibly important to me that every person coming into contact with Trans* Housing Atlanta Program is treated with utmost respect; especially in regards to consent and accountability practices, autonomy and freedom from coercion, and having their privacy maintained and respected. Recently I have discovered that Trans* Housing Atlanta Program has unequivocally failed our clients around these issues and overall in our mission to provide safe housing and supportive services to the transgender and gender non-conforming community of Georgia. I am sorry."
- 2015/02/22 [L..T] Scientist Took Money From The Fossil Fuel Industry "One of the world's most prominent climate researchers publishing scientific papers that doubt humanity's role in climate change has received at least $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry to fund his research and salary, according to documents revealed this weekend."
- 2015/02/22 [L..T] Willie Soon is going down "Soon is a dishonest hack, one of the climate change deniers who exploited his prestigiously titled position as a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (Oooh! Sciencey!) to claim authority in attacks on more credible climate scientists, and he’s been very popular on the denialist side of things. [..] Now his own boss is admitting that he violated disclosure principles by failing to reveal his industry connections."
- 2015/02/18 [L..T] Sex redefined "These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female."
- 2015/02/18 [L..T] “The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” "...my only quibble would be with that “now”. You’d have to define "now" as a window of time that encompasses the entirety of my training and work in developmental biology, and I’m getting to be kind of an old guy. Differences in sex development (DSDs) are common knowledge, and rather routine – and coincidentally, I’m giving an exam on sex chromosome anomalies today."
- 2015/02/06 [L..T] Ukraine’s currency just collapsed 50 percent in two days "Ukraine, to use a technical term, is broke. That's what you call a country whose currency has lost half its value in just two days."
- 2015/02/05 [L..T] 3 Male Lawmakers Propose Eliminating Obamacare's Maternity Coverage "In their quest to repeal and replace Obamacare, three Republican lawmakers have offered an alternative proposal to the health reform law that would roll back some of its major consumer protections, including maternity care for pregnant women."
- 2015/02/05 [L..T] Russian Patriarch Again Supports Blasphemy Laws "Patriarch Kirill, the supreme leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, is unsurprisingly criticizing the publishing of cartoons that are viewed as blasphemous by some Muslims. Kirill was the main force pushing for harsh anti-blasphemy laws in Russia, so this is expected."
- 2015/02/04 [L..T] The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money "Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since. For those four years – until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away – the town's poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school."
- 2015/02/04 [L..T] I Had an Ectopic Pregnancy, and Anti-Choice Laws Could Have Made My Experience Much Worse "I'm grateful that during this medical emergency, my doctors were allowed to follow only their best judgment about what care would keep me healthiest, according to the most current standards of their profession. Their only legal concern was my safety. The police had no part in our story. If you want to imagine me at this moment, picture me thumbing my nose at every meddling anti-choice medievalist who was prevented from making a terrible week even worse and threatening my health to boot."
- 2015/02/04 [L..T] Paul Ryan's First Tax Legislation Adds Nearly $100 Billion To Deficit "The first bills promoted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as the new chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee would add nearly $100 billion to the deficit over 10 years. [..] Ryan, a deficit hawk during his time as the chairman of the Budget Committee for the previous six years, made his fame proposing budgets that aimed to dramatically cut domestic spending and balance the budget within a decade."
- 2015/01/30 [L..T] Rush Limbaugh lays down the law for Republican candidates "Not long ago, Mitt Romney seemed to be indicating that he was thinking about running for President. Shortly after that, he indicated that he thought Anthropogenic Global Warming was for real and important. Then Rush said..."
- 2015/01/26 [L..T] Islamic Terrorism: The Taboo Topic “Every time Islamic terrorism is discussed, those who bring up the "Christian terrorism" of the Ku Klux Klan or anti-abortion violence simply block free speech, as if deliberately trying to scramble the main topic. They seem to be saying, "Whether the Islamic State is Islamic or not is irrelevant; there are Christian terrorists as well, so do not talk about Islamic terrorists."”
- 2015/01/26 [L..T] Climate change skeptic accused of violating disclosure rules "In a note at the end of the paper, all four authors claimed no conflicts of interest on the published study. But Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, an organization based in Virginia, said Soon's long track record of accepting energy-industry related grants indicates otherwise and might constitute a violation of Science Bulletin's disclosure policy. [..] In a letter to Science Bulletin, Davies points to the more than $1 million Soon has received from companies and interests supporting studies critical of climate change."
- 2015/01/26 [L..T] NY cops throw cold water on wild right-wing claims about 'Islamberg' terrorist training camp "It's kind of perplexing to us, all this recent media attention in regard to potential terrorist training camps and things that are going on there," said Delaware County Sheriff Craig Dumont. "We don't see it. We just don’t find any of that to be valid at this time." [..] Rumors about the Islamberg compound have been circulating for years but gained recent attention after the terror attacks in Paris."
- 2015/01/21 [L..T] Muslim Scholars Demand International Blasphemy Laws "A leading Islamic organisation has called on the United Nations to make "contempt of religions" illegal and urged the West to protect Muslim communities following the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo."
- 2015/01/20 [L..T] Charlie Hebdo launches app version featuring prophet Muhammed cover "A new app for French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has been released for iOS, Android and Windows devices, letting readers worldwide get hold of a copy without queueing at newsagents. [..] The app is illustrated with the current cover, a cartoon of the prophet Muhammed, in a change from the norm for Apple's notoriously censorious App Store which has previous banned satirical and controversial apps."
- 2015/01/19 [L..T] Anti-Muslim crimes soar in France in wake of Paris attacks "The National Observatory Against Islamophobia said 116 anti-Muslim incidents had been reported to authorities since the January 7-9 shooting spree by three French jihadists that killed 17."
- 2015/01/18 [L..T] WFAA: Anti-Muslim Protestors Rally Outside Peace Conference in Texas "I don't support their ideology. I don't support what they're doing," one protestor said about the conference – while those at the conference made clear they don't support Islamic extremists who shot and killed 12 people at the satiric publication Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
- 2015/01/17 [L..T] Charlie Hebdo's cover rejected by Muslim world "Many Muslims have expressed disgust at the deadly assault on the magazine's Paris office by Islamic extremists who killed 12 people. However many also remain deeply offended by the magazine's record of publishing cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. Those passions were further inflamed this week when the magazine's first issue following the attack carried a cover cartoon depicting Muhammad holding a "Je Suis Charlie" sign."
- 2015/01/16 [L..T] Hundreds expected to protest Islamic meeting in Garland "We asked if he saw a distinction between families going in, and terrorists who committed the murderous attacks in Paris. "I see common ground," he replied."
- 2015/01/16 [L..T] Draft of new Thailand constitution offers protections for gay, transgender people Gay rights activists are welcoming a clause in a draft of Thailand’s new constitution that is aimed at protecting the rights of gay and transgender people.
- 2015/01/15 [L..T] The Criticism Of The New Charlie Hebdo Cover Explained "This week's front page is a lot less defiant, if it is defiant at all, when compared to the caricatures previously published by the satirical newspaper. So how can these reactions be explained? HuffPost asked religious anthropologist and psychoanalyst Malek Chebel, author of the book L'Inconscient De L'Islam (The Unconscious of Islam)."
- 2015/01/14 [L..T] Are All Terrorists Muslims? It's Not Even Close "Overwhelmingly, those who have committed terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe aren't Muslims."
- 2015/01/13 [L..T] Farage blames Paris attacks on immigrants, UK foreign policy "Farage sparked yet more outrage when he claimed European governments have some 'culpability' for the shooting at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket. [..] He further blamed the EU’s open door immigration policy for 'much of what has happened.'"
- 2015/01/13 [L..T] France - Muslims Feel Backlash After Paris Terror As Pig Heads Thrown Into Mosques "Abdallah Zekri, head of the National Observatory Against Islamophobia, said that in a 48-hour period after the Wednesday massacre at Charlie Hebdo, 16 places of worship around France were attacked by firebombs, gunshots or pig heads]]."
- 2015/01/13 [L..T] Charlie Hebdo Cover Features Muhammad on Post-Attack Issue "Now the often-caustic publication, faced with the challenge of reconciling its new status as a cause célèbre with its reflex to mock, ridicule and offend, is putting a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad on the cover of what is likely to be their most-read issue ever."
- 2015/01/12 [L..T] Jeremy Scahill on Paris Attacks, the al-Qaeda Link & the Secret U.S. War in Yemen "We speak to the reporter who broke this story, The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, about al-Awlaki’s background and the Paris shooters' claims of militant ties."
- 2015/01/10 [L..T] Muslims are terrorism victims, too "These terrorists (Taliban/al-Qaida/ISIS), so-called Muslims, have no religion. No religion in the world teaches you to kill innocent people, especially children and women. [...] These so-called Muslims are not only killing non-Muslims, they are also killing Muslims."
- 2015/01/08 [L..T] Just As The Islamic State (ISIL) Gets Exposed As A Fake US Enemy, A "Wag the Dog" Terrorist Attack in Paris? "Notice how every time the US government is about to be fully exposed in another boldface lie, this one being that ISIL is our sworn enemy, another wag the dog "terrorist" incident suddenly comes along to divert world attention. This time it was three heavily armed and trained gunmen in Paris attacking the office of the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, tragically killing twelve people. Of course like the US, France is notorious for arming and funding al Qaeda terrorists."
- 2015/01/08 [L..T] Charlie Hebdo and Tsarnaev's Trial: Cui bono? Conspiracy theorist Paul Craig Roberts argues that the CH massacre was a false flag: "France is suffering from the Washington-imposed sanctions against Russia. Shipyards are impacted from being unable to deliver Russian orders due to France’s vassalage status to Washington, and other aspects of the French economy are being adversely impacted by sanctions that Washington forced its NATO puppet states to apply to Russia."
- 2015/01/08 [L..T] How Muslim Scholars View Paris Attack (In-depth) "Muslim scholars responded quickly to the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo which killed 12 and injured 10. Slamming the incident as un-Islamic, scholars express anger towards the perpetrators who "betrayed and tainted" Islam rather than defended it."
- 2015/01/07 [L..T] Special to The Los Angeles Times: Political Cartooning is Almost Worth Dying For "Political cartooning in the United States gets no respect. I was thinking about that this morning when I heard NPR's Eleanor Beardsley call Charlie Hebdo "gross" and "in poor taste." (I should certainly hope so! If it’s in good taste, it ain't funny.) It was a hell of a thing to say, not to mention not true, while the bodies of dead journalists were still warm. But these were cartoonists, and therefore unworthy of the same level of decorum that a similar event at, say, The Onion – which mainly runs words – would merit."
- 2015/01/07 [L..T] Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris "The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public."
- 2014/12/22 [L..T] The Scientology Christmas Catalog Is Totally Insane "Thankfully, the Church of Scientology has compiled this handy catalog of L. Ron-approved holiday merchandise." -- including many items that cost more that most people make in a month while still being basically worthless.
- 2014/12/16 [L..T] Gov. Pat McCrory, Rep. Mark Sanford get payouts from broker Soon after taking office, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina accepted six-figure stock payouts from an online mortgage broker accused by regulators of deceiving its customers.
- 2014/12/14 [L..T] Inside The Koch-Backed History Lessons North Carolina Wants To Teach High School Students Public high school students in North Carolina will be taught from a lesson plans and worksheets prepared by an organization closely tied to the billionaire Koch brothers, if the state's Department of Public Instruction gets its way."
- 2014/11/25 [L..T] Bee deaths and neonics: Inside story of Colony Collapse Disorder, Harvard’s Chensheng Lu’s crusade Although public opinion has coalesced around the belief that the bee death mystery is settled, the vast majority of scientists who study bees for a living disagree – vehemently.
- 2014/11/21 [L..T] House panel finds no intelligence failure in Benghazi attacks "An investigation by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee has concluded that the CIA and U.S. military responded appropriately to the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, dismissing allegations that the Obama administration blocked rescue attempts during the assault or sought to mislead the public afterward."
- 2014/11/21 [L..T] House intel panel debunks many Benghazi theories Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.
- 2014/10/10 [L..T] Wall Street Journal Offers a Skewed Climate Perspective from Judith Curry "Like other op-eds, Dr. Curry's is framed as “contradicting” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and suggests that any reduction in potential risks from climate change can justify delay in reducing emissions."
- 2014/10/09 [L..T] The Global Warming Statistical Meltdown "A growing body of evidence suggests that the climate is less sensitive to increases in carbon-dioxide emissions than policy makers generally assume..."
- 2014/10/06 [L..T] Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry "While of some scientific interest, the impact for real-world mitigation policy of the range of conceivable values for the TCR is small (see also this discussion in Sci. Am.). For targets like the 2 K guide-rail, a TCR on the lower end of the Lewis and Curry and IPCC ranges might just be the difference between a achievable rate of emissions reduction and an impossible one..."
- 2014/09/26 [L..T] Muslims in Europe rally against extremist violence "In tweets, in street gatherings and in open letters, moderate Muslims around the world are insisting that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) extremists don't speak for their religion. Many are also frustrated that anyone might think they do, and a backlash has already begun."
- 2014/08/27 [L..T] IPCC attribution statements redux: A response to Judith Curry "The bottom line is that multiple studies indicate with very strong confidence that human activity is the dominant component in the warming of the last 50 to 60 years, and that our best estimates are that pretty much all of the rise is anthropogenic."
- 2014/08/12 [L..T] Only Stupid People Call People Stupid "We shouldn't call people stupid. And when other people resort to name calling, we should discourage them by expressing public disapproval, because calling people stupid... makes people stupid."
- 2014/08/05 [L..T] GOP bury House Benghazi report "In public relations it is understood if you want to bury bad news you release it on Friday afternoon in August. [..] So it was the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee declassified its two-year-old investigation into the Benghazi tragedy last week, releasing its findings last Friday, August 1, at 3:30PM Eastern Time."
- 2014/07/24 [L..T] Jeremy Scahill On U.S. Media Coverage Of Israel-Gaza Conflict: 'We've Hit All-Time Lows' "We could say this every time I come on your show and talk to you: we've hit all-time lows with media coverage in this country. [..] When you look at what's happening right now in Gaza, this is a massive massacre and one epic series of war crime after war crime, child after child being killed. [...] Israeli propagandists are largely given carte blanche to say what they want on American television with very little pushback."
- 2014/07/24 [L..T] Decriminalising sex work would cut HIV infections by a third "Mathematical modelling work by Drs Michael Pickles and Marie-Claude Boily from Imperial College London estimates that decriminalising sex work could prevent up to 33 to 46 per cent of HIV infections among female sex workers (FSWs) and clients worldwide over the next decade."
- 2014/07/23 [L..T] Driller apparently wants to frack Meadowmont in Chapel Hill "It appears the relatively unknown Crimson Holdings Corporation wants to frack more than a handful of nature preserves in Durham, as reported in today's Indy."
- 2014/07/23 [L..T] MSNBC's Sole Palestinian Voice Rula Jebreal Takes on Pro-Israeli Gov't Bias at Network & in US Media "A week after public outrage helped force NBC's reversal of a decision to pull veteran reporter Ayman Mohyeldin out of Gaza, the sole Palestinian contributor to sister network MSNBC has publicly criticized its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. "We are disgustingly biased when it comes to this issue," Rula Jebreal said Monday on MSNBC's Ronan Farrow Daily, citing a disproportionate amount of Palestinian voices and a preponderance of Israeli government officials and supporters."
- 2014/07/22 [L..T] Otherwise Intelligent People
- 2014/07/22 [L..T] Al-Jazeera Gaza offices evacuated after direct hit by Israeli fire "Israel's army has denied targeting the Gaza offices of al-Jazeera TV after the network's correspondents reported that the building had come under fire on Tuesday."