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- 2022/11/14 [L..T] NYT Investigation Offers Biased Reporting on Puberty Blocker Concerns «It's an overtly biased piece of work, and will no doubt spur a heck of a lot of articles from trans people, and allies, seeking to fact check and provide context and criticism on where the Times reporters, Megan Twohey and Christina Jewett, went so wrong. As our specific beat is media criticism, this piece will highlight the clearest journalistic errors, weaselly phrasing, and other poor choices made in the writing and editing of this piece.»
- 2022/11/14 [L..T] They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost? «Puberty blockers can ease transgender youths’ anguish and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about long-term physical effects and other consequences.» A bit of think of the children scaremongering from your friendly neighborhood newspaper.
- 2022/10/14 [L..T] Mayor Will Announce Plan to Ban Unsanctioned Camping Across Portland and Build 500-Capacity Homeless "Campuses" «Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler plans next week to announce a sweeping strategy to ban unsanctioned camping across the city and build three massive sanctioned camping areas, called "campuses," each with capacity for 500 people. [..] Each campus would be divided into four camps with a 125-person capacity.» «The city will seek to hire an outside contractor to run the three campuses.»
- 2022/09/22 [L..T] A judge blocks the Indiana abortion ban a week after it took effect «Owen County Judge Kelsey Hanlon issued a preliminary injunction against the ban that took effect one week ago. The injunction was sought by abortion clinic operators who argued in a lawsuit that the state constitution protects access to the medical procedure.»
- 2022/09/21 [L..T] GOP congressional candidate said US suffered from women’s suffrage and praised organization trying to repeal 19th Amendment «John Gibbs, who defeated in the primary an incumbent Republican who had voted to impeach Trump, also made comments in the early 2000s praising an organization trying to repeal the 19th Amendment which also argued that women’s suffrage had made the United States into a “totalitarian state.”»
- 2022/09/16 [L..T] Book ban efforts surging in 2022, library association says «“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “It’s both the number of challenges and the kinds of challenges. It used to be a parent had learned about a given book and had an issue with it. Now we see campaigns where organizations are compiling lists of books, without necessarily reading or even looking at them.”»
- 2022/06/15 [L..T] The Battle Over Gender Therapy «What Leibowitz and his co-authors didn’t foresee, when they began, was that their work would be engulfed by two intersecting forces: a significant rise in the number of teenagers openly identifying as transgender and seeking gender care, and a right-wing backlash in the United States against allowing them to medically transition, including state-by-state efforts to ban it.»
- 2022/03/17 [L..T] Trans Kids: The Misinformation Battle «U.S. politicians are trying to keep trans kids from getting the medical care they need to transition — and states are banning them from playing on the sports teams that match their gender. So we’re looking at the science here, and asking: are the medical treatments for trans kids dangerous? And do trans folks have an advantage when it comes to sports? We talk to Florence Ashley, Dr. Jack Turban, and Joanna Harper to find out.»
- 2022/02/02 [L..T] What happened after these unhoused people got monthly $500 checks? Two-thirds have homes «The group predicted that the money would help reduce stress and improve food security, and it did. But two-thirds of the people who were unhoused when the pilot began also now have permanent housing. (The number has grown since the program first ended, when only a third had moved into new housing.)» This was quite unexpected.
- 2021/07/28 [L..T] Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug? «The Food and Drug Administration claims to follow the science. So why is it attacking ivermectin, a medication it certified in 1996?» Short Answer: It isn't, and this opinion-piece is stuffed full of misleading claims.
- 2021/07/02 [L..T] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attacks me and Daily Kos. This is my (way too much fun) response «You may have seen my stories about Robert Kennedy Jr.'s lawsuit against Daily Kos. The first one is here, and the follow-up is here. His organization now fires back here. I had a good laugh reading that drivel, and now I'll share my reaction with you.»
- 2020/11/03 [L..T] Should We End Capitalism? (Douglas Murray & Bret Weinstein) “You have a society that generates a huge amount of wellbeing. That wellbeing is not well-distributed. I do not mean to say it should be evenly distributed... but it's not well-distributed. It's not efficiently distributed with respect to producing the kind of incentive that you would want -- you know, a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian ought to want opportunity better distributed because it results in more people discovering more things that serve us collectively. [...] The revolution that we are watching begin has misunderstood the difference between the noise in the way [...] they've misunderstood the basic fact that their lives will get much, much worse if the engine that creates the wellbeing that is unfairly distributed is turned off.–
- 2020/10/14 [L..T] The Curse of Monster Island: a four year experiment in unmoderated free speech “Gather round friends, I want to tell you a true horror story. I can’t promise a twist ending; the monster is still going to turn out to be humans with funny hats on. What I can promise is a direct connection to a recent high-profile act of violence, and an increased anxiety about unregulated internet speech.
- 2020/10/02 [L..T] Young trans men share brutal accounts of conversion therapy camps, where they were abused and forced to carry heavy rocks “...in June, J.K. Rowling liked a tweet from a Canadian anti-trans organisation called We The Females opposing a proposed law in Canada that would ban conversion therapy for LGBT+ youth, including trans kids. [..] Like other anti-trans organisations, We The Females propose that trans youth should be subjected to “gender-critical therapy”, to deter or prevent them from transitioning. Gender-critical feminists often claim that affirming therapists railroad youth. ”
- 2020/10/01 [L..T] The data scientist exposing US white supremacists: 'This is how you fight Nazis' “After surviving far right violence in Charlottesville, Emily Gorcenski has tracked the Proud Boys and other extremist groups.”
- 2020/09/28 [L..T] How A Conservative 6-3 Majority Would Reshape The Supreme Court «...Supreme Court experts [..] stress that we’re likely to see the legal conservative movement seize this moment, and as such, we should brace for a wave of rulings that move the law fundamentally to the right – on everything from hot-button cultural issues like gun rights and abortion to more legalistic, but nevertheless important, topics like the power of the executive branch.»
- 2020/09/26 [L..T] 'Greatest threat we’ve faced so far': Oregon declares state of emergency ahead of Proud Boys rally “The governor of Oregon has declared a state of emergency ahead of far-right demonstrations in Portland, where groups including the Proud Boys are expected to hold a rally following months of protests against police brutality and federal intervention.”
- 2020/09/23 [L..T] The Election That Could Break America “If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?”
- 2020/09/23 [L..T] Republicans will replace RBG but Democrats hold the trump cards – no, really “Progressives should not worry about what will happen if they mimic McConnell’s constitutional hardball. Their representatives need only act with a little less restraint”
- 2020/09/23 [L..T] Surreal scenes from SCOTUS as Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrives for the last time “Thousands gathered outside the Supreme Court as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned for her last visit on Wednesday, including more than 100 of her former clerks.”
- 2020/09/20 [L..T] Pelosi won't rule out using impeachment as option to stop Trump Supreme Court pick “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday would not rule out impeachment as an option to stop President Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court pick from being confirmed to the bench, saying Democrats will "use every arrow in our quiver” to block the eventual nominee.”
- 2020/09/19 [L..T] Everything at stake in the upcoming Supreme Court battle “There are significant political and logistical hurdles that McConnell must clear to confirm Trump's nominee with just 45 days left until the election. But there’s little Democrats can do to halt the process if Republicans, who hold a majority in the Senate, remain united. ”
- 2020/09/19 [L..T] Obama calls for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor to be appointed by the election winner Barack Obama: “A basic principle of the law – and of everyday fairness – is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what's convenient or advantageous in the moment. The rule of law, the legitimacy of our courts, the fundamental workings of our democracy all depend on that basic principle.”
- 2020/09/19 [L..T] Trump and GOP rush on replacing RBG out of weakness and fear “To Republicans, the rush to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a simple proposition: If they don’t replace her right now with a conservative jurist, they’ll lose their chance to replace her. [..] In other words, they think they’re going to lose in November.”
- 2020/09/19 [L..T] Showing they want Democrats to fight GOP efforts to replace Ginsburg, donors inundate ActBlue “As the political reality of Ginsburg’s passing sank in, the ticker that keeps track of donations soared on ActBlue, the non-profit operation that provides a tool for left-leaning activists to raise money for political candidates and issues. About $100,000 in donations came each minute.”
- 2020/09/19 [L..T] In Memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) “Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice who first rose to national prominence as an ACLU lawyer fighting for equal rights for women, has died at 87 years old.”
- 2020/09/18 [L..T] White House announces Trump will nominate a new justice, McConnell announces there will be a vote “...sources inside the White House have already made it clear that Trump intends to nominate a replacement "in the coming days." It can be expected that nominee will come from the list of potential justices Trump published just last week, but considering that it is Donald Trump, anything is possible.
- 2020/09/18 [L..T] Murkowski: 'Fair is fair,' no Supreme Court confirmation before the inauguration. Who's joining her? “Remarkably, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, just told Alaska Public Media on Friday afternoon that she would not confirm a new Supreme Court justice before next year's inauguration. "Fair is fair," she said speaking hypothetically before the announcement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing.”
- 2020/09/18 [L..T] What Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Death Means for America “A furious battle over a Supreme Court vacancy is arguably the last thing the United States needs right now. [..] The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today represents a devastating loss for feminists who held up the 87-year-old as an icon of women’s rights, and as a bulwark protecting abortion rights and a wide range of other progressive ideals on a conservative Supreme Court.”
- 2020/09/18 [L..T] Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87 “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.”
- 2020/07/27 [L..T] Just an ordinary TERF talking about biology Myers dissects some bizarre arguments from @lissyboops, who is apparently of the TERF persuasion.
- 2020/07/16 [L..T] Fox News pushed coronavirus misinformation 253 times in just five days “Fox News repeated coronavirus misinformation 253 times in its weekday coverage from July 6 through 10, including claims that undermined scientific research about the pandemic, eroded trust in public health experts and policy recommendations, called for reopening schools and businesses without regard to public health precautions, and politicized the country’s response to the virus.”
- 2020/07/10 [L..T] Cultivating a British flavor of narrow-mindedness "I saw the same thing in US skeptics, of course. But there was something fundamental going on that is also reflected in the British school of evolutionary biology, represented by Maynard Smith and Dawkins, that totally embraced reductive explanations and adaptationism, vs. the American subset led by Lewontin and Gould, who fiercely opposed eugenics and detested the arrogance of thinking biology could be reduced to a catalog of alleles." .. "Then there's the outcome of all this activity by bigots claiming the mantle of science – some people actually believed."
- 2020/06/17 [L..T] Fox News Argues Viewers Don't Assume Tucker Carlson Reports Facts Fox News argues in court that Tucker Carlson's audience knows that things which Carlson asserts, no matter how definitively stated as fact, may in fact have been entirely made up by Carlson on the spot and could be completely false, and that Carlson's employer will not only take no action against him for doing so but will in fact defend him.
- 2020/06/10 [L..T] J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues "For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t."
- 2020/02/18 [L..T] Richard Dawkins Claims Eugenics Works. He's Wrong. “Last week, Britain discovered that they had a eugenicist advising the prime minister, and that caused a polite bit of upset for almost everyone&rdquo Among the people who were ok with it was Richard Dawkins, who argued that eugenics may be morally wrong but it nonetheless works and these are just the facts.
- 2019/12/20 [L..T] JK Rowling's Transphobia Wasn't Hard to Find, She Wrote a Book About It "It's not just her blatant transphobia on Twitter. As the trans community has been saying for years, Rowling's transphobia is obvious in her writing, too."
- 2019/12/18 [L..T] Judge rules against researcher who lost job over transgender tweets Maya Forstater, a tax expert who lost her contract at the Centre for Global Development after tweeting that transgender women cannot change their biological sex, has lost her tribunal case.
- 2019/11/15 [L..T] Researcher defends tweets on trans rights at employment tribunal “Forstater tweeted that "men cannot change into women". She has argued that her "gender critical" beliefs should be protected under the 2010 Equality Act, and she has funded her legal challenge through the CrowdJustice website.” ...“She was accused of using "offensive and exclusionary" language in tweets opposing government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to self-identify as the opposite sex.“
- 2019/11/14 [L..T] Multnomah County Seeing Spike In People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness “[Marc Jolin, the director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services], said the office already knows what the solution is. "The fact that we don’t have supporting housing is why we’re seeing a persistent increase in the chronically homeless over time," he said.”
- 2019/11/03 [L..T] Rabidly pro-Trump fake news site Epoch Times may be engaging in astroturfing “on Thursday, religious right activist Jim Garlow took to Facebook to confirm what a lot of people suspected – the most rabid fundies believe rolling back abortion and marriage equality are so important that they must go all-in for Trump. [..] Garlow took part in a gathering of Trumpvangelicals at the White House on Tuesday, and included a link to coverage of that gathering from an outfit known as "The BL". [...] a search turned up a Snopes investigation from October that revealed some too-close-for-comfort ties between BL and Epoch Times.”
- 2019/10/29 [L..T] [Serious Discussion] Attracting a higher homeless population with Durham's Affordable Housing Plan? “With a proposed $10,455,838 (pg. 4 in the referendum) to be spent on homeless programs over the next 5 years, how do we protect Durham from attracting an even greater number of homeless people?”
- 2019/10/29 [L..T] The Long Shadow of the 'Welfare Queen' “When Ronald Reagan and his advisors wanted to undermine the very institution of social programs, he turned to a news story out of Chicago – the tale of one Linda Taylor, who'd bilked the government benefits system out of so much money she was dubbed the "welfare queen."”
- 2019/10/28 [L..T] Facebook allows prominent right-wing website to break the rules “The Daily Wire, the right-wing website founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, is a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation. Its toxic content is also fantastically successful on Facebook, with each story reaching more people than any other major media outlet. A Popular Information investigation reveals some of this success is attributable to a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.”
- 2019/10/28 [L..T] Protests Continue Against Neo-Confederates in North Carolina “Anti-racists continue to mobilize in North Carolina against neo-Confederate and white nationalist groups, with this weekend seeing two more arrests on the anti-racist side.”
- 2019/10/28 [L..T] James Patrick Shillinglaw, Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement, Jamestown, North Carolina “Asheville Anti-Racism exposed James Patrick Shillinglaw, of Jamestown, North Carolina, as a member of white nationalist group Identity Evropa, recently renamed the American Identity Movement.”
- 2019/10/28 [L..T] Jeremy Bertino, Proud Boy in Charlotte, North Carolina “Jeremy Bertino, of Locust, North Carolina, was exposed as a Proud Boy this week after rallying in Pittsboro, North Carolina.”
- 2019/10/28 [L..T] Victory over the worst gerrymander in modern history: Court blocks North Carolina GOP's House map “On Monday, a bipartisan panel of state court judges delivered a monumental victory against the worst gerrymander in modern history when it blocked North Carolina from using its Republican-drawn congressional map in the 2020 elections, clearing the way for a fairer replacement that could see Democrats pick up three or more seats.”
- 2019/10/21 [L..T] Statement on GitLab "The MoodleNet team use products and services from GitLab Inc. to develop the MoodleNet code base. We were therefore disappointed to learn of a recent decision by GitLab Inc. to change their policies around who they will and will not do business with."
- 2019/10/20 [L..T] Amazon is shipping expired food, from baby formula to old beef jerky, scaring consumers and putting big brands at risk “...items are arriving spoiled and well past their sell-by date, Amazon customers say. Interviews with brands, consumers, third-party sellers and consultants all point to loopholes in Amazon’s technology and logistics system that allow for expired items to proliferate with little to no accountability.”
- 2019/10/17 [L..T] Inside TurboTax's 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free “Using lobbying, the revolving door and "dark pattern" customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government's attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.”
- 2019/09/30 [L..T] Richard Dawkins Loves Evangelicals if They Hate Social Justice Richard Dawkins is uncompromising in his opposition to religion – except when it happens to oppose something that he thinks is worse, like social justice.
- 2019/09/12 [L..T] Why the neurodiversity movement has become harmful The movement has good intentions, but it favours the high-functioning and overlooks those who struggle with severe autism.
- 2019/08/05 [L..T] Will Durham’s business community support the city’s $95M affordable housing bond? ““A generation of opportunity” could be lost if voters don’t approve Durham’s $95 million affordable-housing bond this fall, [local businessman Steve Toler] said Monday.”
- 2019/06/24 [L..T] Abortion & Ben Shapiro “To DESTROY Ben Shapiro, you must first BECOME Ben Shapiro”
- 2019/04/22 [L..T] Here's How TurboTax Just Tricked You Into Paying to File Your Taxes "Did you know that if you make less than $66,000 a year, you can prepare and file your taxes for free? No? That’s no accident. Companies that make tax preparation software, like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, would rather you didn’t know."
- 2019/02/26 [L..T] What You Need to Know About the Largest Proposed Housing Bond Referendum in North Carolina History "In [Mayor Steve Schewel's] view, the city's current funding for affordable housing isn’t enough to keep downtown from becoming an expensive enclave for white people. If residents are serious about preventing displacement, they need to put their money where their mouths are."
- 2019/01/03 [L..T] Transphobia in the UK a mostly-audio (spoken word) video (35:05) giving a fairly detailed layout of transnegation arguments in the UK
- 2018/11/05 [L..T] Why is British media so transphobic? "The answer lies in part to the coalescence of a certain set of ideas in a very specific circle of voices in the early 21st century – voices that later went on to hold high profile positions in much of the U.K.'s print and broadcast media."
- 2018/08/30 [L..T] Offering a more progressive definition of freedom Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He is a progressive Democrat, Rhodes scholar, served a tour of duty in Afghanistan during his time as mayor, and is openly gay. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Buttigieg talked about the need for progressives to recast concepts that political conservatives have traditionally “owned” – like freedom, family, and patriotism – in more progressive terms.
- 2018/08/30 [L..T] Beaten for Autism? The person filmed by KGW News on June 4 being struck on the head 16 times by a Marion County sheriff deputy while pinned down by three additional officers says the incident may be partly understood as the response of uninformed individuals to people they don’t understand.
- 2018/08/16 [L..T] Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports In on-line forums, parents have been reporting that their children are experiencing what is described here as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion.
- 2018/08/09 [L..T] Protester Maimed by Portland Police: ‘I Thought I Was Going to Die’ Anthony, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was injured last weekend when cops in riot gear unleashed flashbangs, pepper spray, rubber bullets and other less-lethal weapons as local protesters demonstrated against far-right groups massed downtown.
- 2018/08/07 [L..T] Protesters clash with guards at Portland City Hall; 2 arrested Protesters demanding reforms in police use of crowd control clashed with security officers at Portland City Hall after Mayor Ted Wheeler shut down a Wednesday morning City Council meeting.
- 2018/08/06 [L..T] Portland Police Chief: Allegations Of Protest Favoritism 'Ridiculous' "Everything that was anticipated ... with the very clear intent of what people wanted to do, with the level of confrontation and violence that they were expecting to bring, that did not occur. The officers were there and they prevented all of that from happening."
- 2018/08/04 [L..T] IGD Portland: Mass Community Mobilization Against Far-Right Live blog from antifascist mobilization in Portland, Oregon.
- 2018/08/04 [L..T] Portland's Patriot Prayer Rally Could Be Most Violent Since Charlottesville, Activists Say Armed, proto-fascist gangs are set to rally in Portland, Oregon, this weekend, stirring fears that the city could witness the kind of political violence not seen since the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia, nearly a year ago.
- 2018/07/17 [L..T] Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States “The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.”
- 2018/07/06 [L..T] Director’s Desk: Portland has criminalized poverty and mental illness “Now we know: More than half of the people arrested in Portland last year were homeless. [...] The ACLU of Oregon issued a report last year documenting 224 laws around the state that target people who are homeless. It identified laws that target people for sleeping in public places, for begging for money and for loitering. In other words, ACLU of Oregon researchers identified laws that matter only if you are homeless.”
- 2018/07/04 [L..T] Sheriff's office called on Oregon state legislator for representing constituents while black “"Casing" the neighborhood by knocking on doors and having extended conversations with the homeowners, carrying only a phone, a pen, and some leaflets. Bynum appears to have, sadly, taken it in stride. "It was just bizarre," she told an Oregonian reporter. "It boils down to people not knowing their neighbors and people having a sense of fear in their neighborhoods, which is kind of my job to help eradicate. But at the end of the day, it's important for people to feel like they can talk to each other to help minimize misunderstandings." Indeed. Had the woman who called the cops – it was a woman – simply engaged with Bynum, problem solved.”
- 2018/07/01 [L..T] When Children Say They’re Trans «Hormones? Surgery? The choices are fraught – and there are no easy answers.» ...except puberty blockers are generally a good idea. This article emphasizes the unknowns and the risks, and mistakenly implies they're not a good general solution.
- 2018/07/01 [L..T] Right-Wing Portland Rally Declared Riot Amid Clashes With Antifa Protesters A rally in Oregon sponsored by the right-wing group Patriot Prayer turned violent on Saturday as demonstrators clashed with anti-fascist protesters, who showed up in opposition to the event.
- 2018/06/30 [L..T] Portland Police Declare a Riot After Right-Wing Marchers Begin Beating Antifascists with Flag Poles «For the first time in more than a year of street brawling, Portland police today deemed a march by Proud Boys and other right-wing protesters too violent to continue.»
- 2018/06/27 [L..T] Portland Police Saw Right-Wing Protesters as "Much More Mainstream" Than Leftist Ones “Newly released draft reports from a city review of how Portland police handled dueling demonstrations last summer reveal cops admitting what activists have long suspected: They saw right-wing protesters as less of a threat than leftist ones.”
- 2018/06/22 [L..T] Contra the Fearmongering Atlantic Story, Trans-Affirming Care Is Great for Kids «Given all this hand-wringing over the children, it feels necessary to say, unambiguously, that such fears are overblown and can lead parents astray, guiding them toward decisions that may permanently harm their kids and endanger their relationship with them for the rest of their lives. Contrary to the fears of Singal and his ilk, current research supports a flexible approach that does not push children toward any particular outcome, and best practices put the needs of seriously distressed children first.»
- 2018/06/22 [L..T] Woman who set self on fire in Portland park remembered as 'brilliant and tortured' artist “The 31-year-old woman walked on crutches into a downtown Portland park. Minutes later, she set herself on fire. Bystanders put out the fire that consumed Chloe Sagal, but she died from her injuries. It was an act, witnesses and friends say, that was a political protest as well as a suicide.”
- 2018/06/06 [L..T] Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw on protests, trust and learning her new city "The mix-up proved to be a quick, hard lesson for Outlaw on Portland's unusual commission form of government. Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as police commissioner, doesn’t have the final say on decisions like this. He must wade through established city procedures and gain majority support on the City Council."
- 2018/03/28 [L..T] Is J.K. Rowling Transphobic? A Trans Woman Investigates "Ultimately, the answer is yes, she is transphobic, at least in the ways that so many average cisgender people can be. However, because she’s J.K. Rowling, creator of the best-selling book series of all time and an idol to so many LGBTQ+ children and now adults, she gets called out for it. I think it's fair that she receives criticism from trans people, especially given her advocacy on behalf of queer people in general, but also because she has a huge platform. Many people look up to her for creating a singular piece of popular culture that holds deep meaning for fans from different walks of life, and she has a responsibility to handle that platform wisely."
- 2018/03/05 [L..T] Sex Change: Physically Impossible, Psychosocially Unhelpful, and Philosophically Misguided "Modern medicine can’t reassign sex physically, and attempting to do so doesn’t produce good outcomes psychosocially. Here is the evidence." Article presents evidence to the contrary, ignores it, and repeatedly concludes that selected ideologues are prima facie correct.
- 2018/02/15 [L..T] Transgender Women Aren't "Women" "I wanted to talk about the fact that I personally find it kind of offensive when transgender people don't own the fact that they're trans." Video is Tweeted, and much debate ensues.
- 2018/01/22 [L..T] Vast majority of new wealth last year went to top 1% “A new billionaire is created every other day. The three richest Americans have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the U.S. population. And 82% of the global wealth generated last year went to just 1% of the world's population.”
- 2018/01/15 [L..T] Arsonist TERF thinks trans women are immoral & should be beaten "I’m quite prepared to threaten violence because it seems to me that politically what they’re seeking to do is piss on all women. That’s what they’re doing for their personal gratification. There aren’t many of them, but what really offends me is the extent to which academia and political parties have listened to them in a way that they’re not listening to us as women." – Linda Bellos
- 2017/09/04 [L..T] The Purge Of Transgender People From American Life Has Begun “Five members of Trump's evangelical executive advisory board, including the founder of the Family Research Council James Dobson, signed the Nashville Statement. The Nashville statement dictated that transgender people should not be tolerated in society, and that anyone who tolerates them is not a Christian.”
- 2017/09/01 [L..T] How Russian & Alt-Right Twitter Accounts Worked Together to Skew the Narrative About Berkeley “The narrative surrounding last weekend’s protests in Berkeley took shape on social media and was picked up, at least in part, by mainstream news outlets. The result was a skewed presentation of events that was almost entirely devoid of the context in which they took place. Even more troubling: that narrative was influenced by pro-Russian social media networks, including state-sponsored propaganda outlets, botnets, cyborgs, and individual users.”
- 2017/09/01 [L..T] The Idiot Boys of Antifa and the Alt-Right “A lot of what’s happened over the last 10,000 years can be attributed to hormonally charged young men pulling stupid crap.”
- 2017/08/31 [L..T] Preacher Aligned with Portland-Area Far-Right Group Promises “Bloodshed” at Future Rallies “Portland resident and far-right preacher Allen Pucket has penned an inflammatory Facebook post promising violence at future protests, possibly including the upcoming "Freedom March" and counter-protests slated to envelop downtown Portland on Sept. 10..”
- 2017/08/31 [L..T] The Right Wing 'God Will Wipe Them Out': White Supremacist Preacher Promises 'Bloodshed' at Future Rallies “In a video, Pucket also said that “God’s going to wipe them out one day anyway,” referring to anti-racist and anti-fascist counter-protesters who have marched against white supremacist groups in recent months. He also professed a belief that those who organize such rallies shouldn’t cancel them for fear of violent retaliation, but should be "patriots" willing to "fight" in the streets for their white supremacist beliefs.”
- 2017/08/19 [L..T] The truth has got its boots on: what the evidence says about Mr. Damore’s Google memo a detailed rebuttal of the supposedly-scientific arguments supporting Damore's arguments; includes links to many other rebuttals and related resources
- 2017/08/13 [L..T] Damore's Claim There Are Population-Level Differences Between the Genders Is Not The Central Problem With His Manifesto. “In response to the Damore manifesto, "Heterodox Academy", a group that includes multiple political points of view, posted that the scientific evidence is strong that there are population-level differences between the genders. However, the bare assertion that there are population-level differences between the genders is not the central problem with Damore's manifesto.”
- 2017/08/11 [L..T] We've studied gender and STEM for 25 years. The science doesn't support the Google memo. “These are some issues that males simply do not have to face. The "anxiety gap" exists for a reason, and it is not about biology.”
- 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."
- 2014/07/22 [L..T] An "unfortunate political stunt" goes awry «Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) thought he'd come up with a great idea: he'd file a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act in the hopes of making coverage more expensive for Capitol Hill staff. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Johnson's home state of Wisconsin, conceded the senator's lawsuit was "frivolous" and an "unfortunate political stunt."»
- 2014/07/22 [L..T] Great Barrier Reef Will Be 'Pretty Ugly' By 2050, Researchers Say "...there are additional threats facing the Great Barrier reef. Earlier this year, a University of Queensland report indicated that the reef will not be able to recover from "irreversible" damage caused by climate change."
- 2014/07/22 [L..T] Appeals court swings a sledgehammer at the ACA «There's one last court case that we've been following that, in theory, could still destroy much of the federal health care system. At a distance, it's a genuinely ridiculous case, but as Adam Serwer reports this morning, its absurdity didn't stop Republican-appointed judges from making the wrong call this morning.»
- 2014/07/21 [L..T] Children Exposed To Religion Have Difficulty Distinguishing Fact From Fiction, Study Finds "Young children who are exposed to religion have a hard time differentiating between fact and fiction, according to a new study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science."
- 2014/07/18 [L..T] [[2014/07/18/This Woman Has Been Confronting Her Catcallers|]] "It was then she had the idea for Cards Against Street Harassment: pocket-size cards women could download, print, and hand out to their catcallers, explaining why the attention was unwanted without even speaking."
- 2014/07/16 [L..T] Portland police Capt. Mark Kruger's past discipline to be erased -- including for tribute to Nazi-era soldiers -- under city settlement “To settle a legal claim, the city of Portland has agreed to pay $5,000 to Portland police Capt. Mark Kruger and erase two disciplinary actions from his personnel record: a suspension for his public tribute to five Nazi-era German soldiers at a city park and a reprimand for retaliating against a female lieutenant.”
- 2014/07/16 [L..T] Everybody I know is on Food Stamps. "Everybody I know is on Food Stamps. We have jobs, but the jobs pay so low that we still need help. We stock shelves, pump gas, and cook your food. Stuff that needs to be done, but is somehow not "Real Work" or a "Real Job." Let's not even go into the fact that a good chunk of us went to college so we could have a "Real Job" but when we finished those "Real Jobs" turned out to be as mythical as the Yeti or Brownies."
- 2014/07/15 [L..T] Timeline: Koch Brothers' 50 Years in the Tar Sands "The Koch brothers built their first fortune on the particularly dirty form of oil mined in Alberta's tar sands, where they have been major players for 50 years, and remain deeply invested."
- 2014/07/14 [L..T] Hobby Lobby Is Now Discriminating Against a Transgender Employee
- 2014/07/11 [L..T] What We Don't Talk About When We Don't Talk About Abortion "I had an abortion four years ago. I just recently decided to start talking about it."
- 2014/07/06 [L..T] Billionaire Koch brothers are big oil players in Alberta "The ultra-right U.S. Koch brothers, little-known to Canadians, are major players in Alberta's oil patch, where they control at least 1.1 million acres."
- 2014/07/06 [L..T] A Company Liberals Could Love Douthat argues that liberals should support Hobby Lobby because of their internal minimum wage policy, and goes on to argue something about liberal intolerance of religious diversity.
- 2014/07/06 [L..T] Fukushima has 9 days to prevent "unsafe" overheating "Fukushima operator TEPCO has been forced to switch off the cooling system at mothballed Reactor Unit 5, after it was discovered that it had been leaking water. In nine days, if the system is not repaired, temperatures will exceed dangerous levels."
- 2014/07/04 [L..T] At Some Point, Progressives Need to Break Up With the Democratic Party "The Democratic Party espouses right-wing policies. Self-described progressives give them cash. Comedian Bill Maher gave them a million cash dollars, yet Democrats don't agree with him on anything. Why? Because he hates Republicans even more. Why didn't Maher save his money? Or better yet, fund a group or a writer or an artist who promotes ideas he actually agrees with? Because he, like tens of millions of other liberals, are stuck in the two-party trap."
- 2014/07/02 [L..T] Two documentaries reveal shadowy Koch-funded network threatening democracy, public education
- 2014/07/02 [L..T] Cliven Bundy's cousin: "He was raised in a racist predicament" "Explaining that she and Bundy were raised as Mormons, Robertson said, “For the first 130 years of our church, they taught that black people carried the curse of Cain,” adding, “That's why their skin was black. He was raised in a racist predicament.”"
- 2014/07/01 [L..T] Hobby Lobby Made Fight a Matter of Christian Principle
- 2014/07/01 [L..T] 3/4 of Hobby Lobby's investment funds include contraception, abortion services "Hobby Lobby is so offended by the idea of contributing to its employees' birth control expenses that it fought all the way to the Supreme Court over the issue. But its retirement plan has over $73M sunk into funds that include companies that make contraception."
- 2014/06/23 [L..T] Earth has warmest May on record, may signal warmest year in pipeline
- 2014/06/21 [L..T] The Republic of Ireland has never had a school shooting in its history. "The Republic of Ireland has never had a school shooting in its history. Not. A. Single. One."
- 2014/06/21 [L..T] States with Weak Gun Laws and Higher Gun Ownership Lead Nation in Gun Deaths
- 2014/06/20 [L..T] 'Runaway maids' tracked down on Kuwaiti Instagram "Kuwaiti domestic workers are being named and shamed on an Instagram account called Mn7asha, or "runaway"."
- 2014/06/18 [L..T] Abu Khattala comes into sharper focus «The second [possibility] is that the suspected ringleader behind the Benghazi attack is in on the Benghazi conspiracy. Sure, the sheeple will resist, but don't you see it? The conspiracy is so broad, so all-encompassing, and so far-reaching in its scope, the White House has even gotten to Ahmed Abu Khattala, convincing an alleged terrorist to stick to the talking points.»
- 2014/06/17 [L..T] Fall Into Theocracy #1: How the Catholic Church is Killing Polish Democracy
- 2014/06/15 [L..T] WordPress Demands $10,000 For DMCA Takedown Censorship
- 2014/06/15 [L..T] Fukushima's Children are Dying "Some 39 months after the multiple explosions at Fukushima, thyroid cancer rates among nearby children have skyrocketed to more than forty times (40x) normal." CAVEAT: This article's analysis is suspect.
- 2014/06/12 [http://newamericamedia.org/2014/06/oakland-at-risk-of-severe-floods---not-just-water-but-sewage.php L..T] Sea Rise Threatens Oakland's Sewer System
- 2014/06/12 [L..T] The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges
- 2014/06/11 [L..T] Eric Cantor Pushes GOP To The Edge Of A Cliff, Falls Off
- 2014/06/11 [L..T] The Myth of Trafficking
- 2014/06/11 [L..T] U.S. Budget Deficit Narrows as Economy, Jobs Boost Revenue "The U.S. posted a $130 billion budget deficit in May and the smallest shortfall for the first eight months of a fiscal year since 2008, as a stronger economy and rising employment bolster revenue."
- 2014/06/11 [L..T] Armed, masked Russian separatists seize "decadent" hackspace in Donetsk, Ukraine "The Izolyatsia makerspace in Donetsk, Ukraine, has been seized by armed, masked Russian separatists from the Donetsk People's Republic, who denounced it as "decadent" and accused it of being "an American-funded anti-Russian organisation which supports fascism and develops decadent kind of arts." Izolyatsia is the first hackerspace to be occupied by an armed militia."
- 2014/06/11 [L..T] Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained "... it's impossible for me to write fiction set in the near future of Scotland until after we've navigated the political white water ahead: the referendum in September 2014, the general election in June 2015, and (optionally) the further UK referendum in 2016/17. Truly, we're living through the dog days of Schroedinger's Republic; and it's anybody's guess which state the wave function will finally collapse into."
- 2014/06/10 [L..T] We Need to Talk About This "One of the things that happens when I meet a bunch of new people, as I did last weekend, is that when they begin to ask about my job, the conversation inevitably comes around to the ugly part of my job. The threats, the harassment, the rivers of vitriolic shit I have to navigate on a daily basis as a cost of doing this work. [..] Every time, the people with whom I share this experience express shock. It is always, always, a surprise that a woman who does public advocacy is subjected to this sort of abuse."
- 2014/06/10 [L..T] Cult of Compliance: Attacking the Breasts of Female Protestors "One of my questions about what I term the cult of compliance is the extent to which it is a product of our historical moment or an indelible aspect of the relationship between the state and its subjects. I'm an optimist, I want to believe that we can improve, that we can make things better. I'm also an historian, though, so it's hard to ignore this kind of evidence as coming out of a fundamental place in the structures of our society in its reactions to protesters in general and women specifically."
- 2014/06/09 [L..T] George Will: Being a victim of sexual assault is a "coveted status that confers privileges" "Washington Post columnist George Will doesn't believe the statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college. Instead he believes that liberals, feminists and other nefarious forces have conspired to turn being a rape survivor into a "coveted status that confers privileges." As a result of this plot, "victims proliferate," Will wrote in a weekend editorial that ran in the Washington Post and New York Post."
- 2014/06/09 [L..T] Missing Malaysia Airlines flight: Oil rig worker Mike McKay loses job after MH370 'fire in the sky' report "Reports from an oil rig worker who saw a fire in the sky on the night Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared are being taken seriously, police sources have confirmed."
- 2014/06/09 [L..T] Thanks for nothing, jerkface "In case you missed it, Google CEO Sergey Brin publicly admitted last week that Google+ was "a mistake" for him – one month after the man he hired to run the social network, Vic Gundotra, left the company without explanation."
- 2014/06/08 [L..T] Obama on Obama on Climate
- 2014/06/06 [L..T] Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something
- 2014/06/05 [L..T] Scott Brown resigns from Florida firearm manufacturer «Yesterday afternoon, former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), on the campaign trail in his new state, was confronted by quite a few reporters asking about the same topic: his curious role as an adviser to a Florida firearm manufacturer that doesn't actually manufacture firearms.»
- 2014/06/05 [L..T] The Deeply Disturbing Truth About Street Harassment in America "For the past few years, grassroots efforts to end street harassment in the US have been gaining support and amplifying their message."
- 2014/06/03 [L..T] Alabama Bible school puts Hitler quote on billboard to encourage youth indoctrination "A Christian ministry in Alabama said this week that it would remove a billboard with a quote by Adolf Hitler that it had used to promote its work with children."
- 2014/06/03 [L..T] This computer programmer solved gerrymandering in his spare time "Brian Olson is a software engineer in Massachusetts who wrote a program to draw "optimally compact" equal-population congressional districts in each state, based on 2010 census data. Olson's algorithm draws districts that respect the boundaries of census blocks, which are the smallest geographic units used by the Census Bureau. This ensures that the district boundaries reflect actual neighborhoods and don't, say, cut an arbitrary line through somebody's house."
- 2014/06/03 [L..T] Transgender: The Perfect Social Conservative Storm "These days, transgender people bring out the crazy, mean, and ignorant in social conservatives like nothing else. They are accused of being rapists, child molesters, delusional, and mentally ill. Social conservatives in very public positions have offered many "solutions" to the perceived transgender menace, ranging from mistreating us until we self-deport back to our birth gender, to forced institutionalization, to "putting them in camps.""
- 2014/06/02 [L..T] The Conservative War on Girls: School Accused of Shaming Girls for Wearing Shorts (Video) "Shaming women has become almost a sport in schools. Every day, it seems we are confronted with a new instance of a yearbook editing female students to make them less sexy or a girl being kicked from prom because it was likely that she was going to drive a crowd of middle-aged men wild with lust."
- 2014/06/02 [L..T] Google reportedly launching 180 satellites for global internet service "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is planning to spend more than $1 billion on satellites that will offer internet access worldwide from space. The publication's sources say that Google will begin with 180 small satellites that will orbit the Earth at a lower altitude than most other craft, before possibly expanding the fleet in the future."
- 2014/06/01 [L..T] Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out
- 2014/05/31 [L..T] The extreme misogyny of 'pick-up artist' hate "There was a storm on Twitter when Elliot Rodger's misogynistic ramblings and videos were discovered online. Bloggers and commentators pointed out he used language familiar to the "pick-up artist" (PUA) community - an industry dedicated to teaching men the art of attracting women."
- 2014/05/30 [L..T] House votes to restrict DEA marijuana raids «The roll call on the vote is here. Note that it passed largely with Democratic support – the vast majority of Dems voted for it; a clear majority of Republicans voted against it – but the measure was backed by a bipartisan group of co-sponsors.»
- 2014/05/29 [L..T] Utah High School Photoshops Yearbook Pics To Make Girls "Less Sexy" (Video) "Female students at Wasatch High School in Utah is under fire after selectively editing female students' yearbook photos to show less skin – without the students knowing about it."
- 2014/05/29 [L..T] [[2014/05/29/Bush counterterrorism czar: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld all committed war crimes|]]
- 2014/05/29 [L..T] Michael Bloomberg: Universities becoming bastions of intolerance "Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivering Thursday's commencement speech at Harvard University, criticized what he described as a disturbing trend of liberals silencing voices 'deemed politically objectionable.'"
- 2014/05/28 [L..T] The Inclusive Capitalism Initiative is Trojan Horse to quell coming global revolt
- 2014/05/28 [L..T] Are You a Slut? That Depends. Are You Rich? «This class-based construction of the campus slut allowed both groups to deflect the stigma of "sluttiness" onto other women and away from themselves, establish hierarchies among social groups, and police everyone's gender performance – including their own – along the way.»
- 2014/05/27 [L..T] Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051. "There is a far cheaper option though: giving homeless people housing and supportive services. The study found that it would cost taxpayers just $10,051 per homeless person to give them a permanent place to live and services like job training and health care. That figure is 68 percent less than the public currently spends by allowing homeless people to remain on the streets. If central Florida took the permanent supportive housing approach, it could save $350 million over the next decade."
- 2014/05/27 [L..T] This silent, zero-emissions electric plane could be the future of sustainable air travel "One of the first public demonstrations of energy efficient air travel took to the air last week at the Berlin Air Show, in the form of a fully electric airplane."
- 2014/05/26 [L..T] I.R.S. Bars Employers From Dumping Workers Into Health Exchanges
- 2014/05/26 [L..T] Exclusive: Transgender travelers singled out in TSA screenings, docs show "Department of Homeland Security documents obtained last month reveal details of incidents in which transgender travelers were subjected to heightened scrutiny when passing through airport security checkpoints."
- 2014/05/25 [L..T] Isla Vista: the discussion we should be having.
- 2014/05/25 [L..T] Obama Administration Will Let Veterans Seek Care At Private Hospitals "The Obama administration's decision to allow more veterans to get care at private hospitals could take some pressure off backlogged Veterans Affairs facilities struggling to cope with new patients from the wars on terrorism as well as old soldiers from prior conflicts."
- 2014/05/23 [L..T] Absolution By Punctuation "The administration to which Ms. Rice was unswervingly loyal -- and for which she fudged her testimony in front of the 9/11 commission, and for which she helped lie this country into a war that was the most fundamentally immoral act of foreign policy (perhaps) in its history -- did, in fact, torture people to those ends."
- 2014/05/23 [L..T] Harvard professor's 'super PAC' aims to end power of 'super PACs' "Is it possible to create a "super PAC" that would end the power of super PACs by drawing enough Americans into the system to limit the influence of big money in politics? And is it possible to get voters excited about a subject as dry as campaign finance? [..] Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is leading a crusade to answer both those questions with a yes."
- 2014/05/21 [L..T] Enforcing School Dress Codes Teaches Girls to be Ashamed, Not 'Modest'
- 2014/05/21 [L..T] Patent reform stalls in Senate as legislation is pulled from agenda "Patent trolls can claim a major victory today thanks to Sen. Patrick Leahy. The Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman has removed patent reform legislation from the agenda, citing a lack of "sufficient support behind any comprehensive deal." [...] This stall in the Senate comes after the House passed a bipartisan bill designed to crack down on frivolous lawsuits with strong support on both sides of the aisle. The White House also stands behind reform."
- 2014/05/20 [L..T] A replication tour de force "Now, after decades of the status quo, psychology is finally coming to terms with the idea that replication is a vital ingredient in the recipe of discovery. The latest issue of the journal Social Psychology reports an impressive 15 papers that attempted to replicate influential findings related to personality and social cognition."
- 2014/05/20 [L..T] Spain Is Going Orwellian Over Mean Twitter Comments
- 2014/05/19 [L..T] Why were so many female artists airbrushed from history? "Annie Kevans, who first painted well-known men as boys, is now portraying women who should have been famous."
- 2014/05/18 [L..T] 'Trojan horse' teacher breaks into girl's phone
- 2014/05/18 [L..T] Switzerland Votes on World's Highest Minimum Wage "Switzerland's citizens voted Sunday on whether to create the world's highest minimum wage of 22 Swiss francs ($24.70) an hour."
- 2014/05/16 [L..T] Miami Will Be Underwater Before the Senate Acts on Climate Change
- 2014/05/15 [L..T] Jill Abramson and the Mainstreaming of Feminism in American Media
- 2014/05/15 [L..T] Women in secularism: Got a problem with that? "Many of her harassers, she believes, are men in the secular community. They feel threatened by the inclusion of issues that go beyond the central pillars of the secular movement, such as protections of freedom and conscience and church-state separation They want to silence activists, like Hensley and others, who want secularism to address broader issues of social justice, economic equality and racism."
- 2014/05/15 [L..T] Hedge Fund Titans Hum a Happy Tune as They Target Public Schools "Hedge fund flacks hail this growing charter presence as a new window of opportunity for underprivileged kids in failing traditional schools. But many educators consider charters a diversion of badly needed public tax dollars into unaccountable private entities that cream off top students and refuse to take in the most challenged."
- 2014/05/14 [L..T] Bad Science Doesn't Help Bees "In the new study, researchers didn't waste time with a low initial dose. They began right away with syrup containing 136 micrograms of insect-killer per liter. Eventually, six of the 12 colonies fed the spiked syrup failed. Calling the researchers' credibility into further question, the second study, like the first, ascribes colony failure to colony collapse disorder, a malady with characteristics not evident in either trial."
- 2014/05/14 [L..T] Russia threatens to disrupt GPS navigation in fight over sanctions " The Russian government has just threatened to end cooperation with America on major space projects, including maintenance of the GPS system. The policy will also prevent NASA from accessing the International Space Station from 2020, as well as blocking the supply of components for America's Atlas V rockets, which are currently vital for sending military and commercial satellites into space."
- 2014/05/14 [L..T] Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Corporate Media is "Neutered, Impotent and Obsolete" "In the final part of our extended interview, Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media's response to his reporting on Edward Snowden's leaked National Security Agency documents."
- 2014/05/14 [L..T] How Five American Companies Control What You Think
- 2014/05/14 [L..T] We all have to be brave "Michelle Farber, a midwife at women's reproductive health clinics, describes the impact of anti-choice protests on abortion providers and the women seeking their services."
- 2014/05/13 [L..T] The Totally Misleading Way The GOP Plans To Attack Obamacare Next "But they left out one crucial piece of information: Obamacare is designed to protect enrollees against year-to-year price fluctuations. Warning about higher premiums leaves an impression that people will pay more, and the GOP surely won't hesitate to push that line again whenever news of rising premiums breaks."
- 2014/05/13 [L..T] Fox's Karl Rove says he thinks Hillary Clinton might have brain damage "Fox News commentator Karl Rove said to a conference in California earlier this month that he suspects that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is brain-damaged from a fall and concussion she suffered in 2012."
- 2014/05/12 [L..T] Sandy Hook truther steals memorial sign, tells victim's mother her child never existed "A vinyl peace sign installed at a playground in Mystic, Connecticut, dedicated to a victim of the Sandy Hook shooting was stolen last week by a man claiming that the Newtown massacre never happened."
- 2014/05/11 [L..T] Women in the workplace package becomes law "The Women's Economic Security Act, comprised of nine separate pieces of legislation, won legislative approval last week with bipartisan support. It forces about 1,000 state contractors to certify that they pay men and women equally for similar jobs, extends parental leave from six to 12 weeks and requires employers to make new accommodations for expectant and new mothers."
- 2014/05/09 [L..T] Elizabeth Warren Slams Chair of the GOP's New Benghazi Committee "The Massachusetts senator says she knows "a little bit about the way [GOP Rep.] Trey Gowdy pursues oversight" – because in 2011, she "was on the other end of it.""
- 2014/05/09 [L..T] Mitt Romney Backs A Minimum Wage Hike "Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Friday that he believes the Republican Party ought to get on board with raising the minimum wage."
- 2014/05/09 [L..T] Study strengthens link between neonicotinoids and collapse of honey bee colonies
- 2014/05/09 [L..T] Sub-lethal exposure to neonicotinoids impaired honey bees winterization before proceeding to colony collapse disorder "Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colony collapse disorder (CCD) that appeared in 2005/2006 still lingers in many parts of the world. Here we show that sub-lethal exposure of neonicotinoids, imidacloprid or clothianidin, affected the winterization of healthy colonies that subsequently leads to CCD."
- 2014/05/08 [L..T] My personal Wal-Mart nightmare: You won't believe what life is like working there "The president's visiting my store Friday. He won't see how I sleep on my son's floor and eat potato chips for lunch."
- 2014/05/08 [L..T] Miami Finds Itself Ankle-Deep in Climate Change Debate
- 2014/05/08 [L..T] Flight MH370 Families: We Have No Faith in Missing Jet Probe "In an open letter sent to the leaders of Malaysia, China and Australia on Thursday, the relatives questioned how authorities could be certain the Boeing 777 had crashed into the Indian Ocean after vanishing without a trace two months ago. No wreckage has been found."
- 2014/05/08 [L..T] Lloyd's calls on insurers to take into account climate-change risk "Lloyd's of London, the world's oldest and biggest insurance market, has for the first time called on insurers to incorporate climate change into their models."
- 2014/05/08 [L..T] The Ruling Class Wages War On Truth Itself
- 2014/05/07 [L..T] U.S. Women Saved $483 Million On Their Birth Control Pills Last Year "Compared to the data from 2012, about 24 million more birth control pill prescriptions were filled without a co-pay in 2013. That means each of the women filling those prescriptions ended up saving an average of $269."
- 2014/05/07 [L..T] Nobel Prize economists call for end to war on drugs "Five Nobel Prize-winning economists are calling for an end to the global war on drugs and a shift over to policies that focus on public health. The economists, along with over a dozen professors and politicians, have all endorsed a report released last night by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which breaks down the successes and failures of the worldwide drug war and finds that it has had "enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage." The report recommends that countries instead focus on individualized approaches to drug laws and encourages experimentation with lifting prohibitions."
- 2014/05/07 [L..T] US Patent Office Grants 'Photography Against A White Background' Patent To Amazon "Udi Tirosh at DIY Photography has uncovered a recently granted patent for the previously-unheard of process of photographing things/people against a white backdrop... to of all companies, Amazon."
- 2014/05/07 [L..T] Huge coalition led by Amazon, Microsoft, and others take a stand against FCC on net neutrality "A sizable coalition of technology companies has today taken a stand in favor of net neutrality in the form of a letter to the Federal Communications Commission. The group, led by giants including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo, challenges a proposal the FCC is considering that threatens net neutrality."
- 2014/05/06 [L..T] 1500-Year-Old Bible Discovered In Turkey Indicates Jesus Christ Was Not Crucified "A 1500-year-old bible has been discovered in Turkey. Discovered in 2000, the book that contains purportedly the Gospel of Barnabas has been transferred by the Turkish government to the Ethnography Museum of Ankara with a police escort. Barnabas was a disciple of Christ, and in the work, claims that Jesus was not crucified, instead it says he ascended to heaven alive and Judas Iscariot was crucified in his place. Furthermore, the 1500-year-old bible states that Jesus Christ was not the son of God, but simply a prophet who passed on the word of God."
- 2014/05/06 [L..T] Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA
- 2014/05/06 [L..T] The top ten global warming 'skeptic' arguments answered "...as one of those rare contrarian climate scientists, Spencer is in a good position to present the best arguments against the global warming consensus. Conveniently, he recently did just that on his blog, listing what he considers the "Top Ten Good Skeptical Arguments," throwing in an 11th for good measure. He also conveniently posed each of these arguments as questions; it turns out they're all easy to answer."
- 2014/05/05 [L..T] Americans are likelier to die due to pregnancy complications than Russians "The findings, published Friday in The Lancet, indicate that, while infant mortality rates are improving, America is one of the few countries actually seeing an increase in its maternal mortality rate."
- 2014/05/05 [L..T] Rand Paul says 40 times more Kentuckians have gotten health-insurance cancellation notices than signed up for Obamacare Rand Paul email: "Since the implementation of Obamacare, hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians have received cancellation notices from their current health care providers. For every Kentuckian that has enrolled in Obamacare, 40 have been dropped from their coverage." Rated pants-on-fire.
- 2014/05/05 [L..T] U.S. North Carolina voting law gets first test in Tuesday primaries
- 2014/05/05 [L..T] Occupy Wall Street activist found guilty of assaulting police officer "Cecily McMillan was on Monday afternoon found guilty of deliberately elbowing Officer Grantley Bovell in the face in March 2012. After a trial lasting more than four weeks, the jury of eight women and four men reached their verdict in about three hours."
- 2014/05/05 [L..T] Tennessee State Senator Compares Obamacare To The Holocaust "A brief post published at the blog of state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) read: "Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory [sic] sign ups for 'train rides' for Jews in the 40s.""
- 2014/05/05 [L..T] Why I Filmed My Abortion
- 2014/05/04 [L..T] Fox panel imagines Hillary Clinton assassination – then uses it to attack her for Benghazi "A panel on the Fox News Saturday business show Cashin' In entertained the thought of a hypothetical assassination of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday to assert that the media did not place enough focus on her comments about Benghazi, which the group took out of context."
- 2014/05/04 [L..T] CIA and FBI specialists assisting Ukrainian government in Kiev, report says "A report by the German newspaper Bild reveals that specialists from the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are assisting the Ukrainian government in the fight against the pro-Russian separatists in the east."
- 2014/05/03 [L..T] The Debate About Software Patents is Still Dead Because Large Corporations Killed It "There is no substantial bill seeking to truly reform the patent system and those which exist, including corresponding press coverage, are focusing on trolls, costs, and other side issues. The EFF, which once upon a time promised to fight against software patents, recently hired some more lawyers whose articles on the matter tend to be a waste of time (and whose focus is truly bizarre, misguided at best)."
- 2014/05/03 [L..T] Odessa Massacre Pushes Ukraine to the Edge "Western headlines have attempted to spin into ambiguity the death of over 30 anti-fascist Ukrainian protesters cornered and burned to death in the Trade Unions House in the southern port city of Odessa. The arson was carried out by Neo-Nazi mobs loyal to the unelected regime now occupying Kiev."
- 2014/05/02 [L..T] Militiamen and Oath Keepers Drew Weapons, Threatened to Kill Each Other
- 2014/05/02 [L..T] GOP Went Fishing For Bad Obamacare News And Came Up Empty "Perhaps the most interesting thing about the House GOP's Obamacare survey, which an insurance industry source dismissed as "incredibly rigged" when sharing it with TPM, is the question that it didn't manage to answer: How many of the law's enrollees were previously uninsured?"
- 2014/05/02 [L..T] Why There Is No Cure for the GOP's Benghazi Fever
- 2014/05/02 [L..T] The Case of The Vanishing Bees "On a fine June morning last year at a Target store outside Portland, Oregon, customers arrive to a startling sight: the parking lot was covered with a seething mat of bumblebees, some staggering around, most already dead, more raining down from above. The die-off lasted several days."
- 2014/05/02 [L..T] Images and Video from East Ukraine that the Corporate Media Will Never Show You "Today the provisional government in Kiev launched a military offensive against the eastern city of Slavyansk using tanks and helicopters, but the mainstream media will never show you what actually happened."
- 2014/05/02 [L..T] Michigan Loses "Right To Farm" This Week: A Farewell To Backyard Chickens and Beekeepers «Michigan residents lost their "right to farm" this week thanks to a new ruling by the Michigan Commission of Agriculture and Rural Development.»
- 2014/05/02 [L..T] NASA seeks help to save Earth from killer asteroids "After a previously undetected, 65-foot-wide asteroid exploded over Russia in February 2013, unleashing the force of 500,000 tons of TNT, NASA launched a series of contests for smart folks around the globe to come up with ways to keep an eye on asteroids that could threaten Earth."
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] Why the Mormon Church Won't Say "Homosexuality" "In the LDS leadership, you will rarely hear someone say the words "gay" or "homosexual". Occasionally in older talks they will mention "homosexual" or "lesbian behavior". If you go to their site to research topics, this is what you will find when you search for "homosexual":" ("see Same-Sex Attraction")
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] One Year Later, Here's What San Jose Looks Like After Raising the Minimum Wage "One year ago, San Jose, Calif. raised its minimum wage to $10 an hour. From the moment an increase was first discussed, opponents quickly painted a grim scenario. San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed (D) said that a higher minimum posed "the biggest threat" of any issue to the city's economic development."
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] Cops Must Swear Silence to Access Vehicle Tracking System
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] High carbon dioxide levels set a record "Measurements of the climate-changing gas by instruments high on a mountain in Hawaii and around the world show that global emissions from burning fossil fuels rose last month to levels higher than at any time in human history - and higher than it has been in hundreds of thousands of years."
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] Why we talk about the Kochs "As a writer for one outlet that talks about the Kochs frequently, let me explain why we do so: The Kochs threaten to destroy American democracy, regardless of their views. And, as it happens, their extreme and self-interested positions are taking over the Republican Party."
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] Seattle Announces $15 Minimum Wage, Highest In The U.S. "Seattle will raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour over the coming years under a deal brokered by Mayor Ed Murray and blessed by labor and business groups alike, city leaders announced Thursday afternoon."
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] Rising Seas and Leadership as Senate Commerce Heads to Miami
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] Transgender Malaysians await court decision "Transgender Muslim women say law criminalising 'posing as a woman' violates Malaysia's constitution."
- 2014/05/01 [L..T] From the Wilderness Forward, What Really Happened to Michael C. Ruppert “Michael C. Ruppert was a lot of things to a lot of people, but amidst it all – although many didn’t know it, Mike was a troubled man. He carried the weight of what he genuinely believed to be the coming "end of the industrialized civilization" and the inevitable "collapse". He had told us many times that “There is no more time.””
- 2014/04/30 [L..T] Facebook Is Throttling Nonprofits and Activists "So far coverage of Facebook's plan to squeeze the organic reach of Pages has focused on its impact on "brands" that spam us with ads and promotions. But nonprofits, activists, and advocacy groups with much fewer resources (and no ad budgets) are also being hugely affected. It's starting to look like Facebook is willing to strangle public discourse on the platform in an attempt to wring out a few extra dollars for its new shareholders."
- 2014/04/29 [L..T] BREAKING: Supreme Court Denies NDAA Lawsuit "On September 12th, 2012, Federal District Judge Katherine B. Forrest issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. In July 2013, the 2nd Circuit ruled the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge that law. [..] Monday, the Supreme Court put the final nail in this suit by denying to hear the case, without comment."
- 2014/04/29 [L..T] Rick Scott bombs with this crowd of seniors on Obamacare
- 2014/04/29 [L..T] Is your job at risk from robot labor? Check this handy interactive "We compared three variables related to the American workforce: the median wage for various jobs; the number of people employed in those positions in the United States; and the likelihood that these jobs will become automated."
- 2014/04/29 [L..T] Google Removes Deceptive Crisis Pregnancy Center Ads
- 2014/04/29 [L..T] [[2014/04/29/Rick Santorum's misguided view of gun control in the Wild West|]]
- 2014/04/29 [L..T] [[2014/04/29/Harry Reid Describes Vile Threats From Backers of Cliven Bundy|]]
- 2014/04/29 [L..T] Mobility in Cities is About Space - Proven Powerfully in Pictures! "Even if all vehicles became electric tomorrow (which they won't), and even if your local electric energy sources are on the renewable side, like BC's hydro-electric power (which they're likely not - it's just as likely they're on the especially dirty side, like coal), the truth is there's no totally "clean" energy source, no energy without impacts. The only real energy solutions are urban densities, use-mixes and patterns, and personal choices, that depend on much less energy."
- 2014/04/28 [L..T] Aereo Can't Be Bound by Secret Interpretations of Copyright Law "Here's how it seems to work: the executive branch comes up with an interpretation of U.S. copyright law and then negotiates it into international agreements. It conducts these negotiations in secret, insisting that it needs no meaningful oversight because it doesn't require a change in U.S. law."
- 2014/04/27 [L..T] They are agreeing to being spiritually married to their father In certain fundamentalist Christian sects, fathers are encouraged to "spiritually marry" their daughters in order to keep them "pure". In the context of this "purity culture", it is entirely acceptable for fathers to have sexual thoughts about their daughters as long as they don't actually have intercourse.
- 2014/04/27 [L..T] GOP War on Women: Mississippi Could Soon Lose its Only Abortion Clinic
- 2014/04/27 [L..T] 5 Insane Lessons from My Christian Fundamentalist Childhood "In the Quiverfull movement, children are pretty much metaphorical weapons born to shoot a degenerate modern society in the face. I was one of nine children, and our family was just on the large end of "normal" in size. Really, it was downright small: We didn't need to use all the seats in our 15-passenger van to get to church. I was brought up to be just one more weapon in this terrible faith-based arsenal, but I didn't quite hit the target. Here's what I can tell you about being a weaponized offspring."
- 2014/04/27 [L..T] Fear not the 'bot? As robots take jobs, experts ask if humans will keep up
- 2014/04/26 [L..T] Harsh Reality Break: 234 Girls Kidnapped from Physics Test "234 young women were abducted from a physics test in Nigeria, specifically to keep them from getting an education. Nothing is being done to find them. Collective public outrage is the only tool that can possibly get a search started."
- 2014/04/26 [L..T] A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools
- 2014/04/25 [L..T] Federal Grazing Program in Bundy Dispute Rips-Off Taxpayers, Wild Horses
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] Spain restricting people's right to protest, Amnesty report finds "The Spanish government is using fines, harassment and excessive police force to limit the right to protest, Amnesty International warned in a new report released on Thursday."
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] CNN exclusive: Rancher says he's not racist, still defiant over grazing battle "Cliven Bundy -- the Nevada rancher turned conservative folk hero for bucking the federal government's attempts to stop his cattle from grazing on public land -- admits he doesn't understand the bipartisan uproar over his comments suggesting blacks might have been better off under slavery."
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] Conservatives begin backing away after Cliven Bundy's remarks disparaging "the Negro" "Republican politicians began backtracking on their support of Nevada anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy after the New York Times caught Bundy making racially-inflammatory remarks blaming African-Americans for willingly submiting to dependency on federal assistance."
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] [[2014/04/24/FCC Plans to Allow Fast Lane|]] "The Federal Communications Commission will propose new rules that allow Internet service providers to offer a faster lane through which to send video and other content to consumers, as long as a content company is willing to pay for it, according to people briefed on the proposals."
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] GOP can't even win the healthcare argument in the South «As new polling from the New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests, even in the deep South, voters aren't actually buying what Republicans are selling on health care.»
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] Chase Bank exploiting FDIC warning to close accounts of adult entertainers, sex workers "Chase Bank sent hundreds of letters this week to account holders who work in the adult entertainment industry informing them that they have until May 11 to close their accounts and find another bank."
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] The Economic Argument Is Over – And Paul Krugman Won "Once the error was corrected, the "90% debt-to-GDP threshold" instantly disappeared. Higher government debt levels still correlated with slower economic growth, but the relationship was not nearly as pronounced. And there was no dangerous point-of-no-return that countries had to avoid exceeding at all costs."
- 2014/04/24 [L..T] In 2014, it's like deja vu all over again «Bill Kristol, the Republican National Committee, and conservatives everywhere instead dug into the internals to declare the poll is... skewed. It's as if 2012 has already escaped their memories.»
- 2014/04/23 [L..T] Georgia Governor: Gun Bill Protects 'Law Abiding Citizens' "Just before signing a controversial gun bill into law, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal talks about the positive aspects of expanding locations citizens can carry firearms in the state without penalty."
- 2014/04/23 [L..T] [[2014/04/23/An extremely short guide to vehicle emissions|]]
- 2014/04/23 [L..T] Russia Orders Bloggers To 'Register'; Outlaws Anonymous Blogging, Continues Clampdown On Social Media "As we've reported, Russia has been steadily trying to bring the Internet under control with ever-more stringent measures. After tackling general Web sites through powers that allow them to be blocked more easily, it now seems to be the turn of the bloggers..."
- 2014/04/23 [L..T] Net Neutrality. Get ready to pay more for the stuff you love online. "Under the new rules, service providers may not block or discriminate against specific websites, but they can charge certain sites or services for preferential traffic treatment if the ISPs' discrimination is 'commercially reasonable.'"
- 2014/04/23 [L..T] Six Studies That Show Everything Republicans Believe is Wrong "The great 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes has been widely quoted as saying, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Sadly, in their quest to concentrate economic and political power in the hands of the wealthiest members of society, today's Republicans have held the opposite position – as the evidence has piled up against them, they continue spreading the same myths."
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] Tech-fueled inequality offers two paths for humanity – "digital Athens" or bleak dystopia “"It turns out there's no economic law that says everybody is going to share equally when technology brings some of these wonders to the planet," Brynjolfsson said. "It's quite possible for some people, even possible for a majority of people, to be made worse off in absolute terms."”
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] NASA chief touts deep space exploration: We can only survive if we are a multi-planet species "NASA administrator Charles Bolden said Tuesday that humanity faced certain extinction unless it developed the technology to colonize other planets."
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] [[2014/04/22/Property records cast doubt on Cliven Bundy's ancestral claims to disputed federal land|]]
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] [[2014/04/22/Florida is Ground Zero for sea level rise|]] "The waters around south Florida are rising fast. The Florida coast has already seen 12 inches (30 centimeters) of sea rise since 1870."
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] Asteroids as powerful as NUCLEAR BOMBS strike Earth TWICE YEARLY "A study using data from monitoring stations designed to enforce a nuclear test ban treaty shows that the Earth is enduring far more dangerous asteroid impacts than previously thought."
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] The End Of Affirmative Action?
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] Oklahoma militia joins Bundy ranch defenders against feds "Members of the Oklahoma Militia have come out in support of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who recently found himself in a standoff with hundreds of armed federal agents over land rights related to his cattle ranch."
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] No, Meb Keflezighi Was Not the First American to Win the Boston Marathon Since 1983 "...in 1985 American Lisa Larsen Weidenbach won the Boston Marathon. Does her win not really count because she is a woman?"
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] BLM: 2 cows died, 4 others euthanized during Bundy roundup "The Bureau of Land Management said Tuesday that two cows died and four others were euthanized during the roundup at a Bunkerville ranch two weeks ago."
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] You could soon use bitcoin to support political campaigns "The Federal Election Commission will consider a request this Wednesday that could open the floodgates for donors to make political contributions in Bitcoin in the upcoming mid-term elections."
- 2014/04/22 [L..T] FEC Will Consider Allowing Bitcoin Donations to Political Campaigns "It could also add fuel to to a raging debate between bitcoin devotees – who view their decentralized, unregulated currency as a legitimate new form of transaction – and those who see it as a shady way to circumvent monetary standards."
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] The government is a protection racket for the 1 percent “The evidence of income inequality just keeps mounting. According to "Working for the Few," a recent briefing paper from Oxfam, "In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer."”
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] Take A Look At This Picture, According To The State Of New Jersey, This Is OK. "Someone had the bright idea after winning the state championship to get the black dummy, string it up and gather around it. How could this be the first thing you think of doing after achieving a season long goal? They felt it was OK."
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] Panel Orders Release of Memo in 2011 Targeted Killing of Awlaki "A federal appeals panel in Manhattan ordered the release on Monday of key portions of a classified Justice Department memorandum that provided the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had joined Al Qaeda and died in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen."
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied on a Whole City "In a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department sent a civilian aircraft over Compton, California, capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that 10-square-mile municipality."
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] One Courageous Democrat Stands Up and Calls For an Investigation into ALEC
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] Apocalypse Cow - Welfare Rancher "In a surprising move, Sean Hannity comes to the defense of Cliven Bundy, an anarchic Nevada rancher determined to trespass on federal land to feed his cattle. (4:30)"
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] KKK imperial wizard: Neighborhood watch underway in Fairview Township
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] BitBeat: Bitcoin and Political Donations
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] Kansas Governor Ensures His State Won't Expand Medicaid Anytime Soon "On Friday, Brownback signed House Bill 2552, which removes his authority to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion and requires the legislature to approve the policy. Since lawmakers have already concluded their session for the year, that means the state won't be able to move on Medicaid expansion in 2014. And even if a Democratic governor is elected in the fall, the Republicans in the legislature could continue to block expansion."
- 2014/04/21 [L..T] McDonald's Gave Me the "Girl's Toy" With My Happy Meal. So I Went to the CEO. "In the most egregious instance, a McDonald's employee asked a girl, "Would you like the girl's toy?" The girl responded, "No, could I have the boy's toy?" When the girl opened the container a moment later, she learned that notwithstanding her explicit request, a McDonald's employee had given her the girl's toy. This girl went back to the counter with the unopened toy and requested, "May I have a boy's toy, please?" The same McDonald's employee replied, "There are only girl's toys." We then sent an adult male into the store who immediately was given a boy's toy."
- 2014/04/20 [L..T] Oklahoma electric utilities want higher rate for solar, wind energy producers
- 2014/04/20 [L..T] Report: Bundy Family Unearths BLM Mass Cattle Grave "New photos released by the Bundy family Sunday provided more evidence to the claim that the Bureau of Land Management was illegally killing and burying confiscated cattle."
- 2014/04/20 [L..T] Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia
- 2014/04/20 [L..T] [[2014/04/20/EPA Gives BP Get Out of Jail Free Card|]] "The EPA ruled that the corporation could start bidding on lucrative new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico after having been suspended from doing any new business with the government ever since the accident. [..] That suspension was lifted on March 13 less than a week before the yearly government auction for drilling rights."
- 2014/04/19 [L..T] Conservative heavyweights have solar industry in their sights "The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the nation's largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states."
- 2014/04/18 [L..T] How the Military Is Preparing for Climate Change War
- 2014/04/18 [L..T] What made Nevada rancher fight the feds? "The Bundy standoff is emblematic of the larger anti-government sentiment around the country that has been amplified with the creation of the tea party movement in 2009. But the latest move in a two-decade-long tug of war between Bundy and the federal government is bringing to light the delicate balance that has lasted between citizens in the West and the federal government over the use of federally owned land for generations."
- 2014/04/18 [L..T] Obama Accused By Congressman Of Illegal Action At Bundy Ranch; Two Miracles In Less Than A Week
- 2014/04/17 [L..T] The Real Story Behind Those Fliers in Ukraine
- 2014/04/17 [L..T] Bundy Ranch and the New Age of Anti-Fed Standoffs "April 19 is the 21st anniversary of the holocaust which ended the 51-day standoff between followers of the Branch Davidians and federal authorities in Waco, Texas. Though it calmed down before any violence took place, all last week the news cycle was consumed with talk of a comparable, potentially bloody confrontation between supporters of lawbreaking cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agents in Nevada."
- 2014/04/17 [L..T] BLM: 2 bulls euthanized during Cliven Bundy cattle roundup
- 2014/04/17 [L..T] Calif. TV station films dog calmly playing with kids after cop shoots himself trying to kill it "A California deputy accidentally shot himself while trying to kill a dog that he said was threatening his life on Wednesday, but video captured by a local television station later showed the animal much smaller than reported and peacefully playing with children."
- 2014/04/17 [L..T] CIA Working On Proxy War Against Russia in Ukraine
- 2014/04/17 [L..T] Rachel Maddow Calls Out Fox News' 'Hilarious And Pitiful' Coverage "Rachel Maddow criticized Fox News Wednesday for their coverage of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy -- what she called a "dead" story that could potentially lead to violence."
- 2014/04/17 [L..T] [[2014/04/17/Beck's Bizarre View on the Nevada Standoff|]] "Over the weekend, Glenn Beck wrote an open letter about the standoff in Nevada. On the plus side, he is firmly against the far-right gun nuts flocking there to take on the evil gummint. On the minus side... wow, is it a weird, incoherent diatribe. Seriously, see if you can make any sense at all out of this."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] Why CIA Director Brennan Visited Kiev: In Ukraine The Covert War Has Begun "Ukraine is on the brink of civil war, Vladimir Putin has said, and he should know because the country is already in the midst of a covert intelligence war. Over the weekend, CIA director John Brennan travelled to Kiev, nobody knows exactly why, but some speculate that he intends to open US intelligence resources to Ukrainian leaders about real-time Russian military maneuvers."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] Man charged in Kansas shooting once a prominent neo-Nazi in North Carolina "The man charged in the murder of three people outside the Jewish Community Center and Village Shalom assisted-living community in Overland Park, Kan., was once considered the most prominent neo-Nazi leader in North Carolina and operated a paramilitary camp in Johnston County."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] Far Right Hypocrisy in Nevada "I'm getting more than a little tired of seeing the reaction from the far right to this standoff in Nevada where a rancher refuses to either start paying or stop grazing his cattle on federal land the way every other rancher does. The hypocrisy and the dishonest overreaction could hardly be more obvious."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] The fight to unionize the South brews at an N.C. slaughterhouse "Rodriguez worked at the Mountaire plant until 2011, when, she says, she was hit in the stomach by a large bucket used to haul meat and had a miscarriage in the plant. A doctor told her that she needed to take time off to rest. When she brought the doctor's note to Mountaire's Human Resources department, she says she was ordered to turn in her ID and fired."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] Supreme Court ruling on Transgender rights "A two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, after hearing the petition filed by the National Legal Services Authority, passed a historic judgement on Transgender Rights on April 15, 2014."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It's Not a Democracy "A new scientific study from Princeton researcher Martin Gilens and Northwestern researcher Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the United States isn't a democracy any more. And they've found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] Women's Lack Of Confidence Doesn't Cause Inequality. Sexism Does. "The authors are correct to identify what contributes to the confidence gap, they simply overstate the remedial effect of closing it. I can have the swagger of Don Draper, but if I'm a middle class woman with kids and a salary lower than annual childcare costs, I'm going to leave the workforce and come back to men who have edged ahead and think I'm a bitch for speaking my mind."
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] Obama's equal-pay myth is one thing. The GOP's chauvinism is a problem "Go ahead, turn the White House's 77-cents quote into the new 47% video. But don't preach until you know where wage-gap vigilantism gets us"
- 2014/04/16 [L..T] CIA director in Kiev searching for missing mercenaries "Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed that CIA director John Brennan was in Kiev last weekend. One of his advisors told the newspaper Vzgliad that Brennan had not come to oversee the "anti-terrorist" operations conducted by the Ukrainian authorities, but to seek information and rescue twenty Greystone Ltd mercenaries of whom there has been no news."
- 2014/04/15 [L..T] Transgender Europe applauds Malta for naming gender identity "Malta has become the first European state to have gender identity in its constitution following the proposed amendment that was approved yesterday evening in parliament."
- 2014/04/15 [L..T] Everything you need to know about the long fight between Cliven Bundy and the federal government "The case of cattle rancher Cliven Bundy burst into the national news cycle over the past week, captivating conservative media outlets with its protagonist, a firm believer of states' right with an armed group of supporters backing him. The stand-off between the Nevada rancher and federal government officials trying to push cattle off of protected federal land has paused for now, but officials plan to renew their efforts soon."
- 2014/04/15 [L..T] Prominent Republican: Women Need To Be Paid Less So They Can Find Husbands "a prominent member of the Republican movement further undermined the party's campaign to appeal to women voters by suggesting that the current pay gap isn't wide enough. In an op-ed published by the Christian Post, Phyllis Schlafly – the founder of the Eagle Forum – maintained that increasing the pay gap will help women find suitable husbands..."
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Ukrainian government has no legitimacy, it is a coup "The over simplification of the situation in Ukraine and in Crimea by the western media into a good vs evil is far from reality. The VOR talked to Greg Barns, he is an advisor for the WikiLeaks Party in Australia about Australian reaction to this situation in Ukraine."
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Before Batgirl, Weirder than Wonder Woman: Lost Superheroines of the Pre-Code Era "As I discussed in an earlier post, pre-Comics Code comic books are full of fascinating women superheroes who've been more or less forgotten in the decades since WWII. Born in the era of Rosie the Riveter, when there was a national campaign to get women into workplaces, these costumed heroines were brassy, hard-assed, snarky, and sometimes just plain weird. They displayed remarkable grit and independence, and were portrayed as better crime-fighters than the inept, sexist cops that got in their way."
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Alberta PC Caucus approves changing definition of marriage
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] CBO: Affordable Care Act getting even more affordable «The report found that coverage is likely to cost less thanks to premiums being lower than expected through the exchange marketplaces. In other words, take pretty much everything you've heard from congressional Republicans lately and believe the opposite. [..] And as part of the same review, of course, the CBO added that the Affordable Care Act will also continue to reduce the federal budget deficit, which is also the opposite of critics' claims.»
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] U.S. right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists "...since 9/11, extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology."
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Out in the Open: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Kiev urges UN to hold joint 'anti-terrorist operation' in eastern Ukraine
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Intuit Does Subterfuge To Combat Free-Filing Tax Returns "It turns out that trying to stifle people's ability to simplify their own lives and file their taxes for free wasn't all that great for the old public relations department, however, so Intuit has instead decided to go the sneaky route and get a bunch of unwitting mouthpieces to do it for them."
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Frazier Glenn Miller, charged in Kansas killings at Jewish Center, participated in deadly Greensboro confrontation "Frazier Glenn Miller was 39 years old and a leader in the North Carolina white supremacist movement in 1979 when he participated in a deadly confrontation in Greensboro between the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis on one side and on the other, black and white members of the Communist Party, who were holding an anti-racist rally."
- 2014/04/14 [L..T] Google Joins the Kochs in Pumping Funds into the Conservative George Mason University "The emergence of Google as a major lobbying force in Washington is a generally well-reported story. But the Washington Post added fresh, intriguing details over the weekend that reveal the search engine company has been deeply involved with financing and organizing conferences on Internet regulatory policy at a major center of libertarian research – George Mason University."
- 2014/04/13 [L..T] Israel destroys aid projects in West Bank to make room for settlements "Israel has gone ahead and destroyed several EU-funded humanitarian projects in a settlement zone in the West Bank, despite diplomatic threats and repeated calls to desist, it has been revealed by EurActiv."
- 2014/04/13 [L..T] How to Solve Global Warming: It's the Energy Supply
- 2014/04/13 [L..T] Kiev to launch "full-scale" military op as massive protests grip eastern Ukraine Thousands of pro-autonomy demonstrators rallied across eastern Ukraine, with the coup-imposed president in Kiev threatening to use military against the activists if they don't clear the seized government buildings by Monday morning."
- 2014/04/12 [L..T] Worse Than You Can Imagine: The Super Rich Are Hiding Vast Sums of Money "Two new studies have revealed the wealthy have even more wealth than anyone probably thought they did. A study by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman has shown that income has only been increasing for the top one-thousandth, while another study by Gabriel Zucman shows exactly where that money is going."
- 2014/04/12 [L..T] Statement from Director of the Bureau of Land Management Neil Kornze on the Cattle Gather in Nevada "Based on information about conditions on the ground, and in consultation with law enforcement, we have made a decision to conclude the cattle gather because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public."
- 2014/04/12 [L..T] Cattle Gather Operation Concluded "Today we announced the decision to conclude the cattle gather because of our grave concern about the safety of employees and members of the public."
- 2014/04/12 [L..T] Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of climate change "The Working Group III contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (WGIII AR5) provides a comprehensive assessment of all relevant options for mitigating climate change through limiting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as activities that remove them from the atmosphere."
- 2014/04/11 [L..T] Dems run on, not from, the ACA «The conventional wisdom on the politics of health care is so widely accepted, it usually goes unchallenged. Democrats – especially vulnerable, red-state Democrats – will be desperate to avoid the Affordable Care Act this election year, eager to talk about anything but the health care law.»
- 2014/04/11 [L..T] On The Shoulders of Giants "A sepia print of an Indian woman, a Japanese woman and a woman from Syria, dated 1885. What do they have in common? Extraordinarily, each was the first licensed female medical doctor in their country of origin."
- 2014/04/11 [L..T] So much for the nation's falling stature «A few weeks ago, as part of a larger condemnation of Obama presidency, Mitt Romney insisted the last five years have been awful for the United States' stature around the world. "It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office," the failed candidate said, adding, "Our esteem around the world has fallen.»
- 2014/04/11 [L..T] While You Give a Third of Your Income to Taxes, Here's What Corporations Get to Pay "Many corporations have lower effective tax rates than individuals. While corporate profits have soared, Americans' incomes have staggered and yet we're the ones carrying the tax burden. Not only do many U.S. companies keep their overseas profits in foreign countries, about $2.1 trillion in all, double what it was in 2008, they also spend tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and auditors who help identify possible loopholes."
- 2014/04/11 [L..T] The Nevada Tortoise War Is A Right-Wing False Flag "When Bundy's grazing rights were modified by BLM in 1993, it was in part to protect the species, which inhabits the same publicly-owned desert areas trodden by Bundy's cattle and was at the time on the brink of extinction. [..] That's where the connection to the tortoise ends, however."
- 2014/04/11 [L..T] Statistical analysis rules out natural-warming hypothesis with more than 99 percent certainty "An analysis of temperature data since 1500 all but rules out the possibility that global warming in the industrial era is just a natural fluctuation in the earth's climate, according to a new study by McGill University physics professor Shaun Lovejoy."
- 2014/04/10 [L..T] Turkey to maintain YouTube block despite 'free speech' ruling "YouTube will remain blocked in Turkey in spite of a court order ruling that the ban is a violation of freedom of speech. The prohibition of social media in Turkey sparked public ire and mass protests against internet censorship."
- 2014/04/10 [L..T] House passes GOP budget plan despite bipartisan opposition «Because federal spending levels for this fiscal year and the next are already set, there was no practical reason for House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to unveil a budget blueprint last week. Indeed, since it'll never be approved by the Democratic Senate, the mere introduction of the plan was an obviously political exercise – more a statement than an attempt at governing.»
- 2014/04/10 [L..T] Rush Limbaugh Freaks Out About Stephen Colbert Getting 'Late Show' According to Rush Limbaugh, "Colbert's new job is nothing less than a grave political, constitutional, and moral crisis in American television."
- 2014/04/10 [L..T] Stun guns drawn in recorded clash over NV cattle "A clash between Bureau of Land Management agents and protesters aimed at stopping the federal agency from taking cattle off a Clark County rancher's land resulted in a stun gun being used on the crowd."
- 2014/04/10 [L..T] Desert Tortoise Conservation Center's plan to euthanize hundreds of the tortoises in Nevada by 2014. "How does allegedly killing/burying (with or without a court order) and/or selling Mr. Bundy's cattle now save the tortoise from extinction in the Nevada desert when they, the the FEDs, won't help preserve the turtles anymore--maybe even up to a thousand or more of the 1,400 turtles they've been caring for--when they won't release the funds necessary to keep them off that endangered species list for their preservation??"
- 2014/04/09 [L..T] (VIDEO) Cop Puts Crying Boy in Chokehold, Tells Witnesses "Stop Speaking Spanish!" "A Santa Ana School Police Department officer is at the center of controversy after a concerned citizen, Elvia Fernández, filmed him putting a crying young boy in a chokehold."
- 2014/04/09 [L..T] [[2014/04/09/Tea Party Republicans Publish Op-Ed Slamming Obamacare|]]
- 2014/04/09 [L..T] [[2014/04/09/Elijah Cummings RIPS Darryl Issa For Reckless Claims and McCarthyism|]]
- 2014/04/09 [L..T] When Is a Putsch a Putsch? (The US False Narrative about Ukraine Continues)
- 2014/04/09 [L..T] Retiring the A-10 Early Puts Troops' Lives at Risk
- 2014/04/09 [L..T] Ray Massia Hewitt and Bobby Seale in Scandinavia "When Ray Massia Hewitt (our then BPP minister of education) and I went to the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland) in January of 1969 little did I realize that I was being set up by the FBI-CIA COINTELPRO operations to go into exile."
- 2014/04/09 [L..T] Koch Brothers Received Millions In Obamacare Subsidies
- 2014/04/08 [L..T] [[2014/04/08/Lil' Bobby Hutton|]]
- 2014/04/08 [L..T] Survey Estimates Net Gain of 9.3 Million American Adults with Health Insurance "Using a survey fielded by the RAND American Life Panel, we estimate a net gain of 9.3 million in the number of American adults with health insurance coverage from September 2013 to mid-March 2014."
- 2014/04/08 [L..T] America's Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953 «To place the coup in Ukraine in historical context, this is at least the 80th time the United States has organized a coup or a failed coup in a foreign country since 1953.»
- 2014/04/08 [L..T] Dave Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, out of Jail after arrest for defending Cattle. No Charges! "I have had people ask me to explain my dad's stance on this BLM fight. Here it is in as simple of terms as I can explain it. There is so much to it, but here it is in a nut shell."
- 2014/04/08 [L..T] What is Sexism & How Does it Work in STEM? "This post covers the scientific and legal definitions of sexism, sexual harassment and sexual discrimination. We include an overview of the different ways in which sexism is described, such as hostile, benevolent, accidental or unintentional. These qualifiers of sexism can sometimes confuse people, as they invite people to see sexism as an individual or subjective idea. Sexism is neither – it is about how the collective interactions that happen at the everyday level are connected to institutional practices of harassment and discrimination. We provide examples of how sexist culture operates in at various levels of STEM, from undergraduate courses to gender inequality in pay, science publishing and recognition of women's achievements. STEM Women seeks to move beyond superficial arguments about what sexism is and isn't. The scientific evidence, some of which is included here, has established that inequality exists. We are looking for practical solutions to address inequality and lift the participation of women in STEM."
- 2014/04/08 [L..T] Maddow: Obamacare "Armageddon" for Republicans in November Midterms (Video) "MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow investigates this swing of public support in favor of Obamacare, and describes a political scene where the Affordable Care Act's success converts into a literal Armageddon for the conservative party – and not just temporarily."
- 2014/04/07 [L..T] If 97% of Americans Sold Everything They Owned and Spent It on Congressional Elections, They Still Couldn't Max Out To max out on one side of every race including PACs and parties would take $1,291,400. 97% of the country could not reach this limit if they emptied their bank accounts and liquidated all of their possessions. For a few lucky souls, however, $1.3 million is a drop in the bucket.
- 2014/04/07 [L..T] Science or Spin?: Assessing the Accuracy of Cable News Coverage of Climate Science "Accuracy varies significantly across major cable news outlets. All of them can take steps to improve their coverage of climate science." Fox News was worst (misleading 70% of the time), and MSNBC was best (completely accurate 92% of the time); when inaccurate, Fox tended to disparage global warming while MSNBC tended to overstate the case for it. CNN's misrepresentations were mainly along the lines of representing the issue as still being under serious debate.
- 2014/04/07 [L..T] [[2014/04/07/Climate Trends in the Arctic as Observed from Space|]]
- 2014/04/07 [L..T] [[2014/04/07/Artists use poster-child in Pakistan drone protest|]] "A poster of a young child has appeared in north-west Pakistan to raise awareness of the numerous drone attacks the region suffered. Artists who created the image hope military commanders will think twice about shooting after seeing the portrait."
- 2014/04/07 [L..T] Not Your Tragic Queer Muslim Story
- 2014/04/07 [L..T] U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear NSA surveillance case "The court, without comment, denied the request by activist and former federal prosecutor Larry Klayman, along with Charles and Mary Strange, to immediately hear their case against U.S. President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, NSA Director Keith Alexander, Verizon Communications and Roger Vinson, the judge who signed the order allowing the surveillance."
- 2014/04/07 [L..T] GOP's Woman-Haters Club Swells: Why Their Hatred Is Actually Getting Worse "From Christie to Limbaugh the right's view of women is steeped in the 18th century. It may finally catch up to them."
- 2014/04/06 [L..T] George W Bush unveils portraits of world leaders at presidential library in Dallas "I hope they take it in the spirit in which these were painted, and that was a spirit of friendship, and that I admired them as leaders and was willing to give it a shot in terms of getting people to see how I felt about them."
- 2014/04/06 [L..T] Threat of armed conflict subdues in Nevada Rachel Maddow provides considerable background on recent US anti-government violence, from Clinton-era incidents including the Sagebrush Rebellion through Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City up to the recent armed confrontation at Bundy Ranch.
- 2014/04/06 [L..T] Nine-month-old boy charged with attempted murder in Pakistan granted bail by judge "A nine-month-old boy charged with planning a murder, threatening police and interfering with state affairs in Pakistan has been granted bail after appearing in court this week."
- 2014/04/05 [L..T] Anti-slavery and Universal Basic Income raise similar arguments "It is not surprising that anti-slavery and universal basic income raise similar arguments. Both are about emancipation of the suffering poor."
- 2014/04/04 [L..T] Flight 370 Was Remote-Hijacked
- 2014/04/04 [L..T] Private equity, an infection that is eating the world "In an amazing and terrifying essay called How to get beyond the parasite economy, Eric Garland describes how private equity infects industry after industry, sucking all productive capacity out of it through complex and fraudulent financial engineering, and abandoning the drained husk as it moves onto its next meal."
- 2014/04/04 [L..T] New study says Internet could be why Americans are losing their religion "Increased internet use is only one factor in the decrease of religion, but research shows it's a significant one."
- 2014/04/03 [L..T] Shell's drill ship went aground running from taxes in Alaska "A Shell oil-drilling ship was being moved to avoid Alaska state taxes when, on New Year's Eve 2012, it broke loose from its tow line in a wild Gulf of Alaska storm and ran aground on Sitkalidak Island, according to a U.S. Coast Guard investigation."
- 2014/04/03 [L..T] Billionaire George Soros behind major push for marijuana legalization "Advocacy groups are leading the campaign to crush marijuana prohibition from coast-to-coast, and 83-year-old Soros is helping line the pockets of those making that push."
- 2014/04/03 [L..T] Britain is turning into a country that can't tell its terrorists from its journalists "Sarah Harrison, a British journalist who's worked with Wikileaks and the Snowden papers, writes that she will not enter the UK any longer because the nation's overbroad anti-terror laws, combined with the court decision that validates using them to detain journalists who are not suspected of terrorism under any reasonable definition of the term, means that she fears begin detained at the airport and then jailed as a terrorist when she refuses to decrypt her files and grant police access to her online accounts."
- 2014/04/03 [L..T] Energy breakthrough uses sun to create solar energy materials "Researchers have discovered a way to tap the sun not only as a source of power, but also to directly produce the solar energy materials that make this possible. This breakthrough could make the sun almost a 'one-stop shop' that produces both the materials for solar devices and the eternal energy to power them."
- 2014/04/03 [L..T] Climate change will 'lead to battles for food', says head of World Bank "Battles over water and food will erupt within the next five to 10 years as a result of climate change, the president of the World Bank said as he urged those campaigning against global warming to learn the lessons of how protesters and scientists joined forces in the battle against HIV."
- 2014/04/03 [L..T] Would Walmart's Prices Spike If They Paid Their Employees More? "This video crunches the numbers on how much Walmart, the single biggest beneficiary of the food stamp economy, might have to raise prices across the board to help a typical worker earn a living wage."
- 2014/04/03 [L..T] [[2014/04/03/Studies Confirm the Dehumanization of Black Children|]] "...black youth are far more likely to be suspended from school than any other race. They also face disproportionate expulsion and arrest rates, and once children enter the juvenile justice system they are far more likely to be incarcerated as adults."
- 2014/04/02 [L..T] Supreme Court Rules in Favor of the 1%, Immediate Response in Palo Alto "Sally Lieber, former Speaker pro Tempore of the California State Assembly, Nancy Neff of the CA Clean Money Campaign, and others spoke in front of Palo Alto's City Hall. Al Mite TeDollar and a Supreme Court Justice shook hands as Al proffered cigars in mock celebration. Speakers in Palo Alto's King Hall Plaza said that the Court's ruling in favor of McCutcheon today is a giant blow to our electoral system. The event was organized by the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center."
- 2014/04/02 [L..T] The lie behind the shrinking labor force "The frightening truth is that our economy is failing to generate enough jobs. Of the jobs it does generate, too many pay stagnant or declining wages; fast-growth sectors like retail and food service are often at poverty scale. This despite the fact that we are supposedly recovering from the Great Recession, and U.S. stock markets have more than doubled since 2008."
- 2014/04/01 [L..T] Retrogressive mindset: Abolition of Council of Islamic Ideology sought
- 2014/04/01 [L..T] The Dollar-And-Cents Case Against Hollywood's Exclusion of Women "... we found that the data doesn't appear to support the persistent Hollywood belief that films featuring women do worse at the box office. Instead, we found evidence that films that feature meaningful interactions between women may in fact have a better return on investment, overall, than films that don't."
- 2014/04/01 [L..T] Syria Not Guilty: New Evidence from the Ghouta Sarin Gas Attack "New evidence shows that the Syrian government was not responsible for the August 21, 2013 sarin gas attack in Ghouta on its own people."
- 2014/04/01 [L..T] Guest Post: Gender Inequality in Chess
- 2014/04/01 [L..T] Sign the petition: Collect every cent deadbeat Cliven Bundy owes
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] Obamacare fails to collapse. Time to move on, folks.
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] The Debate: Independence or Partisanship "Finally there is a much needed debate about the relationship that people who are working for progressive change should have with the Democratic Party. This is a debate that has existed at the edges, in email discussions and private conversations, but is now moving to center stage."
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] Warming climate may spread drying to a third of earth: Heat, not just rainfall, plays into new projections "A new study estimates that 12 percent of land will be subject to drought by 2100 through rainfall changes alone; but the drying will spread to 30 percent of land if higher evaporation rates are considered."
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] Anti-euro party turns anti-feminist "The campaign, entitled "equal rights, not levelling," invites young men and women to post photos of themselves holding up signs explaining why they reject feminism."
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] Protest against Albuquerque police turns into "mayhem" «One police officer injured in protests sparked by what residents call an increasingly violent police force»
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] Snapshots of inequality "...we also know that capitalism goes through periods in which economic inequality is more extreme and less so. So what kind of moment are we looking at now? What is the shape and contour of inequality in the U.S. today, six years after the recession that cratered in 2008?"
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] How a Pepsi consultant burned a "$400k game jam" down "The amazing result, though, was not the easily-dramatised response footage he perhaps expected: instead, the developers collectively refused to participate further, forcing production to cease."
- 2014/03/31 [L..T] Erdogan vows purge of 'enemies' after vote win
- 2014/03/30 [L..T] [[2014/03/30/Students Walk out on Dick Cheney|]]
- 2014/03/30 [L..T] [[2014/03/30/Climate change already affecting food supply|]]
- 2014/03/30 [L..T] Obamacare has led to health coverage for millions more people "At least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gotten health insurance since Obamacare started, surveys and reports show."
- 2014/03/30 [L..T] [[2014/03/30/effects of climate change worse than predicted|]]
- 2014/03/29 [L..T] Impact of Massive Tax Cuts on Kansas Offers a Warning to Wisconsin "The massive tax cuts in Kansas have deepened the damage done to schools, colleges and universities, and other key services by the recession and have failed to improve Kansas's economic performance, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Kansas should serve as a cautionary tale for Wisconsin, not a model."
- 2014/03/28 [L..T] Wild Horses and Burros Myths and Facts The BLM addresses 15 myths regarding their "Wild Horses and Burros" program.
- 2014/03/28 [L..T] It's time for a basic minimum income! "Regardless of whether you want to fight poverty, stimulate the economy, shrink the size of government, or simply ensure everyone has a sense of human dignity – you should be calling for a no-strings-attached basic income for all."
- 2014/03/28 [L..T] Domino's Pizza Owners Admit to Widespread Wage Theft "Owners of 23 outlets settle with workers for half a million dollars following waves of fast food workers' strikes, protests, and court battles"
- 2014/03/27 [L..T] A Gorgeous Woman Shakes Her Body On Stage ... And The Crowd Goes Wild "Maysoon Zayid is a disabled Arab-American comedian. I had no idea who she was when I first met her at a Washington gala. She was beautiful and stood with her hand on her hip thrust sexily to one side. When I complimented her on the pose, she said, "I'm not posing. I have cerebral palsy – I have to stand like this." My response? "I don't care! You still look hot!" We both laughed, then I went home to google her."
- 2014/03/27 [L..T] 'All men beat their wives, one day you will do the same' "In some communities in India boys as young as eight believe that violence against women is acceptable. Now workshops run by a local NGO are helping to end 'eve-teasing'."
- 2014/03/27 [L..T] Hobby Lobby provided emergency contraceptives before they opposed them "It is quite hard to take the claims by Hobby Lobby seriously. The main drugs in question in the case brought before the Supreme Court are the emergency contraceptives Plan-B and Ella. One huge problem with this situation is that up until 2012, Hobby Lobby provided them as part of their insurance plan. Only when they realized that Obamacare was going to mandate this coverage did they suddenly become interested in not providing these drugs."
- 2014/03/26 [L..T] How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40% "With a three-step method, Harvey Mudd College in California quadrupled its female computer science majors."
- 2014/03/26 [L..T] Poll: Keep Obamacare, fix it, and shut up about it! "Enough already with talking about Obamacare, 53 percent of America (and 47 percent of Republicans!) says. Keep it, fix it and move on to other things, says 60 percent. That's according to the Kaiser Family Foundation poll for March."
- 2014/03/26 [L..T] Hobby Lobby's Hypocrisy "How can the arts and crafts chain espouse Christian values when it imports products from China?"
- 2014/03/25 [L..T] Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
- 2014/03/23 [L..T] UN scientists see grim future if no action taken on climate change "UN scientists are set to deliver their darkest report yet on the impacts of climate change, pointing to a future stalked by floods, drought, conflict and economic damage if carbon emissions go untamed."
- 2014/03/22 [L..T] Troupe of topless Femen protesters get dragged kicking and screaming out of Berlin's Islamic Week meeting after covering themselves in anti-Islam messages "The Berlin Islam Week event, held in one of the city's town halls, was stopped in its tracks by members of extreme protest group Femen, who charged into the hall with slogans attacking 'religious oppression' and Sharia law daubed on their bodies."
- 2014/03/22 [L..T] Exposed: the exploitation of girls in UK gangs "Centre for Social Justice reveals plight of 'invisible' female gang members who face sex abuse and have to carry drugs"
- 2014/03/22 [L..T] 9 Huge Government Conspiracies That Actually Happened "As the years pass, however, secrets surface. Government documents become declassified. We now have evidence of certain elaborate government schemes right here in the U.S. of A."
- 2014/03/22 [L..T] Why Do We Accept Our Failed Political System?
- 2014/03/22 [L..T] Turkey reportedly cuts off Twitter backdoor by blocking Google DNS "Turkey has reportedly blocked Google DNS inside its borders, eliminating a backdoor that briefly helped Turks stay connected to Twitter after the country banned access."
- 2014/03/22 [L..T] Solar Power Is A Huge Water Saver (World Water Day Infographic)
- 2014/03/21 [L..T] Which Professions Have the Most Psychopaths? The Fewest? "CEO is the profession with the most psychopaths."
- 2014/03/21 [L..T] Out of Work, Out of Luck
- 2014/03/20 [L..T] NATO's "Mystery Gunmen" Seek to Strengthen Kiev Regime's Hand "In yet another attempt to widen the confrontation between Russia, Crimea, and the Western-backed regime in Kiev, snipers have opened fire on both Ukrainian and Crimean defense forces at a small military base within the heart of the Crimean peninsula, the administrative city of Simferopol."
- 2014/03/20 [L..T] The truth about Venezuela: a revolt of the well-off, not a 'terror campaign'
- 2014/03/20 [L..T] McCrory: Here are 3 things holding back North Carolina's startups
- 2014/03/20 [L..T] Former U.S. Ambassador: Behind Crimea Crisis, Russia Responding to Years of "Hostile" U.S. Policy Jack Matlock argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is acting in response to years of perceived hostility from the U.S., from the eastward expansion of NATO to the bombing of Serbia to the expansion of American military bases in eastern Europe.
- 2014/03/19 [L..T] Expensing Misogyny "Today, yet another of the professional men I've hired to provide services for Triskele Media made the mistake of calling it Sean's corporation, and that's twice for this person. In all, the tally so far is two bankers, an insurance agent and an accountant in the last year alone."
- 2014/03/19 [L..T] A remarkably accurate global warming prediction, made in 1972 "A paper published in Nature in 1972 accurately predicted the next 30 years of global warming."
- 2014/03/18 [L..T] A Stillborn Child, A Charge of Murder and the Disputed Case Law on "Fetal Harm" "By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had "unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously" caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison."