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- 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.»
- 2010/06/09 [L..T] Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.
- 2010/06/07 [L..T] Consumerist.com declares "wolf whistles at women is not sexism" A longtime reader of Consumerist is dismayed by sexist comments on a post about sexism, sends a private message about the problem, receives no reply, posts a related comment on a follow-up article -- and is banned.
- 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.
- 2010/05/23 [http://osintegrators.com/node/54 L..T] To Microsoft, Open Source means "Windows Encumbered"
- 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.”
- 2010/05/17 [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.”
- 2010/05/14 [L..T] Jaywalkers take deadly risks Jaywalkers have migrated to the suburbs. They venture across four- to eight-lane roads, often not using crosswalks, pausing on the raised medians or the middle “suicide lanes” to look for a break in traffic as cars whiz by. Sometimes the crossings end tragically, as it did last month for a young mother who watched her 4-year-old son killed in the road."
- 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.»
- 2010/04/16 [L..T] Solar power in Ontario could produce almost as much power as all U.S. nuclear reactors, studies find "Solar power in southeastern Ontario has the potential to produce almost the same amount of power as all the nuclear reactors in the United States, according to two new studies."
- 2010/04/08 [L..T] headline::Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?
- 2010/03/27 [L..T] The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters
- 2010/02/10 [L..T] Ridicule of Conspiracy Theories Focuses On Diffusing Criticism of the Powerful
- 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."
- 2010/01/29 [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.”
- 2010/01/15 [L..T] Blacks Picket Pizza Hut in North Carolina lead paragraph::On Saturday, January 16, 2010, black activists will be standing outside of a Pizza Hut on Bragg Boulevard. In October, 2008, black pro-life activists with graphic signs stood on Yadkin Road in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to expose what was believed to be a stealth Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in the making.
- 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...”
- 2009/12/14 [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.
- 2009/11/30 [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.”
- 2009/11/18 [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:...”
- 2009/11/12 [L..T] Meet The Predators If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever "had sexual intercourse with somone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances," some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don't use the 'R' word.
- 2009/11/06 [L..T] Kline: Democrats spend too much, accomplish too little “For months, I've been calling on my Democratic colleagues to press the 'reset' button and embrace commonsense, targeted solutions to strengthen and reform health care. Democrats have instead left Republicans with no alternative but to propose our own plan.”
- 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
- 2009/10/02 [L..T] Water Sucking Solar Farms Breed Water Wars "Many solar projects consume enormous amounts of water. How much water are we talking? According to a recent New York Times article, proposed plans for two solar farms in Nevada would gulp up 1.3 billion gallons of water annually--or 20 percent of the area's available water."
- 2009/09/04 [L..T] Diebold Dumps Most of Its E-Voting Business “Diebold Inc. announced yesterday that it had sold its U.S. election systems business ... to Election Systems & Software, Inc..”
- 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.”
- 2009/08/11 [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.
- 2009/08/08 [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."”
- 2009/07/27 [L..T] Science Is in the Details “...it is important that we understand Dr. Collins and his faith as they relate to scientific inquiry.”
- 2009/07/27 [L..T] Chris Mooney is Not My Friend Anymore “It was not until a Boston Globe article in which Mooney and Kirshenbaum place the blame and responsibility squarely on the shoulders of scientists that the camel's back broke.”
- 2009/07/26 [L..T] The formula “There's no doubt members of the public must become much more knowledgeable about science and its importance. But scientists must also become far more involved with - and knowledgeable about - the public.”
- 2009/07/20 [L..T] Bait and switch: How the 'public option' was sold “...the leaders of the "public option" movement haven't told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It's high time they did.”
- 2009/07/18 [L..T] Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle “In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of [Animal Farm and 1984] from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.”
- 2009/07/18 [L..T] Today's Question When do we get to stop defining smart, passionate women by the most powerful men in their circle?
- 2009/07/15 [L..T] A face of the uninsured, a state of denial “A proponent himself of single-payer when he was but an Illinois legislator, Obama now counsels that the way to achieve universal coverage is by reforming – or "building on" – the private insurance system while bolstering the public insurance sector.”
- 2009/07/06 [L..T] How Long Does it Take to Set Up a Health Co-Op? “Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, tells Bloomberg that if existing regional co-ops are the model, such plans can take decades to fully develop.”
- 2009/07/04 [L..T] Asking for it There's nothing like science for giving that objective, white-coat flavoured legitimacy to your prejudices, so it must have been a great day for Telegraph readers when they came across the headline "Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists". Ah, scientists.
- 2009/06/23 [L..T] How Women Will Be Hurt by Gay Marriage “...once they've experienced sex with other men, Catullus tells us, men are unsatisfied with what their new wives provide them.”
- 2009/06/10 [L..T] The Health Insurance Mafia Deserves a Good Screwing “Even calling it "insurance" is a sick joke. Insurance implies a guarantee, and no matter what we pay, there are never any guarantees.”
- 2009/06/10 [L..T] Conrad Proposes Co-ops To Replace Public Plan “Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) proposed replacing a public health care plan with a non-profit cooperative "that would have the same plans and would be subject to the same standards [as private plans]."”
- 2009/06/10 [L..T] Open Access Publisher Accepts Nonsense Manuscript for Dollars Would a publisher accept a completely nonsensical manuscript if the authors were willing to pay Open Access publication charges? After being spammed with invitations to publish in Bentham Science journals earlier this year, I decided to find out. ... Bentham confirmed receipt of my submission the very next day (January 30, 2009). Nearly four months later, I received a response – the article was accepted.
- 2009/05/31 [L..T] Why do people persist in voting Republican? “I happened to read University of Virginia Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's thoughtful essay on what makes people vote Republican ... Read the whole thing. You might even conclude, as I suspect Haidt does, that Republican voters tend to be more nuanced and sophisticated than Democratic voters.”
- 2009/04/02 [L..T] Fake Faith and Epic Crimes «Spain's celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq – "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law" that had left the UN "in tatters." He said, "There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay."»
- 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."
- 2009/03/07 [L..T] "Bipartisan DEFINED !" : RUSH LIMBAUGH : CPAC Convention 2009 “To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.”
- 2009/02/19 [L..T] The New Book Banning “under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children's products, the federal government has now advised that children's books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute.”
- 2009/02/14 [L..T] Knoxville Shooter's Manifesto Made Public “Adkisson was also clear that he considered his actions a hate crime. He made a special point in explaining that by emphasizing his hatred of "damn left-wing Liberals."”
- 2008/11/25 [L..T] The price of dissent on global warming “According to official data, in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that?”
- 2008/11/25 [L..T] Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks “The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay in American history”, even when earlier outlays are adjusted for inflation.
- 2008/11/07 [L..T] Insiders spill beans on Palin “[Sarah Palin]'s big spend on clothes emerged publicly last month, but McCain's aides also said that she spent "thousands more" than the reported $US150,000 on clothes during the campaign,”
- 2008/11/05 [L..T] Is our children learning science? O, woe is Texas “Dunbar was not worried about martial law when President George W. Bush actually took the steps she claims to worry about now, assigning troops to domestic crowd control in the U.S.”
- 2008/11/03 [L..T] How McCain Could Win An examination of recent voter purges and new voter "verification" practices enacted since 2004 paints a depressing scenario tomorrow for supporters of Obama and American democracy.
- 2008/10/02 [L..T] Congressman Brad Sherman: Martial Law if We Voted No “A few Members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted "no."”
- 2008/10/01 [L..T] Clinton: Deregulation Not to Blame for Crisis “Former President Bill Clinton says deregulation of financial institutions is not to blame for the mortgage market mess. ...these facts will likely come as news to many ... who are promoting the idea that deregulation is to blame for the mortgage market meltdown.”
- 2008/09/19 [L..T] Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans a collection of scientific investigations into why people vote Republican
- 2008/09/16 [L..T] Brunswick school board to consider creationism teaching «The Brunswick County school board is looking for a way for creationism to be taught in the classroom side by side with evolution.»
- 2008/09/09 [L..T] What Makes People Vote Republican? “People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity" – a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.” However, “to see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.”
- 2008/08/06 [L..T] MO voter arrested for trying to vote «My son and I were grabbed by the arms and escorted outside. The two policemen who escorted us were soon joined by four others with two other squad cars. Surrounded, we were peppered by questions. Basically they were of the type, "Why are you bothering these people?" .. The answer, as clear as we could make it was, "We aren't bothering them! We are simply trying to vote, and these people are breaking Missouri State Statutes, preventing us from voting." .. The police responded, "Look, you are breaking their rules. If you don't get out of here, we are going to arrest you!" .. The question I had in response was, "Their rules? What rules? Those are employees of the Election Board, they are under the mandate of the Election Board, and then the SoS. Aren't you more concerned about the breaking of state laws?" As it turns out, apparently they were not.»
- 2008/07/18 [L..T] Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 “That is, if you went in with a different framework for explanation – like, "too many guys in one-night stands don't know how to satisfy women" or "women are better at sex than men" – you could construct another story around this data that was ... more plausible than 'women are programmed to want long-term relationship'...”
- 2008/07/15 [L..T] Much ado about transubstantiation "In the previous post, I suggested that the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that when the priest during the communion service consecrates the bread and wine, the bread becomes the actual body of Jesus and the wine becomes his actual blood, was a fairly bizarre thing to believe in this day and age and raised the possibility that perhaps even Catholics did not really believe in it but were just humoring the church by going along with a doctrine that came into being a long time ago."
- 2008/07/11 [L..T] HYSTERIA MARKS MYERS AND HIS ILK "Yesterday, Catholic League president Bill Donohue issued a news release calling attention to the plea that Paul Zachary Myers made on his blog: he solicited the Communion Host for the express purpose of desecrating it. Donohue now responds to the reaction he has received from the University of Minnesota Morris professor, as well as others:"
- 2008/07/07 [L..T] Presidential economics: Do parties matter? some historical data on economic performance by political party
- 2008/07/06 [L..T] Student Holds Eucharist Hostage “Webster Cook is a student at the University of Central Florida. He is also a top notch jerk.”
- 2008/07/03 [L..T] Nut launches death threats at Debian women ”Women working on Debian have been getting death threats from a nut job who believes they're killing free software.”
- 2008/07/02 [L..T] Women Say Economy Was Factor In Getting Abortions “There were 13,843 abortions performed in Minnesota in 2007. Of the women who listed a reason for their abortions, 40 percent cited economic concerns – the largest share since the state started collecting detailed abortion information a decade ago.”
- 2008/06/25 [L..T] Money for Nothing “The Bear Stearns people dismissed my questions with ill-concealed contempt. Their computer models told them that home prices wouldn't fall much and that few people would default on their loans, barring another Depression. .. About the same time, Richard Bitner, the co-owner of a small subprime mortgage bank in Dallas, was coming to a different conclusion. Mr. Bitner wasn't relying on mathematical formulas. He was dealing with actual subprime borrowers...” The article is a review of Bitner's book Confessions of a Subprime Lender.
- 2008/06/22 [L..T] Lara Logan, I Tip My Smack-o-Matic 3000 to You “You know, I was asked once, 'Do you feel responsible for the American public having a ... a negative view of the war in Iraq?' And I looked at the reporter and I said, 'Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier. ... Who in America knows what that looks like? Because I know what that looks like, and I feel responsible for the fact that no one else does.'”
- 2008/06/10 [L..T] Countdown: The Impeachment Of George W. Bush «Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich spent some 290 minutes on the House floor Monday, reading Articles of Impeachment against President George Bush. Not that you would notice, as there was a virtual media blackout on the story, but Keith Olbermann ran with it right out of the gate...»
- 2008/06/03 [L..T] Pictures at church troubling “There is no question, though, that the color pictures of mangled fetuses will stop you from ordering cherry cobbler for dessert. ... Fozard called abortion "the most evil atrocity in the nation" and said the display is intended to combat "white folks sending money to Planned Parenthood to pay for black abortions." .. Say what?”
- 2008/06/03 [L..T] Women and Science, again “There have been numerous posts about a recent report on the lack of women in science and technology careers, pointing to the sexism and macho culture as the main reason women leave these careers. Needless to say the comments on some of those posts have been frustrating.”
- 2008/05/16 [L..T] Senate Votes to Reverse FCC Decision Allowing Media Consolidation “Thursday night, the Senate cast a near-unanimous vote to reverse the Federal Communication Commission's December 2007 decision to let media companies own both a major TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in the same city.”
- 2008/05/11 [L..T] Three Names Shock Me... A substantial list of economists sign a statement supporting McCain's economic policy, but it is revealed that they are nowhere near the majority in their profession.
- 2008/05/03 [L..T] An Anatomy of Surrender “...the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech.”
- 2008/04/28 [L..T] A Blood Libel on Our Civilization “What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? ... Though I've never met him, I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him. ... So what's going on here with this stupid Expelled movie? ... It's pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism. How could a guy like this do a thing like that?”
- 2008/03/07 [L..T] Freedom Means Responsibility “Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal economics, including calls to regulate subprime mortgages.” McGovern's point about pay-day lending seems related to the point others have made about outsourcing: the terms (be that interest or wages) may seem completely abusive by our standards, but may seem a godsend (or at least far better than the alternatives) to those who choose them.
- 2008/02/28 [L..T] Announced project proof of 'gay agenda,' says DC activist “Matt Barber, policy director for cultural issues at Washington, DC-based Concerned Women for America, says the project puts to rest the notion that there is no "gay agenda." He says the homosexual lobby is committed to infiltrating the executive branch with people who define their identity based on changeable, sexually deviant behavior.” As Box Turtle Bulletin points out, his singling out of the "gay agenda" for attention while neglecting any mention of the anti-gay agenda of groups such as Focus on the Family shows that they too have an agenda.
- 2008/02/22 [L..T] Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us “A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020.”
- 2008/02/12 [L..T] Senate Passes Bill to Expand Government's Spying Powers “Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who spoke on the Senate floor for more than 20 hours in an unsuccessful effort to stall the wiretapping bill, said the vote would be remembered by future generations as a test of whether the country heeds "the rule of law or the rule of men."”
- 2008/01/21 [L..T] Saudi Arabia to lift driving ban on women “Saudi Arabia is to lift the ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the kingdom. ... The move is designed to forestall protests for greater freedom by women, which have recently included campaigners driving cars through the kingdom in defiance of a threat of detention and loss of livelihoods.”
- 2008/01/10 [L..T] Will the Iranian "Provocation" Ruse Be Allowed to Succeed? “The navy showed a tape of what they claimed were Iranian speedboats "harassing" a U.S. warship, along with audio of foreign-sounding bad guys making very threatening statements. .. However, after a blogger pointed out that the accents of the supposed speed boat passengers could not have been Iranian, the government changed its story...”
- 2008/01/08 [L..T] Appealing Apostate: Prodigal Son Frank Schaeffer Roasts Religious Right “Consider Frank Schaeffer. The name may not be familiar to you, but Schaeffer’s father, theologian and Presbyterian pastor Francis Schaeffer, was pivotal in the creation of the Religious Right. .. Frank Schaeffer shared his father’s opinions and, as an adult, worked alongside him. He had an insider’s view of the rise of the Religious Right. Father and son were there at the movement’s birth and worked with some of its biggest names. .. What does Frank Schaeffer think about the Religious Right these days? Let’s just say he’s not a fan. He refers to Robertson as “a lunatic” and says Dobson is “a power-crazed political manipulator cynically abusing his followers.” He calls the late Jerry Falwell an “unreconstructed bigot.””
- 2007/12/31 [L..T] Liberals Against Diversity “The New York Times op-ed page is trying to go from bad to diverse. The page has hired William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, as a weekly columnist, starting next Monday. The Politico reports that word of the hiring "caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons"”
- 2007/12/26 [L..T] [[2007-12-26 Bush's very good year|]] “Against all odds, and despite the usual drumbeat of criticism, President Bush had a very good year. .. The troop surge in Iraq is succeeding. America remains safe from terrorist attacks. And the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.”
- 2007/11/21 [L..T] O'Reilly: "War" on Christmas part of "secular progressive agenda" that includes "legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage" “...decrying the purported "war" on Christmas, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed that "it's all part of the secular progressive agenda ... to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square."”
- 2007/09/28 [L..T] Floating Utopias "Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000."
- 2007/08/05 [L..T] Newsweek's Climate Editorial Screed Violates Basic Standards of Journalism “Newsweek Magazine's cover story of August 13, 2007 entitled, "The Truth About Denial" contains very little that could actually be considered balanced, objective or fair by journalistic standards.”
- 2007/06/30 [L..T] Science on Trial «Over the last three weeks, I listened to testimony in the first of nine test cases in the U.S. Vaccine Court (Cedillo v. Health and Human Services) considering the question of whether a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal (which used to be in many vaccines), or the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, or both together caused autism in Michelle Cedillo, the plaintiffs' daughter.»
- 2007/04/20 [L..T] Why, what a vile little man “I speak of Dinesh D'Souza, who seems to have noticed that his creepy and dishonest tirade against atheists won him some attention, so now he has upped the ante, and gotten even creepier and more dishonest.”
- 2007/04/16 [L..T] New Research Shows Wal-Mart Rigs the System to Skip Out on $2.3 Billion in State Taxes Wal-Mart appears to be skipping out on its fair share of taxes that most Americans have to pay to help support state governments. New research conducted in part by a leading non-partisan, non-profit tax organization reveals that Wal-Mart avoided $2.3 billion in state income taxes, cutting its payment to state governments almost in half between 1999 and 2005.
- 2007/04/13 [L..T] Citing New Study Showing that Federally Funded Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Don't Work, ACLU Calls on Congress to Stop Funding “Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.”
- 2007/04/01 [L..T] Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs “Based on follow-up data collected from youth four to six years after study enrollment, the report presents the estimated program impacts on youth behavior, including sexual abstinence, risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and other related outcomes.”
- 2007/03/06 [L..T] What is science? “Unfortunately, "science" is one of those hugely polymorphic terms that carries a tremendous amount of baggage, and any one definition is going to be inadequate. This is one of those subjects where a smart philosopher ... could go on at amazing length, and even then, everyone will argue with their summaries. I'll just charge in, though, and give a couple of shorter definitions off the top of my head.”
- 2007/02/01 [L..T] Wal-Mart pays itself rent, gets large tax breaks Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer and the world's biggest retailer, is regularly paying itself rent and using the transaction to decrease the taxes it pays to state governments, according to a report in this morning's Wall Street Journal.
- 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.
- 2007/01/01 [L..T] The New American Movement and the Los Angeles Socialist Community School "Here I provide a short account of NAM's history and a description of a school it opened in Los Angeles in the 1970s, both of which form a unique link between the study of everyday life and the practice of socialism."
- 2006/12/12 [L..T] Poll: Most Americans see lingering racism -- in others "Most Americans, white and black, see racism as a lingering problem in the United States, and many say they know people who are racist, according to a new poll. [..] But few Americans of either race -- about one out of eight -- consider themselves racist."
- 2006/11/05 [L..T] Time bobbles the God and science debate “Gah, what crap. Revelation is irrational and unreasonable. You can't do science, collect data, and then decide, "Well, God has revealed to me that the correct answer is 2 grams heavier". .. That's precisely what Collins wants to do, and he admits it: he wants to add in anti-scientific beliefs and pretend he is still talking about science.”
- 2006/10/25 [L..T] Will The Next Election Be Hacked? «The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM.» ... «But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election — and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries.»
- 2006/10/06 [L..T] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Response to Diebold «The inaccurate and misleading statements in Diebold's response begin with the very first sentence. Not only did I make every effort to verify the accuracy of my sources, I made sure that researchers from both Rolling Stone and my own office contacted Diebold for comment. As readers of the article can confirm for themselves, several responses from the company are included in the piece.»
- 2006/07/02 [L..T] Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm "Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post."
- 2006/06/07 [L..T] RFK Jr: Taking the Stolen Election Seriously «Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has written a brilliant new article about the biggest political story in the history of the United States: An American politician illegitimately took the office of president by outright theft and fraud. Although such high crimes and misdemeanors have been rumored in previous elections, none in the history of the republic have been so thoroughly documented. George W. Bush is not the legitimate president of the United States.»
- 2006/06/01 [L..T] Was the 2004 Election Stolen? «Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.»
- 2006/03/02 [L..T] Mercury and autism: RFK Jr. drops another stinky one on the blogosphere “it's more of the same old assertions without evidence. (See the links at the end of this article for multiple discussions about why this assertion is unsupported and almost certainly incorrect.) The article then gets to the meat of RFK Jr.'s conspiracy-mongering, proceeding to an accusation that the CDC quietly turned down an offer by SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals in 1999 to begin production of thimerosal-free vaccines immediately...”
- 2006/01/26 [L..T] Tamed! How A Declawed, Defanged Aslan will End Our Species and Our Souls “This is the problem: C. S. Lewis was an unabashed traditionalist. As he outlined in The Abolition of Man, he believed there was an underlying and objective moral law, which was foundational to all human behavior.”
- 2005/09/12 [L..T] WTC7 Collapse: The Real Story (not tinfoil) “I see a semi-regular appearance of the idea that the WTC7 building (part of the WTC complex but not one of the Twin Towers) collapsed due to deliberate demolition rather than due to damage from the Twin Tower collapses. This is pretty implausible so I did some internet research to find out why so many people believe it and what actually happened.”
- 2005/08/03 [L..T] Why Most Published Research Findings Are False "Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research."
- 2005/07/08 [L..T] headline::Root, Root, Root for the Bomb Team “That's right, the Times is complaining that "wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism"!”
- 2005/06/20 [L..T] Deadly Immunity «Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal»
- 2005/02/15 [L..T] Popular Mechanics' Deceptive Smear Against 9/11 Truth lead paragraph::The March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine contains a 14-full-page cover article which attacks skepticism about the government and media explanation of the 9/11/01 attack. The primary method of the piece is to build and attack a straw man of myths it claims are "at the root of virtually every 9/11 alternative scenario" embraced by the "growing army of conspiracy theorists." PM selects a combination of 16 valid, erroneous, and inconsequential claims found on websites, implying that they are all endorsed by the "army" of skeptics.
- 2005/02/03 [L..T] Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report sub-headline::Popular Mechanics examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11.
- 2004/12/31 [L..T] A Big Push On Social Security «President Bush's political allies are raising millions of dollars for an election-style campaign to promote private Social Security accounts, as Democrats and Republicans prepare for what they predict will be the most expensive and extensive public policy debate since the 1993 fight over the Clinton administration's failed health care plan.»
- 2004/11/01 [L..T] Why We Stopped Doing Sex Change Operations “Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them “women” had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however. The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women.”
- 2004/09/01 [L..T] Operation Coffeecup: Ronald Reagan's Effort to Prevent the Enactment of Medicare Ronald Reagan may have crystallized, in the minds of Republican strategists, the political ability of popular myth to be more powerful than the truth – as exemplified by his well-documented history of working against social programs (Medicare, Social Security) while convincingly denying it in debates with Jimmy Carter.
- 2004/07/30 [L..T] Sex changes are not effective, say researchers “There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend tomorrow.” This article misleadingly represents what is known about the effects of SRS, and the headline is an outright lie.
- 2004/04/04 [L..T] Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits "Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect – a simple matter of computer keystrokes – and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses."
- 2004/02/20 [L..T] Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush's talking-points war The neocons had three reasons for the US to invade Iraq: (1) sanctions were working, not leaving US companies in a favored position for doing business in Iraq; (2) the US needed a location for military bases; (3) the US needed to ensure that oil would continue to be traded in dollars.
- 2004/02/15 [L..T] Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization “...anyone who has any understanding of how America – or any civilization – works... will realize that this new diktat of the courts [in support of gay marriage] will not have any of the intended effects, while the unintended effects are likely to be devastating.”
- 2004/01/21 [L..T] Best of the Web Today a potpourri of news items, including "The al Qaeda Cheering Section" in which Taranto equates dislike of the Patriot Act with being fond of terrorists.
- 2002/05/31 [L..T] WTC Collapse - The Contribution Of Enviro Fanaticism “When the use of asbestos was banned, Levine's insulation had already been installed in the first 64 floors. The newer lightweight construction didn't permit traditional heavy concrete insulation for the remaining 54 floors, and so a nonasbestos substitute was jury-rigged to complete the buildings. On studying the arrangement, Levine said, "If a fire breaks out above the 64th floor, that building will fall down." He was right.”
- 2001/06/04 [L..T] Pearl Harbor: The Facts Behind the Fiction “Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, stated in 1944: "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war."”
- 2000/08/18 [L..T] Wake up, parents! "Schools have already taken over the decision as to when and in what manner your child will be introduced to sex. Some schools are teaching various techniques of homosexual acts and some have gay activists visiting the schools, passing out cards giving the addresses of local homosexual hangouts."
- 2000/01/18 [L..T] Global Warming Is 300-Year-Old News “Unfortunately for advocates of the Kyoto treaty, atmospheric temperatures over the same two decades have not risen.”
- 1999/01/24 [L..T] ACPI extensions an email from Bill Gates suggesting that the ACPI be designed in such a way as to prevent it from working with anything except Microsoft Windows
- 1988/09/16 [L..T] Originalism: The Lesser Evil "The principal theoretical defect of nonoriginalism, in my view, is its incompatibility with the very principle that legitimizes judicial review of constitutionality. Nothing in the text of the Constitution confers upon the courts the power to inquire into, rather than passively assume, the constitutionality of federal statutes."
- 1972/06/17 [L..T] Libertarian Party Platform of 1972 "We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state, and defend the rights of the individual."
- 1941/08/01 [L..T] Who Goes Nazi? "It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one's acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."