Visiting relatives this weekend, I was pretty disturbed by the post-Thanksgiving crush of sales, some of which started at midnight last Friday. Stupid me, I thought the holiday was about giving thanks and enjoying family. I was going to write a whiny post about it. But why should I work hard at being a crank when others do it so much better?

It ( Read more... )

Is it just me, or is choosing Presidential candidates based on how much you dislike their wives a really stupid thing to do? From an article by Melinda Henneberger:Do presidential unions matter? Voters think they do. A recent survey found that fully one-third of women voters not only take the happiness of a presidential candidate's marriage into ( Read more... )

Is the military taking inappropriate steps to politicize the flow of information to soldiers and from the battlefield? Here is the allegation:In totalitarian societies, the party’s control of the military is a standard feature, implemented through formal requirements of political loyalty. The most effective and arguably the most repulsive model is ( Read more... )

Today is the day Apple releases Leopard, the next version of OS X. And here is a review from New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, the Thomas Friedman of tech journalism ( Read more... )

I was sitting in my office this afternoon, around 2 pm, when from the window I heard the unmistakable sound of a protest. I looked out into the street and saw a speaker addressing a crowd of a few hundred people, all carrying signs and pickets, while being filmed by at least seven TV crews. Having no idea what was up, I asked around to see if ( Read more... )

In keeping with the banana-republicanization of the United States that is occuring under the slothful gaze of Prez-O-Dint W, our weakened currency is now trading at levels not seen in 30 yearsThis begs the question: why have we not yet completed the transformation into the United States of Argentina - i.e., a basket-case country with massive ( Read more... )

...contains the following ingredients:

• mechanically separated chicken
• pork
• dextrose
• water
• salt

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Bjorn Lomborg, the statistician and climate skeptic who has made a career of undercutting the conventional wisdom on climate change.

The media responses to his work have been informative and interesting. In Salon, Eban Goodstein has accused Lomborg of cherry-picking his economic and climate statistics. ( Read more... )

Today I read a review of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. The author of the book, Bjorn Lomborg, is definitely not a supporter of the conventional environmentalist wisdom. However, in his arguments for "do-good" strategies in place of the "feel-good" approach we are taking seem fairly cogent.

( From the article... )

More from the AP news wire: air traffic controllers are upset with the FAA for imposing a contract with 30% pay cuts when the agency and the union could not agree on a new contract last year ( Read more... )