Stuff about politics and politicians.
It’s so hard to find a good, credible, looming disaster to panic about, and then those pesky scientists keep destroying the few that we manage to find. Runaway global warming keeps getting kicked in the teeth by inconvenient facts. Nuclear power disasters persistently refuse to be anywhere near as disastrous as people hope. Scientific advancement …
Continue reading ‘“RIP: Peak Oil – we won’t be running out any time soon”’ »
Good God… someone actually advocating an intelligent solution to movie piracy, in a mainstream business magazine?! Unbelievable! Listen up, Hollywood. As an independent software developer, I’ve been dealing with Internet piracy for longer than you — without a single lawyer, let alone an army of them, and often on a shoestring budget. The facts in …
Continue reading ‘“You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You”’ »
“US, UK research: Thick kids more likely to become bigots“. Ouch. I’ve often thought that today’s conservatives weren’t the brightest bulbs on the whole, and wondered whether there was some causal link there, but to have it bluntly spelled out like that is pretty damning. Maybe these studies should be publicized a lot more. Nobody …
Continue reading ‘“Study links dim wits to conservative ideology”’ »
Remember the SOPA drama last week? It has given MPAA not-quite-lobbyist Chris Dodd a bad case of foot-in-mouth: he publicly threatened politicians who’d taken MPAA money for not doing what the MPAA wanted. On national television, no less. Un-freakin’-believable. And just this side of actually criminal. Dodd is a former senator — he should know …
Wow. I didn’t expect anything like what happened, and apparently neither did anyone else — including the MPAA. From the e-mail I received from FightForTheFuture.org: The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA …
As you may have noticed, this site — along with thousands of others — was blacked out today, to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills. If you’re an American Internet user and haven’t heard of them before, what rock have you been hiding under? Go find out what it’s all about (this page might help), …
A “National Day of Prayer”? “One Nation Under God”? “In God We Trust”? I’ve heard people claim that they’re proof that America was founded on Christian principles. If the speaker acknowledges freedom of religion at all, he invariably means that everyone must be free to practice his religion. Thing is, all three of those were …
Continue reading ‘“Religious Expressions Are Rooted in Fear-Based Politics”’ »
I’ve been baffled by this for the last couple days. I’m not sure I follow their numbers, but I’ll accept them on faith for the moment. The thing that baffles me is the source: a very conservative think-tank. Political conservatives have railed against anyone who was different practically since the ink was dry on the …
Continue reading ‘“The cure for US job woes: More immigrants”’ »
A nice idea, but I suspect the execution would be pretty difficult. Hollywood special effects are a lot better now than in 1938, but there are many more science-educated people who would be a lot harder to fool too. All it would take is one slip-up, caught and pointed out by some bright teenager, and …
Continue reading ‘“Paul Krugman: save the economy by staging an alien invasion hoax”’ »
As much as this sounds like pure fantasy right now, I suspect it’s all but inevitable. Too many people are looking too hard at the problem — somebody is going to crack it sooner or later, and likely sooner. I also suspect that the consequences listed in the article are only the tip of the …
Continue reading ‘“Superhero oil-burping algae will save the world”’ »