The kind of thank you I gave to Sarah Palin a while back goes out to the Tea Party protesters who shouted racial slurs today ( Read more... )

I appreciate the fact that smoke, wherever you encounter it, is harmful, even when it sticks to the walls. But I still have to groan when they think they can get away with calling it "Third Hand Smoke." They don't seem to understand that it makes a person sound like and alarmist retard. The facts don't make much of an impression in the face of that

How to make it clear? How to understand that we make the same mistakes, for the same reasons? That knowing history is not the same thing as learning from it? If that were enough, all one would have to do is say, "The attacks of 9/11 are this century's Pearl Harbor. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram are this century's Japanese interment camps ( Read more... )

Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota have been told to teach alternatives to the scientific consensus on global warming. Or at least, that's how The New Scientist puts it. While I can understand their caution and their worry, once you get down to the wording of the new legislation, it becomes a different story ( Read more... )

Here's an innovative idea: Let's have a democracy. The National Popular Vote.

Science and science fiction sometimes look exactly the same. Two unproven theories about multiple realities (that's "universes," to the non-sci-fi geek), have turned out to lean on each other, and sort of back each other up. (Different from the way your Mom "backs it up.") That is sometimes what we call "independent verification." Sometimes we call ( Read more... )

Oh goody.

Of course it makes sense, but why is this new, completely obvious discovery so disheartening?

There have been a total of three people tried and convicted in military courts. Two were released and are walking the street right now. One is in Australia, and the other is in Yemen.

So why and how can anyone argue that this is "safer" than civilian courts?

Well, on the other side of the argument, people have been cherry-picking* their numbers. ( Read more... )

This is rare, but I have to give Sarah Palin thanks, for essentializing the heart of the argument against giving a fair trial to the terrorists we've caught, and the suspected terrorists we've apprehended. Thank you, Sarah Palin, for tearing away the pretty window-dressing, and leaving it with just this: terrorists are not worthy of the ( Read more... )

You might have gotten this email about pilot whales.

As Snopes says, it's probably true. And yes, it does seem that there is too much mercury in them now for human consumption. The irony in that would make me giggle, but, well....I'm not signing my name to the email though, or forwarding it. Given that all this is true, kicking an email around the ( Read more... )