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- 2014/03/07 [L..T] Yet another ACA "horror story" draws scrutiny «After all the recent troubles conservatives have had with "Obamacare victims" in attack ads that turned out to be wrong, the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity wouldn't push its luck with another dubious commercial, would it?»
- 2014/03/07 [L..T] Venezuela, Journalistic Malpractice, and the 'Paper of Record' "NYT violates standards of basic economics and journalistic procedures in reporting on Venezuela inflation"
- 2014/03/07 [L..T] Millennial generation is cause for liberal optimism A new study by the Pew Research Center provides reason for political optimism: Members of the so-called millennial generation, born after 1980, are more liberal than the preceding generations on a range of issues.
- 2014/03/06 [L..T] Why Is Our Government (And Deep State) So Incompetent? Though many may reckon the U.S. government (and its Deep State) are not so much incompetent as merely evil, I suggest incompetence sows the seeds of evil consequences.
- 2014/03/05 [L..T] Kiev snipers hired by Maidan leaders - leaked EU's Ashton phone tape The snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Maidan leaders, according to a leaked phone conversation between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign affairs minister, which has emerged online.
- 2014/03/05 [L..T] Who is really responsible for the Ukrainian crisis? Someone, namely US and Canadian oil and gas barons, stands to make a helluva lot of money off this deal.
- 2014/03/05 [L..T] Russia puts Ukraine far-right leader on international wanted list over calls for terrorism The leader of the Ukrainian radical group Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), Dmitry Yarosh, has been put on an international wanted list and charged with inciting terrorism, after asking Doku Umarov to attack Russia.
- 2014/03/04 [L..T] Global Warming Slows Antarctica's Coldest Currents The deep, salty currents that carry oxygen and nutrients to the ocean depths have been disappearing over the past few decades.
- 2014/03/04 [L..T] A New Fake Report On Climate Change. Two global warming denialists make a claim which would be important if it weren't totally incorrect, which it is.
- 2014/03/04 [L..T] Open letter of Ukrainian Jews to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.
- 2014/03/04 [L..T] Obama to Republicans: You're Right, Let's Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit
- 2014/03/04 [L..T] [[2014/03/04/Ukraine's Jews lambaste Putin in open letter|]]
- 2014/03/03 [L..T] The Washington Post Uses Biased Experts to Promote Propaganda on Venezuela
- 2014/03/02 [L..T] Fox News host calls out Darrell Issa for "highest level of falsehood" on Benghazi Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday confronted Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) after he was rated as having the "highest level of falsehood" for his obsession with the terrorist attacks in Benghazi.
- 2014/03/02 [L..T] Ross Douthat looks at gay marriage and wonders what's love got to do with it ...if you think that marriage is not a synergistic coupling of sexual variables for the express purpose of pooping out babies from a vagina Pez dispenser, Ross thinks that you are setting your sights way too low and [you] are probably callow and unthinking...
- 2014/03/02 [L..T] Obama pushes Israel to stop assassinations of Iran nuclear scientists President Barack Obama is pressuring Israel to stop carrying out assassinations of top nuclear scientists in Iran as the Islamic Republic continues its negotiations with world powers over its uranium enrichment program, according to a new book.
- 2014/03/02 [L..T] Tug of War Over Ukraine Intensifies Sunday was a day of messages and mopping up, with Ukrainian and Western leaders trying to dissuade President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from overplaying his hand and ordering an invasion of eastern Ukraine, even as Russian forces and their sympathizers in Crimea worked to disarm or neutralize any Ukrainian resistance there.
- 2014/03/01 [L..T] [[2014/03/01/Apple CEO to Global Warming Deniers|]]
- 2014/03/01 [L..T] Russian forces in Ukraine could be a stabilizing factor in a country with no legitimate govt As President Putin weighs using military forces in a Ukraine plunging deeper into political turmoil, Alexander Mercouris, international law expert, tells RT that the presence [of] Russia's forces could be a restraining factor for all the parties involved.
- 2014/03/01 [L..T] Ukraine alleges Russian "invasion" of Crimea as Obama warns of "costs" US President Barack Obama issued a statement Friday evening denouncing "reports of military movements" taken by Russia in Ukraine, warning that "there will be costs for any military intervention." The comments come as the US/European-stoked regime change operation in Ukraine threatens to develop into a conflict between Western powers and Russia.
- 2014/03/01 [L..T] Situation in Ukraine
- 2014/03/01 [L..T] Ukraine's Donetsk calls for referendum, votes to restore Russian's official status The City Council in the eastern city of Donetsk has refused to recognize Ukraine's self-imposed government and called for a referendum on the region's status. The council has made Russian alongside Ukrainian the official language in the region.
- 2014/02/28 [L..T] Indianapolis cops must allow citizens to film police activity after $200k settlement
- 2014/02/28 [L..T] Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr I replied that the indicated comments by Dr. Pielke, and similar ones attributed by Senator Sessions to Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, were not representative of main- stream views on this topic in the climate-science community; and I promised to provide for the record a more complete response with relevant scientific references.
- 2014/02/28 [L..T] The real story behind the FCC's study of newsrooms "Sometimes research takes on a life of its own and becomes more like a Rorschach test for a national policy controversy. That's what's happened to a review of the literature on the critical information needs of American communities that I and colleagues from around the country conducted for the Federal Communications Commission in July 2012."
- 2014/02/28 [L..T] The Gox Crater: Crowd Detectives Reveal Billion-Dollar Heist as Inside Job As smoke clears on the implosion of the Empty Gox bitcoin exchange, thousands of people in the community committed to revealing the truth behind the stonewalling exchange. What was claimed first to be a technical problem, then an outside theft, has been conclusively determined that the MtGox management knew too much, too long ago, to have this be an ordinary case of theft.
- 2014/02/27 [L..T] Astonishingly awful Supreme Court decision lets the government seize all your assets before trial I'll just defer [to] what others have already said about the court's ruling in Kaley v. U.S. this week.
- 2014/02/27 [L..T] One-third of California town's police force arrested for scheming cars from poor Hispanics Investigators say King City police ordered hundreds of vehicles to be impounded – most often those driven by Hispanic immigrants – and then either kept the cars for themselves or re-sold them for profit.
- 2014/02/26 [L..T] Why the Plan to Dig a Canal Across Nicaragua Could Be a Very Bad Idea By the end of this year, if a Chinese entrepreneur gets his way, digging will begin on a waterway that would stretch roughly 180 miles across Nicaragua to unite the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Giant container ships capable of carrying consumer electronics by the millions (or T-shirts by the billions) could begin making the passage by 2019, according to the most optimistic projections.
- 2014/02/26 [L..T] David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Chris Ruen Lead Rally For Radio to Pay Performance Royalties The Content Creators Coalition sponsored an event in New York City calling on terrestrial radio to pay artists performance rights royalties.
- 2014/02/26 [L..T] David Byrne Covered 'Just a Friend' So Biz Markie Can Get Paid Talking Heads frontman performs for Content Creators Coalition, a new royalties advocacy group
- 2014/02/25 [L..T] Groom kidnappings: A blot on India's Bihar Poor and unable to find grooms for their daughters, many still seize men at gunpoint in what is known as pakadwa shaadi.
- 2014/02/25 [L..T] Durham private school's move draws objections Members opted for the postponement after Patrick Byker, attorney for a next-door neighbor of the site, pointed out the school's advocates hadn't addressed how the project might affect the value of nearby property.
- 2014/02/25 [L..T] Secrets of the Vatican Video (83:41): "An inside look at the scandals that rocked Benedict's papacy."
- 2014/02/24 [L..T] Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine? John McCain and other State Department members have troubling ties to the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party.
- 2014/02/23 [L..T] Symposium: How to understand Hobby Lobby
- 2014/02/23 [L..T] Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers You might find your Prime membership morally indefensible after reading these stories about worker mistreatment.
- 2014/02/21 [L..T] From the fringe to the Hill It's alarmingly common to hear congressional Republicans repeat some deeply odd conspiracy theories. But more often than not, the theories didn't start on Capitol Hill; they just ended up there.
- 2014/02/20 [L..T] Is Obama Trying to Control the News with FCC Monitoring?
- 2014/02/19 [L..T] The Increasingly Unequal States of America
- 2014/02/19 [L..T] Hobby Lobby Part VIII: Hobby Lobby's identification of the "precise religious exercise at issue here," and some thoughts on whether federal law substantially burdens it "Most of my previous posts here about Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood have been devoted to the question of whether the plaintiffs have adequately alleged that federal law imposes a "substantial burden" on their exercise of religion--the threshold question under RFRA. I've tried to make two principal points..."
- 2014/02/19 [L..T] Celebrities, European Leaders Push for Final Deal on Wall Street Tax A new viral video with Andrew Lincoln of "The Walking Dead" is one more setback for financial industry lobbyists fighting a financial transaction tax.
- 2014/02/18 [L..T] Sex Is Not an 'Economy' and You Are Not Merchandise The longer I live and the more I read and the deeper I fall in love and the less I give a fuck and the more patience I lose and the more perspective I gain, the more certain I become that the people who most aggressively try to define love for others have never actually experienced it themselves.
- 2014/02/18 [L..T] Cops Interpreted Sign Language as Threat, Handcuffed, Used Stun Gun, and Beat Deaf Man, Lawsuit Alleges
- 2014/02/18 [L..T] The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income "Increasing the minimum wage would have two principal effects on low-wage workers. Most of them would receive higher pay that would increase their family's income, and some of those families would see their income rise above the federal poverty threshold. But some jobs for low-wage workers would probably be eliminated, the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially, and the share of low-wage workers who were employed would probably fall slightly."
- 2014/02/17 [L..T] Cheap Words Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?
- 2014/02/14 [L..T] How the Myth of the "Negro Cocaine Fiend" Helped Shape American Drug Policy "In 1914, a racist fiction helped sell one of the nation's first drug laws; 100 years later, it's still with us."
- 2014/02/13 [L..T] Why a small German village bet big on renewables "Regardless of debate about the success of Germany's renewables revolution, there is no denying that a small town in the corner of rural eastern Germany, 40 miles south of Berlin, may be one of the best examples of decentralized self-sufficiency. Feldheim (population 150), in the cash-strapped state of Brandenburg, was a communist collective farm back when Germany still was divided into East and West. Now it is a model renewable energy village putting into practice Germany's vision of a renewably powered future."
- 2014/02/07 [L..T] Tens of thousands of Muslims flee Christian militias in Central African Republic "Tens of thousands of Muslims are fleeing to neighboring countries by plane and truck as Christian militias stage brutal attacks, shattering the social fabric of this war-ravaged nation. [..] In towns and villages as well as here in the capital, Christian vigilantes wielding machetes have killed scores of Muslims, who are a minority here, and burned and looted their houses and mosques in recent days, according to witnesses, aid agencies and peacekeepers."
- 2014/02/03 [L..T] The painful case of Pastor Scott Lively, homophobe to the world In fact, I argue, minorities are much better off in a system that protects hateful or discriminatory speech than in a system that protects them from it.
- 2014/02/01 [L..T] BIG and Technological Unemployment: Chicken Little Versus the Economists "The paper rehearses arguments for and against the prediction of massive technological unemployment."
- 2014/02/01 [L..T] Majority Interim Report: Benghazi Investigation Update "Immediately after the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012, the Committee on Armed Services began an ongoing extensive effort to evaluate the response of the Department of Defense (DOD). In addition to assessing how the Department reacted, the committee seeks to determine what preparations the U.S. military had made for the possibility of an attack in Libya, and what arrangements have subsequently been put into place to minimize the possibility of a similar recurrence."
- 2014/01/30 [L..T] Opting Out Of Medicaid Expansion: The Health And Financial Impacts
- 2014/01/26 [L..T] Map: Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism. "Thousands of schools in states across the country can use taxpayer money to cast doubt on basic science."
- 2014/01/21 [L..T] Senator questions Council of Islamic Ideology "Senator Farhatullah Babar on Monday questioned recent pronouncements of the Council of Islamic Ideology and asked if the council was a legal entity even after having submitted its final report to parliament in 1997 as required under the constitution."
- 2014/01/13 [L..T] Chris Christie Vetoes Bill Allowing Transgender People To Amend Birth Certificates
- 2014/01/13 [L..T] Amazon Has Jedi Mind-Tricked You Into Forgetting It's Pretty Much Walmart Amazon.com is the best-loved company in America, despite being very similar to one of the least-loved companies in America: Walmart.
- 2014/01/08 [L..T] Kentucky Democratic Congressional Candidate Goes Undercover And Finds A Broken Economy. Awesome! For the past couple months I worked for United Parcel Service, Louisville Kentucky, as an "air handler" loading and unloading cargo aircraft...
- 2014/01/03 [L..T] How I learned to stop worrying and love Amazon The online retailer has reshaped bookselling since it entered the trade in 1995. But Amazon's aggressive and "anti-competitive" tactics, especially for selling ebooks, are raising hackles in an industry under stress.
- 2013/12/30 [L..T] For Economic Stability, Follow the French "The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people, thus lowering unemployment."
- 2013/12/17 [L..T] The Future Is All Robots. But Will We Even Notice?
- 2013/12/10 [L..T] Give Me Amendments or Give Me Death "Inside the secretive campaign by state legislators to pass conservative amendments in 34 states and rewrite the Constitution."
- 2013/11/07 [L..T] 10 Homophobic Quotes by Orson Scott Card, Author of Ender's Game «It is both funny and sad that such a gifted writer has nothing worthwhile to say on the subject of LGBTA rights. Instead, backed by his tired religious convictions, he makes the same, dry, awful arguments that we've come to expect from our basement-dwelling politicians. The great-great-grandson of award-winning polygamist Brigham Young moralizing against social taboos? With that hilarious hypocrisy, he might as well be touring with Dave Chappelle.»
- 2013/11/04 [L..T] [[2013/11/04/Barilla pasta to make inclusive ads|]]
- 2013/10/31 [L..T] Orson Scott Card: Mentor, Friend, Bigot «These days, it's easier for me to think of them as two separate people -- the Card I knew, whose books I loved; and the increasingly unbalanced and extremist pundit whose worldview scarcely counts me as a person. But that's reductionist, and a disservice to both. Card is a monster who helped me learn to write, an author of hateful screed whose novels taught lonely, angry kids compassion and gave them their first sense of home. None of those things makes the others go away. None of those things makes the others stop mattering.»
- 2013/10/19 [L..T] United States v. Bundy
- 2013/10/17 [L..T] [[2013/10/17/Chain email says Nancy Pelosi will earn $803,700 Dollars a year for LIFE|]]
- 2013/10/12 [L..T] Despite what you may have heard in the press, Germany's transition to renewable power has been a stunning success. Energy analyst Chris Nelder runs down the facts. "Major English-language media have been propagating a false narrative about the stunning success of Germany's transition to renewable energy: the Energiewende. To hear them tell it, the transition has been a massive failure, driving up power prices, putting Germany's grid at risk of blackouts, and inspiring a mass revolt against renewables. Nothing could be further from the truth."
- 2013/10/10 [L..T] The Time Jeff Bezos Went Thermonuclear on Diapers.com "Amazon tracks its competitors extremely closely. So when an upstart called Diapers.com began catching on with parents by allowing them to easily schedule recurring orders of diapers and other essentials, Jeff Bezos took notice..."
- 2013/10/09 [L..T] Koch Bros. gave $500k to Heritage Action
- 2013/09/30 [L..T] The Barilla Boycott, A Lesson In Respect "When Guido Barilla gave a radio interview last week, he stepped on a land mine of LGBT issues. While attempting to write about it from a mass market retail angle, this contributor did too."
- 2013/09/17 [L..T] The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?
- 2013/09/10 [L..T] Technology and the Distribution of Wealth There is a question so important to the modern economy that it often hides in plain view. I'm talking about the role that technology plays in the distribution of wealth. This connection between our distribution of societal resources and our rapidly evolving technology centers on two fundamental phenomena: (1) The way technology displaces labor (2) The way technology concentrates profits
- 2013/09/09 [L..T] How Green Is a Tesla, Really?
- 2013/09/06 [L..T] Has the NSA broken SSL? TLS? AES? "Indications suggest that SSL and other fundamental Internet security technologies have indeed been compromised by the NSA."
- 2013/08/26 [L..T] Desert tortoise faces threat from its own refuge "Federal funds are running out at the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center and officials plan to close the site and euthanize hundreds of the tortoises they've been caring for since the animals were added to the endangered species list in 1990."
- 2013/08/15 [L..T] Ender's Game Author Orson Scott Card Goes Off on Another Insane Rant «"Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator," Card wrote before comparing the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler. "Obama will claim we need a national police force in order to fight terrorism and crime. The Boston bombing is a useful start, especially when combined with random shootings by crazy people."» «And then he added that Obama will reassert his power through puppet dictators.»
- 2013/08/07 [L..T] Apple patents tech to let cops switch off iPhone video, camera and wi-fi "Police forces around the world have had the problem that when their officers get a bit carried away and start pepper spraying tied captives there is someone on hand filming the event on their mobile phones. [...] But they may not need to fear scrutiny much longer - Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, whenever they like."
- 2013/07/26 [L..T] The Oxford Dictionary Is Changing The Definition Of 'Marriage' To Include Gay Couples "In light of gay marriage being legalized in the UK, the Oxford English Dictionary editors are changing the definition of marriage."
- 2013/07/17 [L..T] Hacking The World's Dictionaries To Change The Definition Of Marriage "A group of San Francisco activists are trying to change old dictionaries definitions of marriage, by replacing out of date entries wherever they find them."
- 2013/07/16 [L..T] With Citizen Buy-in, German Village Generates 5X Renewable Energy It Needs
- 2013/07/09 [L..T] Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card issues plea for tolerance of his intolerance of gays «just like the Stonewall rioters, Card is here to say he’s finally had enough of being hounded simply for his way of life that involves decrying others' way of life.» If this had happened circa 2020, he'd doubtless be decrying cancel culture and demanding his right of freeze peach as well.
- 2013/07/09 [L..T] United States v. Bundy
- 2013/06/13 [L..T] Rape of Iraqi Women by US Forces as Weapon of War: Photos and Data Emerge
- 2013/06/10 [L..T] How Does He Keep Getting A Platform? Bill Kristol's History Of Terrible Predictions And Bad Advice "Bill Kristol rightly finds the IRS's targeting to be exemplary of abuse, overreaching government. But the NSA? Not really a concern."
- 2013/05/26 [L..T] Abiotic Oil Is Killing the Peak Oil Hoax "It is looking like oil is far more plentiful than western governments and the mainstream media would like us to believe, and the reason oil is so plentiful is because it is produced deep in the earth by geological processes in addition to any biological processes. [..] Abiotic oil is explained pretty well by a recent article at Principia-Scientific entitled Fracturing the Fossil Fuel Fables. Another article I recommend is More Evidence for Abiotic Oil."
- 2013/05/20 [L..T] 'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative "And then there came a day when you started writing about your own llamas. Unsurprisingly, you didn't choose to write about the soft, downy, non-cannibalistic ones you actually met, because you knew no one would find those 'realistic.'"
- 2013/05/15 [L..T] For Insurers, No Doubts on Climate Change
- 2013/05/08 [L..T] Orson Scott Card's long history of homophobia «in addition to being one of the most critically acclaimed writers of science fiction, Card, or OSC, as he's dubbed in sci-fi circles, is also one of the most openly bigoted. Card is the great-great-grandson of Mormon icon Brigham Young, and his politics are deeply linked to his lifelong Mormonism. Card has been openly railing against what he calls "the homosexual agenda" for decades.»
- 2013/04/24 [L..T] Jill Abramson and the wholly sexist narrative of the woman in power "The New York Times newsroom is unhappy because its editor is not very nice. Allegedly. This startling revelation comes from a piece posted on Politico yesterday that instantly lost the internet but gained fans at the NYT."
- 2013/04/18 [L..T] Hobby Lobby Raises Minimum Wage to $14 for Full-Time Employees "Arts and crafts giant Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. announced on Monday that effective immediately, the minimum wage for its full-time hourly employees at its stores and affiliate Hemisphere was increased to $14. The hourly wage for part-time employees was also increased to $9.50."
- 2013/04/15 [L..T] Eden Foods doubles down in birth control flap
- 2013/04/11 [L..T] How the Psychiatrist Who Co-Wrote the Manual on Sex Talks About Sex “ It has been 40 years since homosexuality was removed as a mental illness from the DSM. But given a clean slate, Blanchard said he would still classify homosexual sex as abnormal.”
- 2013/04/11 [L..T] Epidemic: Guns kill twice as many kids as cancer does
- 2013/04/08 [L..T] Newsflash: Pregnancy Is Hard But Anti-Choicers Refuse to Admit It
- 2013/04/07 [L..T] Wearing a Badge, and a Video Camera Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.
- 2013/03/24 [L..T] Debunking Almost Every Republican Lie Against President Obama
- 2013/02/14 [L..T] Economists disagree on whether the minimum wage kills jobs. Why? "Except that the real world seems to be much murkier. Yes, a number of studies have found a link between a higher minimum wage and higher unemployment. But many others, such as this recent paper from U.C. Berkeley that exploited differences across state borders, have found no effect at all."
- 2013/02/14 [L..T] A 2011 Study Exploded One Of The Biggest Fears About Raising The Minimum Wage "This far from settles the fight over raising the minimum wage, but does address concerns that a rise in the minimum wage would lead to across the board job losses."
- 2013/02/08 [L..T] Amazon unpacked The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
- 2013/02/01 [L..T] Gun violence research: History of the federal funding freeze "For many, it is clear that any comprehensive plan to address gun violence in the United States must include further research into this problem. The longtime concern among the science community about the freeze on federal funds for gun violence research, which has now spanned nearly two decades, has seen a renewed wave of interest and advocacy. This article reviews the history of the freeze and of responses to it by the American Psychological Association (APA) and other organizations and individuals."
- 2013/01/11 [L..T] The Hitler gun control lie "Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong."
- 2013/01/02 [L..T] Hypocrisy? Hobby Lobby fights government mandate to give employees access to birth control coverage on religious grounds, yet makes millions on products primarily from China where 7 million abortions and forced contraceptive surgeries a year take place "...one company stands out in its perceived civil disobedience lawsuit fighting the government mandate to give employees access to birth control coverage. Citing violation of religious beliefs, the owners of Hobby Lobby, the David Green family, doesn't want to provide access to birth control they think will induce abortion, although according to Tulsa World they have covered other forms of birth control in the past."
- 2013/01/01 [L..T] Senate clear fiscal cliff measure The Senate has passed legislation to block the impact of across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts that make up the fiscal cliff.
- 2013/01/01 [L..T] Fiscal cliff: America goes to the brink, but millions already fell into poverty Whatever the outcome of the political haggling, Congress has failed the 50 million Americans below the bread line.
- 2012/12/29 [L..T] Chris Hedges Explains How Entire Regions Within the US Are Treated Like Exploited Colonies a recent interview conducted with Chris Hedges surrounding his latest book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.
- 2012/12/21 [L..T] The Evolution of the NRA's Defense of Guns "Over the past few decades, the National Rifle Association has opposed most major efforts to control guns. But the organization's rhetoric and tactics against federal gun-control regulation have evolved significantly since 1934, when the first major weapons regulation – the National Firearms Act – was enacted."
- 2012/12/11 [L..T] Explaining Socialism To A Republican “My friend seemed totally shocked when I said "All socialism isn't bad". She became very serious and replied "So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?" I smiled and said "No, not at all. Why do you think socialism means taking money from the rich and giving to the poor?"”
- 2012/11/20 [L..T] Wealth Inequality in America “Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.”
- 2012/11/20 [L..T] Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects "It's easier for a successful volunteer Free Software project to get money than it is to decide how to spend it. While paying developers is easy, it can carry unintended negative consequences. This essay explores problems and benefits of paying developers in volunteer free and open source projects and surveys strategies that projects have used to successfully finance development while maintaining their volunteer nature."
- 2012/10/27 [L..T] [[2012/10/27/Majority of Americans racist|]] "The election of Barack Obama failed to usher in a post-racial US, with a new poll showing that 51 percent of Americans hold explicitly anti-black views. That figure is up from 48 percent in 2008, the year America elected its first black president."
- 2012/10/27 [L..T] [[2012/10/27/CNBC Exec's Children Murdered 1 Day After CNBC Reports Bankster Lawsuit|]] "Within hours the original page for the article was taken down, and CNBC senior vice president Kevin Krim received news that his children were killed under very suspicious circumstances."
- 2012/10/20 [L..T] Harris-Perry: "Disgusting" voter-suppression tactics still spreading Besides billboards in Ohio and Wisconsin threatening enormous fines and prison sentences for "voter fraud," Harris-Perry noted the appearance of a Spanish-language billboard spotted in Pennsylvania telling voters, "Si Quieres Votar Muéstrala," or, "If you want to vote, show it," a reference to the state voter identification law that was largely struck down in court earlier this month.
- 2012/10/19 [L..T] Third instance of voter registration dumping found in Virginia A third instance of fraudulent voter registration has been uncovered in the important swing state of Virginia, where a Republican consultant has been arrested and thousands of discarded voter registration forms were recovered from a dumpster earlier this week.
- 2012/09/13 [L..T] New questions about makers of anti-Muslim film as shadowy details emerge This appears to be the same AP article as 2012/09/12/California man confirms role in anti-Islam film.
- 2012/09/12 [L..T] Latest Updates on Rage Over Anti-Islam Film
- 2012/09/12 [L..T] 'This Does Not Represent Us': Moving Photos of Pro-American Rallies in Libya pictures of Libyans holding up signs apologizing to US for the death of US ambassador Chris Stevens
- 2012/09/12 [L..T] Craft Store Chain Sues For Right To Deny Their Employees Contraception Coverage Hobby Lobby, a large chain of craft stores owned by conservative evangelical Christians, filed a federal lawsuit against the contraception mandate today, claiming they should have the right to deny coverage for emergency contraception to over 13,000 employees across 40 states. Hobby Lobby's owners, the Green family, claim the Obamacare requirement to provide employer-based coverage for that contraceptive service violates their freedom of religion and speech...
- 2012/09/12 [L..T] California man confirms role in anti-Islam film Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he was manager for the company that produced "Innocence of Muslims," which mocked Muslims and the prophet Muhammad and may have caused inflamed mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. He provided the first details about a shadowy production group behind the film.
- 2012/09/12 [L..T] YouTube Blocks Access to Controversial Video in Egypt and Libya In an unusual move, YouTube announced today that it was blocking access to a video showing clips from "The Innocence of Muslims"– an anti-Islamic film that depicts Prophet Mohammed as a philanderer who approves of child abuse – after the film sparked violent protests in Egypt and Libya.
- 2012/09/10 [L..T] Mitt Romney's epic incompetence I've been following politics for many years; I've written a book on presidential campaigns and I've delved quite a bit into the minutiae of the 2012 campaign. And I'm increasingly convinced that Mitt Romney is the worst national politician I've ever seen.
- 2012/09/09 [L..T] Enough Wind to Power Global Energy Demand: New Research Examines Limits, Climate Consequences "There is enough energy available in winds to meet all of the world's demand. Atmospheric turbines that convert steadier and faster high-altitude winds into energy could generate even more power than ground- and ocean-based units. New research from Carnegie's Ken Caldeira examines the limits of the amount of power that could be harvested from winds, as well as the effects high-altitude wind power could have on the climate as a whole."
- 2012/09/09 [L..T] Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius "This is a challenge to regulations issued under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that would force religiously-motivated business owners like Plaintiffs to violate their faith under threat of millions of dollars in fines."
- 2012/08/19 [L..T] Racism by Political Party "It is undeniable that some Americans are racist but racists split about evenly across the parties. No party has a monopoly on racists."
- 2012/08/07 [L..T] Mandan City Commission gives Wal-Mart $403,000 tax break After two hours of hot debate, the Mandan City Commission on Tuesday gave the Wal-Mart Stores Inc., its first property tax break in the state, to build a supercenter in the city.
- 2012/08/04 [L..T] Edward Jones saga "Some of the firm's financial advisors refer to it as a cult -- they call it "Jonestown" -- and hundreds quit every year, because they "can't drink the green Kool Aid any longer.""
- 2012/07/30 [L..T] Data Tampering At USHCN/GISS "The measured USHCN daily temperature data shows a decline in US temperatures since the 1930s. But before they release it to the public, they put it thorough a series of adjustments which change it from a cooling trend to a warming trend."
- 2012/07/30 [L..T] The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
- 2012/07/18 [L..T] Thanks, Elizabeth Warren! Capitol One to pay $210 million as result of CFPB action
- 2012/07/16 [L..T] Chick-fil-A's flippant response to years of LGBT controversy: 'Guilty as charged' Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy defends the company's anti-gay activities on Biblical grounds.
- 2012/07/15 [L..T] Deconstructing Conservative Myths About Socialism, Capitalism, and Who The "Job Creators" Are "Conservatives have taken to a new spin on truth, by refashioning definitions of words and terms in order to provoke new connotations. Socialism is now defined as a government take over, Capitalism is now defined as patriotic, and the wealthy are now defined as job creators. But simply redefining these words will not change their true meaning, it is only myth making."
- 2012/07/12 [L..T] Iceland Has Hired An Ex-Cop To Hunt Down The Bankers That Wrecked Its Economy
- 2012/06/19 [L..T] Grazing Fees: Overview and Issues "Charging fees for grazing private livestock on federal lands is a long-standing but contentious practice. Generally, livestock producers who use federal lands want to keep fees low, while conservation groups and others believe fees should be increased. The formula for determining the grazing fee for lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service (FS) uses a base value adjusted annually by the lease rates for grazing on private lands, beef cattle prices, and the cost of livestock production."
- 2012/06/01 [L..T] How marriage has changed over centuries "Whenever people talk about traditional marriage or traditional families, historians throw up their hands," said Steven Mintz, a history professor at Columbia University. "We say, 'When and where?'"
- 2012/05/03 [L..T] What you know depends on what you watch: Current events knowledge across popular news sources "The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly – a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all."
- 2012/04/19 [L..T] CEO pay is 380 times average worker's - AFL-CIO “Chief executives at some of the nation's largest companies earned an average of $12.9 million in total pay last year -- 380 times more than a typical American worker, according to the AFL-CIO. [..] Average CEO pay rose 14% compared to 2010, when they earned $11.4 million on average, according to the union group.”
- 2012/04/13 [L..T] 10 Big Companies That Pay No Taxes (and Their Favorite Politicians) "Between 2008 and 2011, 26 major American corporations paid no net federal income taxes despite bringing in billions in profits, according to a new report (PDF) from the nonprofit research group Citizens for Tax Justice."
- 2012/04/13 [L..T] 12 Ways To Use Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals Against Liberals All liberals are using rules set forth by Saul Alinsky; conservatives should use them too, because they work.
- 2012/03/09 [L..T] A Power Grid of Their Own: German Village Becomes Model for Renewable Energy "The tiny village of Feldheim, some 60 kilometers southwest of Berlin, was catapulted by chance to the forefront of the renewable energy movement. Now visitors from around the world are flocking to this otherwise unremarkable rural community to see if they can replicate its success."
- 2012/01/26 [L..T] Remake of Tezuka's Popular Story Turns Into Denial? "Did the Disney studio steal Kimba The White Lion and rework it as their "original story", The Lion King? They certainly give that impression with their corporate stance ("we never heard of Tezuka nor Kimba until after The Lion King was released"). And why would they have filed suit to try to prevent the showing of Tezuka Productions' 1997 Jungle Emperor Leo movie at the 1998 Toronto FantAsia Film Festival? (Jungle Emperor was the original title for Kimba The White Lion.) It seems quite simple; Kimba had been kept out of sight in North America for 20 years by that time. And once you can see the two together..."
- 2012/01/19 [L..T] Shock new revelations about Mother Teresa "In January, 2012, documents obtained by an investigative journalist working at SF Weekly, a successful alternative weekly newspaper in San Francisco, California, revealed that an Albanian nun, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known to the world today as Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), supported and praised a Catholic priest knowing that he was an accused serial abuser of young boys in his care."
- 2011/12/02 [L..T] [[2011/12/02/How Israeli Occupation Forces, Bahraini Monarchy Guards Trained U.S. Police|]]
- 2011/12/01 [L..T] Do Europe's Minimum Income Schemes Provide Adequate Shelter against the Economic Crisis and How, If at All, Have Governments Responded? "The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changes that have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens with adequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on data for 24 European Union countries, this paper asks whether EU governments implemented additional measures during the first phase of the crisis to improve safety nets."
- 2011/11/08 [L..T] Charlie Hebdo front cover depicts Muslim man kissing cartoonist "French satirical magazine does not hold back in latest issue despite firebomb attack after printing Muhammad cartoon"
- 2011/10/03 [L..T] How Unequal We Are: The Top 5 Facts You Should Know About The Wealthiest One Percent Of Americans “It may shock you exactly how wealthy this top 1 percent of Americans is. ThinkProgress has assembled five facts about this class of super-rich Americans...”
- 2011/09/14 [L..T] Abiotic Oil a Theory Worth Exploring "...their advocacy of "abiotic theory" has many dismissing them as heretics, frauds, or idealists. They hold that oil can be derived from hydrocarbons that existed eons ago in massive pools deep within the earth's core. That source of hydrocarbons seeps up through the earth's layers and slowly replenishes oil sources. In other words, it turns the fossil-fuel paradigm upside down."
- 2011/09/04 [L..T] Voters' zero-sum faceoff with wealthy campaign donors "While most citizens gripe about politicians or "the system" for operating beyond their influence--do any voters understand the "how" and "why" when elite interests wield far greater force?"
- 2011/08/21 [L..T] German Village Produces 321% More Energy Than It Needs! "Not only has [ Germany ] announced plans to shut down all of its nuclear power plants and started the construction of 2,800 miles of transmission lines for its new renewable energy initiative, but now the village of Wildpoldsried is producing 321% more energy than it needs! The small agricultural village in the state of Bavaria is generating an impressive $5.7 million in annual revenue from renewable energy."
- 2011/08/18 [L..T] Pseudonymous blogging at Science Blogs is over. lead paragraph::I have just been informed that ScienceBlogs will no longer be hosting anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers. In case you are interested, despite extensive communication from many of us as to why we blog under pseudonyms, I have not been given any rationale or reason for this move. Particularly, no rationale or reason that responds to the many valid points raised by the pseudonymous folks.
- 2011/08/12 [L..T] 8 grams of thorium could replace gasoline in cars
- 2011/07/28 [L..T] headline::'No porn or prostitution': Islamic extremists set up Sharia law controlled zones in British cities lead paragraph::Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up.
- 2011/07/28 [L..T] About "Google Minus." How does this affect me? As a member of a plural system, I would technically not be allowed to sign up as "Noël Dawkins," even though I prefer to use my own name online, rather than presenting as the "front identity." I would probably not be banned, as my name looks like a name, rather than an actual pseudonym, but it would technically be against their strict community guidelines. I suppose that I could simply sign up under the front identity (disclosure: we have already done so), but there is a difference between social networking under that guise, and social networking as myself.
- 2011/07/27 [L..T] headline::Mom granted new trial in death of son struck by driver lead paragraph:: A Georgia woman convicted on misdemeanor charges in the death of her son after he darted out into traffic will receive a new trial, a judge ruled.
- 2011/07/27 [L..T] Why it Matters: Google+ and Diversity Just a few days before Google+'s doors officially open on July 31, Google's latest communications from Vic (via Robert) and Bradley on the raft of account suspensions and “common names” policy seem unlikely to put the “identity crisis” to rest. It's certainly a positive sign that they're engaging, and process changes like giving people with names Google doesn't like a week to change their account name before suspending them are certainly improvements. That said, the impression they're giving is that they're going to try to hold the line with the current policy even knowing that it targets transgender people, human rights activists, people at risk for stalking and harrassment domestic violence survivors, HIV/AIDS victims and caregivers, people with names that sound weird to Americans (or for that matter people in Hong Kong who would rather go by their English names)..."
- 2011/07/26 [L..T] headline::Mom spared jail time after driver hits, kills boy lead paragraph:: A Georgia woman who was convicted on misdemeanor charges in the death of her son who darted out into traffic will not spend time in jail, a judge ruled Tuesday.
- 2011/07/26 [L..T] Fraudsters Already Exploiting Google+ It was inevitable. With the creation of Google+, a new social network already boasting over 20 million users, the scammers were sure to follow. Here's a note a probable fraudster sent to reader Geoff through his Google+ profile, informing him that someone died in Africa and he needs to be contacted about a "business transaction" of "magnitude."
- 2011/07/25 [L..T] Taxing The Poor: The Only Tax Increase Republicans Support While they fight the expiration of the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, Republicans have continually cited a report that shows that 51 percent of Americans don't pay income taxes, even admitting that middle- and lower-class Americans need to shoulder a larger burden in deficit reduction efforts.
- 2011/07/25 [L..T] Google's gormless 'no pseudonym' policy lead paragraph::A week ago, I was stunned to discover that my entire Google account -- gmail, reader, blogger, Google documents, YouTube, Google Plus (G+), etc. -- was suddenly suspended because their system "perceived a violation."
- 2011/07/25 [L..T] Google+ Real Names Policy Is About Brands, Not People Google may have inadvertently swept up some users and handles that were legitimate or simply too innocuous to cause any brand any kind of harm, but I think the intention is clear: to protect brands and businesses from everyday Google service users who might infringe upon their trademarks and brand identities.
- 2011/07/25 [L..T] Let them eat bus transfers
- 2011/07/24 [L..T] JP Morgan Tells Investors Why Middle Class Americans Are Screwed
- 2011/07/24 [L..T] The Secret History of Guns "The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership – and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers – the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there's no resolution in sight."
- 2011/07/23 [L..T] headline::Anders Behring Breivik: profile of a mass murderer
- 2011/07/23 [L..T] Something rotten in the state of Norway The media initially attributed the event -- with some evidence -- to Muslim extremists, then rapidly backed off from that conclusion when the "blond Nordic-looking" suspect was identified. This is one of several parallels with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and there are reasons to believe that there was a Muslim-extremist connection in that event as well.
- 2011/07/23 [L..T] headline::Norway, Islam and the threat of the West Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a "madman". He may well be, but this is one way that the motivations for heinous crimes can be airbrushed out of the story before they have the chance to take hold in the popular imagination.
- 2011/07/23 [L..T] Right-Wing Pundits Jumped To Blame Muslims And "Jihadists" For Norway Attacks quote::...some pundits, mostly right-wing neoconservatives, proclaimed that this bore all the hallmarks of Islamic terrorism, even going so far as to draw policy prescriptions. At the Washington Post, normally a well-respected news outlet, Jennifer Rubin quoted the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' Thomas Joscelyn and AEI scholar Gary Schmitt to say that the attacks were the result of Islamic terrorism. She then concluded the "jihadist" attack on Oslo means the U.S. shouldn't cut military spending...
- 2011/07/22 [L..T] Suspect In Custody For Norwegian Terror Attacks Allegedly An Anti-Islam Right-Wing Extremist
- 2011/07/22 [L..T] I've been suspended from Google+ Skud summarizes the circumstances of her suspension from Google+, including her prior employment at Google and arguments in favor of pseudonymity.
- 2011/07/22 [L..T] Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs Something happened to Dylan's Google account, and it's been disabled. He doesn't know what happened to the account, and no one at Google with the power to help him is interested in acknowledging the problem or letting him back in to the cloud-based services where all of his correspondence and much of the digital trail from the last few years of his life is stored.
- 2011/07/21 [L..T] Woman who lost child to hit and run driver convicted of vehicular homicide Forum thread discussing the traffic death of Raquel Nelson's 4-year-old child, and similar car-centric situations around the US.
- 2011/07/21 [L..T] The Fed Audit The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
- 2011/07/21 [L..T] 21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit.
- 2011/07/20 [L..T] When design kills: The criminalization of walking Raquel Nelson, an Atlanta-area mother, was recently convicted of vehicular homicide because her 4-year-old son was struck by a car and killed while she was crossing a busy street at an intersection with no crosswalk.
- 2011/07/20 [L..T] headline::Syrian Tribal Leader Threatens To Barbecue U.S. Ambassador Like Lamb And 'Eat' Him 'With Or Without Salt' quote::Ahmad Al-Shlash, a tribal leader in Syria, gave an interview to the Arabic language channel Al-Dunya TV in which he, along with his "cousins," reportedly called for the U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Robert Stephen Ford, to be cooked and eaten like "American mutton," either "with salt or without salt."
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] News Corp shares fall as pressure grows Shares in News Corporation have fallen 4.3% in New York amid mounting pressure as the phone-hacking scandal develops.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] headline::Hacking scandal earns News Corp. credit warning lead paragraph::Standard & Poor's on Monday placed News Corp.'s credit rating on a negative watch citing increased business and reputation risks from investigations into the widening phone hacking scandal in Britain.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] headline::News of the World phone-hacking whistleblower found dead lead paragraph::Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] Prosecuting the victim, absolving the perpetrators
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] Not Taking Other People's Money “The problem with socialists, according to Margaret Thatcher, is that "they always run out of other people's money." We haven't hit that point just yet, but we have hit our nation's legal credit limit of $14.3 trillion. To avoid defaulting on our loans, policymakers must raise that limit.” ...so that we can continue borrowing other people's money.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] Finland's Internet service provider refuses to block The Pirate Bay In May, copyright holders sued Internet service provider Elisa, one of Finland's largest, to get the provider to block access to torrent site The Pirate Bay due to charges of media piracy. Finnish public service media company YLE reports that Elisa refuses to comply with such claims, however, citing the technical difficulty of compliance.
- 2011/07/18 [L..T] Cousin admits role in NYC subway terror plot lead paragraph::A cousin of admitted terrorist Najibullah Zazi publicly revealed for the first time Monday that he was in on Zazi's chilling 2009 plot to attack New York City subways with suicide bombers.
- 2011/07/17 [L..T] Woman boards plane with 3-inch knife TWICE but TSA plays it down because explosives are 'biggest threat' An Indianapolis woman was shocked to discover she had been able to board a plane with a three-inch knife in her carry-on bag not once, but twice.
- 2011/07/17 [L..T] Pilot drives 6,000 mi to protest TSA
- 2011/07/17 [L..T] "Why does she stay with that jerk?" 19 common reasons that people stay with abusers
- 2011/07/16 [L..T] headline::Will you be a "known traveller"? lead paragraph::Earlier this month, the US Travel Association released the results of a survey that found that 45 percent of respondents would pay a fee of "up to" $150 for a background check and verification program that would allow them to speed through airport security. On Friday, America's Transportation Security Administration announced that this Fall, it will move ahead with a plan to test just such a program.
- 2011/07/16 [L..T] The Google+ Controversy & Virtual Worlds – A Question Of Identity excerpt::The avalanche of news last weekend was triggered by the story that Opensource Obscure, a Second Life resident from Italy, had his profile suspended by Google+ because his name "violated community standards." This was followed by reports of the accounts of Second Life users being culled, much in the same fashion as had happened at Facebook weeks ago.
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] GOP Rep. Steve King Would Reject Debt Ceiling Deal With $3 Trillion In Cuts And Just $8 In Revenue Increases
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] The Political Lessons Of "Harry Potter" eight moral/political lessons taught by the Harry Potter series
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] headline::A research revolution to save the planet
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] headline::Mother faces jail for killing son, four, after they crossed road in the wrong place - and he was struck by hit-and-run driver quote::Raquel Nelson, 30, could now spend more time in jail than the driver because she didn't use a crosswalk when she walked her three children over a busy street from a bus stop to their apartment in Marietta, Georgia.
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] Default Would Dim American Power A sustained default could undercut American power in four ways. The first and perhaps most certain would be to force cuts in defense spending. Second, a default would make it harder for Washington to negotiate agreements or build alliances with other countries. Third, a debt default would erode American credibility. Finally, a default could help China, Russia and other major buyers of U.S. debt accomplish something they have been trying to do for years: find an alternative investment to U.S. Treasurys.
- 2011/07/15 [L..T] ALEC Exposed: State Legislative Bills Drafted by Secretive Corporate-Lawmaker Coalition This week the Center for Media and Democracy released 800 model bills, legislation that is straight out of the corporate playbook and drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council.
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] headline::Pedestrian convicted of vehicular homicide in own child's death lead paragraph::A Marietta mother may serve more time than the driver who hit and killed her 4-year-old son.
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] Sen. John McCain Renews Push for Senate Committee to Halt WikiLeaks' Undermining of America
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] headline::Barack Obama storms out of meeting
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] What Everyone Is Missing in the Debt Ceiling Debate
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] Computers Learn To Play Civilization By Reading Instruction Manual lead paragraph::Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have taught a computer how to play strategy game Civilization by providing it with the game's instruction manual.
- 2011/07/14 [L..T] Getting to Crazy The insanity of the GOP, which many people are finally just noticing, has been building gradually for a long time.
- 2011/07/13 [L..T] headline::Cantor Says Obama Stormed Out Of Debt Ceiling Meeting, As All Progress In Talks "Erased" House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told reporters that President Obama walked out "angrily" from a meeting on the debt ceiling; Democratic aides say that Cantor was rude and Obama merely ended the meeting for the day.
- 2011/07/13 [L..T] headline::Social Media: a double-edged sword in Syria
- 2011/07/13 [L..T] 5 Disastrous Consequences Of A Debt Ceiling Meltdown 1. Fed gov will have to cut back payments for services. 2. ...which will cause "real people" to be hurt. 3. ...which will hurt the economy. 4. ...and raise interest rates significantly. 5. It will actually increase the deficit more than would raising the debt ceiling in a timely manner -- assuming the ceiling is eventually lifted.
- 2011/07/13 [L..T] Kenya opens its books in revolutionary transparency drive
- 2011/07/13 [L..T] headline::Pushing for faster Internet connection with fiber
- 2011/07/13 [L..T] What Happened to the $2.6 Trillion Social Security Trust Fund? "I cannot guarantee that those checks [he included veterans and the disabled, in addition to Social Security] go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." "...either Obama and Geithner are lying to us now, or they and all defenders of the Social Security status quo have been lying to us for decades. It must be one or the other."
- 2011/07/12 [L..T] Friends in Revolution
- 2011/07/12 [L..T] headline::Overthrowing Apple: The Web Leads To Freedom
- 2011/07/12 [L..T] How committed are ISPs to graduated response?
- 2011/07/12 [L..T] headline::Effort in Senate to Close Offshore Tax Havens
- 2011/07/12 [L..T] headline::Rep. Ron Paul Slams Debt Ceiling with Grassroots Campaign
- 2011/07/12 [L..T] headline::Bad law, good lawsuit It's not comfortable to side against the state of North Carolina in the lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina. Rooting against the state means hoping that we, as taxpayers who pay for the state's legal defense, lose money on litigation.
- 2011/07/11 [L..T] Phone hacking scandal could spell disaster for press freedom
- 2011/07/11 [L..T] Google Confirms: Non-Real Name Google Profiles Risk Suspension (I.E., Google Still Doesn't Get Social)
- 2011/07/10 [L..T] headline::EGYPT: Activists back in Tahrir Square to salvage revolution
- 2011/07/10 [L..T] headline::Murdoch: the network defeats the hierarchy
- 2011/07/09 [L..T] Bullies and cowards who have killed a newspaper – for nothing
- 2011/07/08 [L..T] Children's Personalities Linked to Their Chemical Response to Stress This high-and-low-cortisol reactivity provides different developmental advantages and disadvantages, the authors write. Heightened cortisol levels characteristic of the doves were related to lower attention problems but also put them at risk for developing anxiety and depression over time. By contrast, the lower cortisol levels for hawks in aggressive families were associated with lower anxiety problems; however, at the same time, these children were more prone to risky behavior, including attention and hyperactivity problems.
- 2011/07/08 [L..T] Michigan Woman Faces 93 Days in Jail for Planting a Vegetable Garden Julie Bass of Oak Park, Michigan -- a mother of 6, law-abiding citizen, and gardener -- is facing 93 days in jail after being charged with a misdemeanor for planting a vegetable garden in the front yard.
- 2011/07/08 [L..T] Esther Dyson On The Future Of Space Travel: We Are Only At “The End Of The Beginning”
- 2011/07/08 [L..T] Anti-pseudonym bingo “People testing the Google+ social network are discussing increasing evidence that, terms of service requirement or not, Google+ wants people to use their legal names much as Facebook does. Skud shares a heads-up from a user banned for using his initials. Then, for example, see discussion around it on Mark Cuban's stream, Skud's stream and Sarah Stokely's blog.” The post includes a bingo card to keep score of anti-nym arguments.
- 2011/07/07 [L..T] headline::AntiSec: Anonymous hackers show Orlando Police taking food from hungry children
- 2011/07/07 [L..T] The educational value of creative disobedience
- 2011/07/05 [L..T] Alex and Google, follow-up
- 2011/07/05 [L..T] headline::What Does it Mean to be a Woman Hackerspace Member? “I wasn't sure what the answer to that question might be, so I interviewed seven female hackerspace members ... to get their take on what it's like.”
- 2011/07/03 [L..T] Shame on you, Google
- 2011/07/03 [L..T] Google made my son cry
- 2011/07/02 [L..T] Dr. Cynthia Boaz: 14 propaganda techniques Fox "News" uses to brainwash Americans "Panic mongering, character assassination, and scapegoating are just three of the techniques Fox News relies on to drive its right-wing agenda forward."
- 2011/06/24 [L..T] The Debt Ceiling: Why Obama Should Just Ignore It The argument goes like this: Because Congress already appropriated the funds in question, it is the executive branch's duty to enact those appropriations. The debt ceiling, then, is legislative "double-counting," because the executive branch is obligated to spend the money Congress appropriates, without having to go back and ask again for permission.
- 2011/06/19 [L..T] Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong
- 2011/06/11 [L..T] Other People's Money Fox's John Stossel criticizes politicians for being careless with "other people's money". To his credit, the $700 billion military budget is the second item he mentions ("growing entitlements" are, of course, first), but then he immediately proceeds to ridicule a series of absolutely trivial expenditures, the largest of which is 0.0002% of the $700B originally mentioned and most of which are probably quite worthwhile investments of public money (including the bicycle helmets, which probably save money overall).
- 2011/06/01 [L..T] Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil "Why "efficiency" and "productivity" really mean more profits for corporations and less sanity for you."
- 2011/05/27 [L..T] Water Use May Decide Future of Centralized Solar Power "Nuclear and coal may be big offenders, but wet-cooled concentrating solar power uses even more water per MWh of electricity generated. Dry-cooled CSP cuts water consumption significantly, but it's still far more than solar power from photovoltaics (or wind power)."
- 2011/05/21 [L..T] Lab personnel: Technically gifted an article mainly about the lab technician job market which happens to use James Damore as an example, long before he became notorious
- 2011/05/13 [L..T] Court denies right to resist illegal cop entry into home
- 2011/05/13 [L..T] Pay Enough or Don't Pay at All
- 2011/05/04 [L..T] headline::Our National Debt 'Shall Not Be Questioned,' the Constitution Says For the Obama administration to adopt the broad reading of Section Four would be bold (and I hasten to say I don't expect them to do it); but it would hardly be unusual in the recent discourse of presidential power--especially the Republican party's theory of the presidency.
- 2011/05/03 [L..T] Yes, you should join Anonymous “despite [Anonymous's] somewhat ironic transparency, there remain a few points of misunderstanding that we encounter when it comes time to recruit [...] I've composed the following FAQ by which to address those myths along with common questions and concerns that we often encounter.”
- 2011/04/29 [L..T] The Debt Limit Option President Obama Can Use
- 2011/04/26 [L..T] Real-Life Superheroes Offer Sex Workers Protection From the Long Island Serial Killer “Real life superhero vigilantes in New York – the New York Initiative – have decided to step in and have sworn to do everything they can to protect sex workers from the Long Island Serial Killer. They are offering brute-force, no questions asked protection – because they believe police are inadequate...”
- 2011/04/16 [L..T] To all Ladies: Free Protection and Safety System, (Long Island Killer) - m4w - 29 (NYC) This is the New York Initiative's Craig's List ad offering assistance to New York City sex workers in defending themselves from the Long Island Serial Killer.
- 2011/03/01 [L..T] It's the Inequality, Stupid “Eleven charts that explain what’s wrong with America.”
- 2011/02/22 [L..T] Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden Conclusions: “Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.”
- 2011/02/03 [L..T] Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time “First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups – even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy – desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.”
- 2011/01/19 [L..T] How many ways has K&L Gates touched you today? “{K&L Gates's} high-stakes cases are well documented, and so is its slick, and often aggressive, brand of lawyering. To win, the attorneys have used clever legal tactics to steamroll opponents, impugned the ethics of some government officials and singed relationships with allies.”
- 2011/01/19 [L..T] Fuller Memorial Presbyterian / Durham Rescue Mission “Plans submitted to the City / County Planning department with the rezoning demonstrated several worrisome elements to neighbors. The scale had grown considerably from the single multipurpose building discussed in previous years; it now stretched over portions of five city blocks, involved the demolition of 9 houses in historic district, and contemplated the closing of two streets, creating a fenced/gated facility stretching over three blocks.”
- 2011/01/11 [L..T] 20 Deadliest Gun States "You're five times more likely to die from a gun in Arizona than Hawaii. In the wake of the Giffords massacre, The Daily Beast ranks which states have the worst record of gun fatalities."
- 2011/01/05 [L..T] Doctor faked data linking autism to vaccines, British Medical Journal says “The British Medical Journal on Wednesday accused [disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield of committing an "elaborate fraud" by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.”
- 2010/12/09 [L..T] Voters Say Election Full of Misleading and False Information Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that a number of false statements relevant to the election were, in fact, true.
- 2010/10/21 [L..T] Hobby Lobby's religious real estate hobby "But real estate -- that's the fun part. By the time the Greens closed on the Northfield campus late last year, the previous owners had grown weary of spending millions on annual upkeep and the price had come way down. They got the core of the campus -- 48 buildings and 217 acres, without the surrounding woodlands -- for $100,000."
- 2010/09/30 [L..T] Wealth Inequality “[...] Mike Norton and I recently conducted a study in which we asked Americans to first guess at the distribution of wealth in the United States, and then we asked them to perform the thought experiment and lay out what they think would be the ideal distribution of wealth if they were to enter society and be placed randomly in a class.”
- 2010/09/09 [L..T] Why the Rich Need the Poor
- 2010/07/05 [L..T] Sex, Lies and Oil Spills «A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina. .. In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep.»
- 2010/06/09 [L..T] Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.
- 2010/06/07 [L..T] Consumerist.com declares "wolf whistles at women is not sexism" A longtime reader of Consumerist is dismayed by sexist comments on a post about sexism, sends a private message about the problem, receives no reply, posts a related comment on a follow-up article -- and is banned.
- 2010/06/04 [L..T] No mosque at Ground Zero Pat Condell throws his lot in with the US right-wing media on the issue of the Ground Zero Mosque, warning that it is the first major step towards the Islamic cultural invasion of America.
- 2010/05/23 [http://osintegrators.com/node/54 L..T] To Microsoft, Open Source means "Windows Encumbered"
- 2010/05/20 [L..T] Dear Andres Duany: Money, not millennials, hurting cities “But you know what really kills a city? Keeping people out. Making it prohibitively expensive by demanding it look or feel a certain way. A city cannot be planned all at once or dropped from the sky. A city is the accumulation of years and years of small changes made by many, many people of all kinds, creating a unique, irreplaceable product.”
- 2010/05/17 [L..T] Protesters Take Over Banks, K St. “It didn't take long for the handful of irritated Bank of America employees to abandon their desks and make for the doors. Their office, a small Bank of America branch on Massachusetts Avenue, had been more or less taken over by a boisterous rally of 75 or so protesters from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the organizer behind two days' worth of Wall Street-themed protests in or near Washington.”
- 2010/05/14 [L..T] Jaywalkers take deadly risks Jaywalkers have migrated to the suburbs. They venture across four- to eight-lane roads, often not using crosswalks, pausing on the raised medians or the middle “suicide lanes” to look for a break in traffic as cars whiz by. Sometimes the crossings end tragically, as it did last month for a young mother who watched her 4-year-old son killed in the road."
- 2010/04/18 [L..T] Right-wing radio host calls tea parties 'the Sarah Palin movement' «As right-wing radio host Matt Walsh learned recently, if you challenge mob mentality, you get the mob itself. In this case, if you trash Sarah Palin in front of her biggest fans, you might just get called an "infiltrator" and booed off stage.»
- 2010/04/16 [L..T] Solar power in Ontario could produce almost as much power as all U.S. nuclear reactors, studies find "Solar power in southeastern Ontario has the potential to produce almost the same amount of power as all the nuclear reactors in the United States, according to two new studies."
- 2010/04/08 [L..T] headline::Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?
- 2010/03/27 [L..T] The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters
- 2010/02/10 [L..T] Ridicule of Conspiracy Theories Focuses On Diffusing Criticism of the Powerful
- 2010/01/29 [L..T] Victim Blaming and Transgender Rape Victims "Last year, we dredged the ugliest depths of victim-blaming when a middle-school girl was gang-raped outside her homecoming dance, and a bunch of assholes got on the Internet to shame her for drinking alcohol. Thought that was bad? Consider what happens when a rape accusation is coming from a trans woman."
- 2010/01/29 [L..T] Rebutting (Again!) the 9/11 Truthers “The belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (that includes, in addition to Holocaust denial, creationism and crank theories of physics), and is easily refuted by noting that beliefs and theories are not built on single facts alone, but on a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry. All of the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.”
- 2010/01/15 [L..T] Blacks Picket Pizza Hut in North Carolina lead paragraph::On Saturday, January 16, 2010, black activists will be standing outside of a Pizza Hut on Bragg Boulevard. In October, 2008, black pro-life activists with graphic signs stood on Yadkin Road in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to expose what was believed to be a stealth Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in the making.
- 2009/12/16 [L..T] Who are the climate change skeptics? “...a 2008 study that examined 141 "English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005" found that over 92% of them were connected to conservative think tanks, either published by them or authored by persons directly affiliated with them...”
- 2009/12/14 [L..T] visiting the Amazon warehouse Julia Sweeney recounts her trip to the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitesville, Indiana to deliver shipping stock of her CD and DVD Letting Go of God.
- 2009/11/30 [L..T] Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense “Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. ... What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians' bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.”
- 2009/11/18 [L..T] How we discovered Verizon's Spamdetector could be twisted into a disguise for censorship “According to the laws of Verizon Central, once you've been labeled spam, there is only one course of action and it goes like this:...”
- 2009/11/12 [L..T] Meet The Predators If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever "had sexual intercourse with somone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances," some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don't use the 'R' word.
- 2009/11/06 [L..T] Kline: Democrats spend too much, accomplish too little “For months, I've been calling on my Democratic colleagues to press the 'reset' button and embrace commonsense, targeted solutions to strengthen and reform health care. Democrats have instead left Republicans with no alternative but to propose our own plan.”
- 2009/11/04 [L..T] The Public Option Fight Continues – But How Exactly Does Reform Work? “The basic theme of health care reform is that insurance would be mandatory, subsidized and regulated.” - an overview of the bills currently being reconciled
- 2009/10/02 [L..T] Water Sucking Solar Farms Breed Water Wars "Many solar projects consume enormous amounts of water. How much water are we talking? According to a recent New York Times article, proposed plans for two solar farms in Nevada would gulp up 1.3 billion gallons of water annually--or 20 percent of the area's available water."
- 2009/09/04 [L..T] Diebold Dumps Most of Its E-Voting Business “Diebold Inc. announced yesterday that it had sold its U.S. election systems business ... to Election Systems & Software, Inc..”
- 2009/08/14 [L..T] The Senate HELP Committee "public option" will be multiple "options," and these will be run by insurance companies “Section 3106 is difficult to read. ... I will tell you first what I derive from it in the plainest language possible, and then discuss some of its provisions so you can judge for yourself whether I got it right.”
- 2009/08/11 [L..T] Woman sues to get men to play her “Three years ago, league members voted to rescind a rule that penalized them for refusing to compete against [Nancy Griffin, a woman who has beaten many top male players] or anyone else. [Some] men have invoked both their wives and God to avoid matches against her”, while others have signed a petition supporting her case.
- 2009/08/08 [L..T] Reply to critics of "Bait and switch: How the 'public option' was sold" >“Several "yes buts" took issue with a comment I posted on July 20 on this blog entitled "Bait and switch: How the 'public option' was sold."”
- 2009/07/27 [L..T] Science Is in the Details “...it is important that we understand Dr. Collins and his faith as they relate to scientific inquiry.”
- 2009/07/27 [L..T] Chris Mooney is Not My Friend Anymore “It was not until a Boston Globe article in which Mooney and Kirshenbaum place the blame and responsibility squarely on the shoulders of scientists that the camel's back broke.”
- 2009/07/26 [L..T] The formula “There's no doubt members of the public must become much more knowledgeable about science and its importance. But scientists must also become far more involved with - and knowledgeable about - the public.”
- 2009/07/20 [L..T] Bait and switch: How the 'public option' was sold “...the leaders of the "public option" movement haven't told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It's high time they did.”
- 2009/07/18 [L..T] Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle “In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of [Animal Farm and 1984] from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.”
- 2009/07/18 [L..T] Today's Question When do we get to stop defining smart, passionate women by the most powerful men in their circle?
- 2009/07/15 [L..T] A face of the uninsured, a state of denial “A proponent himself of single-payer when he was but an Illinois legislator, Obama now counsels that the way to achieve universal coverage is by reforming – or "building on" – the private insurance system while bolstering the public insurance sector.”
- 2009/07/06 [L..T] How Long Does it Take to Set Up a Health Co-Op? “Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, tells Bloomberg that if existing regional co-ops are the model, such plans can take decades to fully develop.”
- 2009/07/04 [L..T] Asking for it There's nothing like science for giving that objective, white-coat flavoured legitimacy to your prejudices, so it must have been a great day for Telegraph readers when they came across the headline "Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists". Ah, scientists.
- 2009/06/23 [L..T] How Women Will Be Hurt by Gay Marriage “...once they've experienced sex with other men, Catullus tells us, men are unsatisfied with what their new wives provide them.”
- 2009/06/10 [L..T] The Health Insurance Mafia Deserves a Good Screwing “Even calling it "insurance" is a sick joke. Insurance implies a guarantee, and no matter what we pay, there are never any guarantees.”
- 2009/06/10 [L..T] Conrad Proposes Co-ops To Replace Public Plan “Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) proposed replacing a public health care plan with a non-profit cooperative "that would have the same plans and would be subject to the same standards [as private plans]."”
- 2009/06/10 [L..T] Open Access Publisher Accepts Nonsense Manuscript for Dollars Would a publisher accept a completely nonsensical manuscript if the authors were willing to pay Open Access publication charges? After being spammed with invitations to publish in Bentham Science journals earlier this year, I decided to find out. ... Bentham confirmed receipt of my submission the very next day (January 30, 2009). Nearly four months later, I received a response – the article was accepted.
- 2009/05/31 [L..T] Why do people persist in voting Republican? “I happened to read University of Virginia Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's thoughtful essay on what makes people vote Republican ... Read the whole thing. You might even conclude, as I suspect Haidt does, that Republican voters tend to be more nuanced and sophisticated than Democratic voters.”
- 2009/04/02 [L..T] Fake Faith and Epic Crimes «Spain's celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq – "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law" that had left the UN "in tatters." He said, "There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay."»
- 2009/04/01 [L..T] Assessment of Minimum Income Schemes in Spain "...this report points out the need to make progress in cover for situations of social exclusion and need. It also makes clear that wide-reaching protective cover (such as Spain's) for situations of need is not enough if unaccompanied by quality services or enhanced protective intensity with a view to surmounting the situation of relative poverty. Nor is it sufficient if unaccompanied by real opportunities to enter the labour market."
- 2009/03/07 [L..T] "Bipartisan DEFINED !" : RUSH LIMBAUGH : CPAC Convention 2009 “To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.”
- 2009/02/19 [L..T] The New Book Banning “under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children's products, the federal government has now advised that children's books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute.”
- 2009/02/14 [L..T] Knoxville Shooter's Manifesto Made Public “Adkisson was also clear that he considered his actions a hate crime. He made a special point in explaining that by emphasizing his hatred of "damn left-wing Liberals."”
- 2008/11/25 [L..T] The price of dissent on global warming “According to official data, in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that?”
- 2008/11/25 [L..T] Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks “The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay in American history”, even when earlier outlays are adjusted for inflation.
- 2008/11/07 [L..T] Insiders spill beans on Palin “[Sarah Palin]'s big spend on clothes emerged publicly last month, but McCain's aides also said that she spent "thousands more" than the reported $US150,000 on clothes during the campaign,”
- 2008/11/05 [L..T] Is our children learning science? O, woe is Texas “Dunbar was not worried about martial law when President George W. Bush actually took the steps she claims to worry about now, assigning troops to domestic crowd control in the U.S.”
- 2008/11/03 [L..T] How McCain Could Win An examination of recent voter purges and new voter "verification" practices enacted since 2004 paints a depressing scenario tomorrow for supporters of Obama and American democracy.
- 2008/10/02 [L..T] Congressman Brad Sherman: Martial Law if We Voted No “A few Members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted "no."”
- 2008/10/01 [L..T] Clinton: Deregulation Not to Blame for Crisis “Former President Bill Clinton says deregulation of financial institutions is not to blame for the mortgage market mess. ...these facts will likely come as news to many ... who are promoting the idea that deregulation is to blame for the mortgage market meltdown.”
- 2008/09/19 [L..T] Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans a collection of scientific investigations into why people vote Republican
- 2008/09/16 [L..T] Brunswick school board to consider creationism teaching «The Brunswick County school board is looking for a way for creationism to be taught in the classroom side by side with evolution.»
- 2008/09/09 [L..T] What Makes People Vote Republican? “People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity" – a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.” However, “to see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.”
- 2008/08/06 [L..T] MO voter arrested for trying to vote «My son and I were grabbed by the arms and escorted outside. The two policemen who escorted us were soon joined by four others with two other squad cars. Surrounded, we were peppered by questions. Basically they were of the type, "Why are you bothering these people?" .. The answer, as clear as we could make it was, "We aren't bothering them! We are simply trying to vote, and these people are breaking Missouri State Statutes, preventing us from voting." .. The police responded, "Look, you are breaking their rules. If you don't get out of here, we are going to arrest you!" .. The question I had in response was, "Their rules? What rules? Those are employees of the Election Board, they are under the mandate of the Election Board, and then the SoS. Aren't you more concerned about the breaking of state laws?" As it turns out, apparently they were not.»
- 2008/07/18 [L..T] Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 “That is, if you went in with a different framework for explanation – like, "too many guys in one-night stands don't know how to satisfy women" or "women are better at sex than men" – you could construct another story around this data that was ... more plausible than 'women are programmed to want long-term relationship'...”
- 2008/07/15 [L..T] Much ado about transubstantiation "In the previous post, I suggested that the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that when the priest during the communion service consecrates the bread and wine, the bread becomes the actual body of Jesus and the wine becomes his actual blood, was a fairly bizarre thing to believe in this day and age and raised the possibility that perhaps even Catholics did not really believe in it but were just humoring the church by going along with a doctrine that came into being a long time ago."
- 2008/07/11 [L..T] HYSTERIA MARKS MYERS AND HIS ILK "Yesterday, Catholic League president Bill Donohue issued a news release calling attention to the plea that Paul Zachary Myers made on his blog: he solicited the Communion Host for the express purpose of desecrating it. Donohue now responds to the reaction he has received from the University of Minnesota Morris professor, as well as others:"
- 2008/07/07 [L..T] Presidential economics: Do parties matter? some historical data on economic performance by political party
- 2008/07/06 [L..T] Student Holds Eucharist Hostage “Webster Cook is a student at the University of Central Florida. He is also a top notch jerk.”
- 2008/07/03 [L..T] Nut launches death threats at Debian women ”Women working on Debian have been getting death threats from a nut job who believes they're killing free software.”
- 2008/07/02 [L..T] Women Say Economy Was Factor In Getting Abortions “There were 13,843 abortions performed in Minnesota in 2007. Of the women who listed a reason for their abortions, 40 percent cited economic concerns – the largest share since the state started collecting detailed abortion information a decade ago.”
- 2008/06/25 [L..T] Money for Nothing “The Bear Stearns people dismissed my questions with ill-concealed contempt. Their computer models told them that home prices wouldn't fall much and that few people would default on their loans, barring another Depression. .. About the same time, Richard Bitner, the co-owner of a small subprime mortgage bank in Dallas, was coming to a different conclusion. Mr. Bitner wasn't relying on mathematical formulas. He was dealing with actual subprime borrowers...” The article is a review of Bitner's book Confessions of a Subprime Lender.
- 2008/06/22 [L..T] Lara Logan, I Tip My Smack-o-Matic 3000 to You “You know, I was asked once, 'Do you feel responsible for the American public having a ... a negative view of the war in Iraq?' And I looked at the reporter and I said, 'Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier. ... Who in America knows what that looks like? Because I know what that looks like, and I feel responsible for the fact that no one else does.'”
- 2008/06/10 [L..T] Countdown: The Impeachment Of George W. Bush «Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich spent some 290 minutes on the House floor Monday, reading Articles of Impeachment against President George Bush. Not that you would notice, as there was a virtual media blackout on the story, but Keith Olbermann ran with it right out of the gate...»
- 2008/06/03 [L..T] Pictures at church troubling “There is no question, though, that the color pictures of mangled fetuses will stop you from ordering cherry cobbler for dessert. ... Fozard called abortion "the most evil atrocity in the nation" and said the display is intended to combat "white folks sending money to Planned Parenthood to pay for black abortions." .. Say what?”
- 2008/06/03 [L..T] Women and Science, again “There have been numerous posts about a recent report on the lack of women in science and technology careers, pointing to the sexism and macho culture as the main reason women leave these careers. Needless to say the comments on some of those posts have been frustrating.”
- 2008/05/16 [L..T] Senate Votes to Reverse FCC Decision Allowing Media Consolidation “Thursday night, the Senate cast a near-unanimous vote to reverse the Federal Communication Commission's December 2007 decision to let media companies own both a major TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in the same city.”
- 2008/05/11 [L..T] Three Names Shock Me... A substantial list of economists sign a statement supporting McCain's economic policy, but it is revealed that they are nowhere near the majority in their profession.
- 2008/05/03 [L..T] An Anatomy of Surrender “...the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech.”
- 2008/04/28 [L..T] A Blood Libel on Our Civilization “What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? ... Though I've never met him, I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him. ... So what's going on here with this stupid Expelled movie? ... It's pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism. How could a guy like this do a thing like that?”
- 2008/03/07 [L..T] Freedom Means Responsibility “Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal economics, including calls to regulate subprime mortgages.” McGovern's point about pay-day lending seems related to the point others have made about outsourcing: the terms (be that interest or wages) may seem completely abusive by our standards, but may seem a godsend (or at least far better than the alternatives) to those who choose them.
- 2008/02/28 [L..T] Announced project proof of 'gay agenda,' says DC activist “Matt Barber, policy director for cultural issues at Washington, DC-based Concerned Women for America, says the project puts to rest the notion that there is no "gay agenda." He says the homosexual lobby is committed to infiltrating the executive branch with people who define their identity based on changeable, sexually deviant behavior.” As Box Turtle Bulletin points out, his singling out of the "gay agenda" for attention while neglecting any mention of the anti-gay agenda of groups such as Focus on the Family shows that they too have an agenda.
- 2008/02/22 [L..T] Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us “A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020.”
- 2008/02/12 [L..T] Senate Passes Bill to Expand Government's Spying Powers “Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who spoke on the Senate floor for more than 20 hours in an unsuccessful effort to stall the wiretapping bill, said the vote would be remembered by future generations as a test of whether the country heeds "the rule of law or the rule of men."”
- 2008/01/21 [L..T] Saudi Arabia to lift driving ban on women “Saudi Arabia is to lift the ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the kingdom. ... The move is designed to forestall protests for greater freedom by women, which have recently included campaigners driving cars through the kingdom in defiance of a threat of detention and loss of livelihoods.”
- 2008/01/10 [L..T] Will the Iranian "Provocation" Ruse Be Allowed to Succeed? “The navy showed a tape of what they claimed were Iranian speedboats "harassing" a U.S. warship, along with audio of foreign-sounding bad guys making very threatening statements. .. However, after a blogger pointed out that the accents of the supposed speed boat passengers could not have been Iranian, the government changed its story...”
- 2008/01/08 [L..T] Appealing Apostate: Prodigal Son Frank Schaeffer Roasts Religious Right “Consider Frank Schaeffer. The name may not be familiar to you, but Schaeffer’s father, theologian and Presbyterian pastor Francis Schaeffer, was pivotal in the creation of the Religious Right. .. Frank Schaeffer shared his father’s opinions and, as an adult, worked alongside him. He had an insider’s view of the rise of the Religious Right. Father and son were there at the movement’s birth and worked with some of its biggest names. .. What does Frank Schaeffer think about the Religious Right these days? Let’s just say he’s not a fan. He refers to Robertson as “a lunatic” and says Dobson is “a power-crazed political manipulator cynically abusing his followers.” He calls the late Jerry Falwell an “unreconstructed bigot.””
- 2007/12/31 [L..T] Liberals Against Diversity “The New York Times op-ed page is trying to go from bad to diverse. The page has hired William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, as a weekly columnist, starting next Monday. The Politico reports that word of the hiring "caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons"”
- 2007/12/26 [L..T] [[2007-12-26 Bush's very good year|]] “Against all odds, and despite the usual drumbeat of criticism, President Bush had a very good year. .. The troop surge in Iraq is succeeding. America remains safe from terrorist attacks. And the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.”
- 2007/11/21 [L..T] O'Reilly: "War" on Christmas part of "secular progressive agenda" that includes "legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage" “...decrying the purported "war" on Christmas, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed that "it's all part of the secular progressive agenda ... to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square."”
- 2007/09/28 [L..T] Floating Utopias "Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000."
- 2007/08/05 [L..T] Newsweek's Climate Editorial Screed Violates Basic Standards of Journalism “Newsweek Magazine's cover story of August 13, 2007 entitled, "The Truth About Denial" contains very little that could actually be considered balanced, objective or fair by journalistic standards.”
- 2007/06/30 [L..T] Science on Trial «Over the last three weeks, I listened to testimony in the first of nine test cases in the U.S. Vaccine Court (Cedillo v. Health and Human Services) considering the question of whether a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal (which used to be in many vaccines), or the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, or both together caused autism in Michelle Cedillo, the plaintiffs' daughter.»
- 2007/04/20 [L..T] Why, what a vile little man “I speak of Dinesh D'Souza, who seems to have noticed that his creepy and dishonest tirade against atheists won him some attention, so now he has upped the ante, and gotten even creepier and more dishonest.”
- 2007/04/16 [L..T] New Research Shows Wal-Mart Rigs the System to Skip Out on $2.3 Billion in State Taxes Wal-Mart appears to be skipping out on its fair share of taxes that most Americans have to pay to help support state governments. New research conducted in part by a leading non-partisan, non-profit tax organization reveals that Wal-Mart avoided $2.3 billion in state income taxes, cutting its payment to state governments almost in half between 1999 and 2005.
- 2007/04/13 [L..T] Citing New Study Showing that Federally Funded Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Don't Work, ACLU Calls on Congress to Stop Funding “Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.”
- 2007/04/01 [L..T] Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs “Based on follow-up data collected from youth four to six years after study enrollment, the report presents the estimated program impacts on youth behavior, including sexual abstinence, risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and other related outcomes.”
- 2007/03/06 [L..T] What is science? “Unfortunately, "science" is one of those hugely polymorphic terms that carries a tremendous amount of baggage, and any one definition is going to be inadequate. This is one of those subjects where a smart philosopher ... could go on at amazing length, and even then, everyone will argue with their summaries. I'll just charge in, though, and give a couple of shorter definitions off the top of my head.”
- 2007/02/01 [L..T] Wal-Mart pays itself rent, gets large tax breaks Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer and the world's biggest retailer, is regularly paying itself rent and using the transaction to decrease the taxes it pays to state governments, according to a report in this morning's Wall Street Journal.
- 2007/01/03 [L..T] Executing Saddam Hussein was an Act of Vandalism The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. ... But I want to add another and less obvious reason why we should not have executed Saddam Hussein. His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.
- 2007/01/01 [L..T] The New American Movement and the Los Angeles Socialist Community School "Here I provide a short account of NAM's history and a description of a school it opened in Los Angeles in the 1970s, both of which form a unique link between the study of everyday life and the practice of socialism."
- 2006/12/12 [L..T] Poll: Most Americans see lingering racism -- in others "Most Americans, white and black, see racism as a lingering problem in the United States, and many say they know people who are racist, according to a new poll. [..] But few Americans of either race -- about one out of eight -- consider themselves racist."
- 2006/11/05 [L..T] Time bobbles the God and science debate “Gah, what crap. Revelation is irrational and unreasonable. You can't do science, collect data, and then decide, "Well, God has revealed to me that the correct answer is 2 grams heavier". .. That's precisely what Collins wants to do, and he admits it: he wants to add in anti-scientific beliefs and pretend he is still talking about science.”
- 2006/10/25 [L..T] Will The Next Election Be Hacked? «The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM.» ... «But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election — and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries.»
- 2006/10/06 [L..T] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Response to Diebold «The inaccurate and misleading statements in Diebold's response begin with the very first sentence. Not only did I make every effort to verify the accuracy of my sources, I made sure that researchers from both Rolling Stone and my own office contacted Diebold for comment. As readers of the article can confirm for themselves, several responses from the company are included in the piece.»
- 2006/07/02 [L..T] Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm "Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post."
- 2006/06/07 [L..T] RFK Jr: Taking the Stolen Election Seriously «Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has written a brilliant new article about the biggest political story in the history of the United States: An American politician illegitimately took the office of president by outright theft and fraud. Although such high crimes and misdemeanors have been rumored in previous elections, none in the history of the republic have been so thoroughly documented. George W. Bush is not the legitimate president of the United States.»
- 2006/06/01 [L..T] Was the 2004 Election Stolen? «Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.»
- 2006/03/02 [L..T] Mercury and autism: RFK Jr. drops another stinky one on the blogosphere “it's more of the same old assertions without evidence. (See the links at the end of this article for multiple discussions about why this assertion is unsupported and almost certainly incorrect.) The article then gets to the meat of RFK Jr.'s conspiracy-mongering, proceeding to an accusation that the CDC quietly turned down an offer by SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals in 1999 to begin production of thimerosal-free vaccines immediately...”
- 2006/01/26 [L..T] Tamed! How A Declawed, Defanged Aslan will End Our Species and Our Souls “This is the problem: C. S. Lewis was an unabashed traditionalist. As he outlined in The Abolition of Man, he believed there was an underlying and objective moral law, which was foundational to all human behavior.”
- 2005/09/12 [L..T] WTC7 Collapse: The Real Story (not tinfoil) “I see a semi-regular appearance of the idea that the WTC7 building (part of the WTC complex but not one of the Twin Towers) collapsed due to deliberate demolition rather than due to damage from the Twin Tower collapses. This is pretty implausible so I did some internet research to find out why so many people believe it and what actually happened.”
- 2005/08/03 [L..T] Why Most Published Research Findings Are False "Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research."
- 2005/07/08 [L..T] headline::Root, Root, Root for the Bomb Team “That's right, the Times is complaining that "wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism"!”
- 2005/06/20 [L..T] Deadly Immunity «Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal»
- 2005/02/15 [L..T] Popular Mechanics' Deceptive Smear Against 9/11 Truth lead paragraph::The March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine contains a 14-full-page cover article which attacks skepticism about the government and media explanation of the 9/11/01 attack. The primary method of the piece is to build and attack a straw man of myths it claims are "at the root of virtually every 9/11 alternative scenario" embraced by the "growing army of conspiracy theorists." PM selects a combination of 16 valid, erroneous, and inconsequential claims found on websites, implying that they are all endorsed by the "army" of skeptics.
- 2005/02/03 [L..T] Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report sub-headline::Popular Mechanics examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11.
- 2004/12/31 [L..T] A Big Push On Social Security «President Bush's political allies are raising millions of dollars for an election-style campaign to promote private Social Security accounts, as Democrats and Republicans prepare for what they predict will be the most expensive and extensive public policy debate since the 1993 fight over the Clinton administration's failed health care plan.»
- 2004/11/01 [L..T] Why We Stopped Doing Sex Change Operations “Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them “women” had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however. The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women.”
- 2004/09/01 [L..T] Operation Coffeecup: Ronald Reagan's Effort to Prevent the Enactment of Medicare Ronald Reagan may have crystallized, in the minds of Republican strategists, the political ability of popular myth to be more powerful than the truth – as exemplified by his well-documented history of working against social programs (Medicare, Social Security) while convincingly denying it in debates with Jimmy Carter.
- 2004/07/30 [L..T] Sex changes are not effective, say researchers “There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation, according to a medical review conducted exclusively for Guardian Weekend tomorrow.” This article misleadingly represents what is known about the effects of SRS, and the headline is an outright lie.
- 2004/04/04 [L..T] Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits "Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect – a simple matter of computer keystrokes – and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses."
- 2004/02/20 [L..T] Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush's talking-points war The neocons had three reasons for the US to invade Iraq: (1) sanctions were working, not leaving US companies in a favored position for doing business in Iraq; (2) the US needed a location for military bases; (3) the US needed to ensure that oil would continue to be traded in dollars.
- 2004/02/15 [L..T] Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization “...anyone who has any understanding of how America – or any civilization – works... will realize that this new diktat of the courts [in support of gay marriage] will not have any of the intended effects, while the unintended effects are likely to be devastating.”
- 2004/01/21 [L..T] Best of the Web Today a potpourri of news items, including "The al Qaeda Cheering Section" in which Taranto equates dislike of the Patriot Act with being fond of terrorists.
- 2002/05/31 [L..T] WTC Collapse - The Contribution Of Enviro Fanaticism “When the use of asbestos was banned, Levine's insulation had already been installed in the first 64 floors. The newer lightweight construction didn't permit traditional heavy concrete insulation for the remaining 54 floors, and so a nonasbestos substitute was jury-rigged to complete the buildings. On studying the arrangement, Levine said, "If a fire breaks out above the 64th floor, that building will fall down." He was right.”
- 2001/06/04 [L..T] Pearl Harbor: The Facts Behind the Fiction “Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, stated in 1944: "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war."”
- 2000/08/18 [L..T] Wake up, parents! "Schools have already taken over the decision as to when and in what manner your child will be introduced to sex. Some schools are teaching various techniques of homosexual acts and some have gay activists visiting the schools, passing out cards giving the addresses of local homosexual hangouts."
- 2000/01/18 [L..T] Global Warming Is 300-Year-Old News “Unfortunately for advocates of the Kyoto treaty, atmospheric temperatures over the same two decades have not risen.”
- 1999/01/24 [L..T] ACPI extensions an email from Bill Gates suggesting that the ACPI be designed in such a way as to prevent it from working with anything except Microsoft Windows
- 1988/09/16 [L..T] Originalism: The Lesser Evil "The principal theoretical defect of nonoriginalism, in my view, is its incompatibility with the very principle that legitimizes judicial review of constitutionality. Nothing in the text of the Constitution confers upon the courts the power to inquire into, rather than passively assume, the constitutionality of federal statutes."
- 1972/06/17 [L..T] Libertarian Party Platform of 1972 "We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state, and defend the rights of the individual."
- 1941/08/01 [L..T] Who Goes Nazi? "It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one's acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."