Well, I suppose this was inevitable, wasn’t it? Someone has come up with a garden Noam Chomsky.
P.S.—You can also get Garden Oms:
I bet the folks who make those things have their own special gnomenclature. . . .
[...]In Soviet Communism’s heyday, thousands of dissidents were imprisoned in mental wards for the crime of questioning the totalitarian state. And there was a certain kind of logic to the punishment: After all, anyone who would risk having his whole family executed or sent to the gulag (which often amounted [...]
Once you cut through all the hype, says today’s column, the problem of lowering carbon emissions reduces to a question of math.
[...]It’s always been amusing to hear professional bodybuilders who look like former Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman here say they are all-natural weightlifters who don’t use steroids or growth hormones.
(The drug-free guys look more like this.)
Now, it turns [...]
Reports continue to say 1998 was the warmest year on record:
If 2009 ends as the fifth-warmest year, it would replace 2003. According to NASA, the other warmest years since 1850 have been 2005, 1998, 2007 and 2006.
I certainly don’t think so. But dyed-in-the-wool radicals apparently do. Read, then fight among yourselves.
[...]This excellent piece cuts through the backroom-deliberation fog to explain why the debate over a public option and abortion coverage are sideshows: The real killers in health-care reform are guaranteed issue, the individual mandate, and the government-overseen exchange—all of which will make insurance more expensive while [...]
In response to Tuesday’s column, a reader offers some good backstory and additonal thoughts:
As a former CIA analyst/manager, I have given in the past a course on “Intelligence Failures: From Pearl Harbor to Iraq
WMD,“ and will give it again at the Shepherd’s Center this winter. [...]
Tiger Woods’ personal life ought to be his own business, IMHO. The appetite people have for staring at car wrecks, literal or metaphorical, is a little disturbing in its own right. Now we have the Daily Mail putting this online:
DO YOU KNOW ANY WOMEN LINKED TO TIGER [...]
“Britain, the Sick Man of Europe: Heart and cancer survival rates among worst in developed world,“ reports the Daily Mail:
British health care is little better than that of former Communist countries, which spend a fraction of the billions poured into the NHS.
A survey published yesterday by the [...]
It was very disappointing to find an Obamaphile attack the “evil geniuses” who are trying to smear a great president, and my name didn’t come up once. Must mean I’m not a genius, because the evil part. . . .
[...]Members of a North Dakota Indian tribe are suing to stop UND from dropping its “Fighting Sioux” nickname. They consider it a badge of honor.
[...]If this Washington Post story is right, and “U.S.-born kids of illegal immigrants twice as likely as others to face poverty,“ then the solution is obvious, isn’t it? To reduce poverty, reduce illegal immigration! What am I missing here? There must be something. . . .
[...]A nice point about [reciprocity and religious tolerance]:
When Our Lady of the Rosary, Qatar’s first-ever church, opened last year, it did so minus cross, bell, dome, steeple, or signboard. Rosary’s priest, Father Tom Veneracion, explained their absence: “The idea is to be discreet because we don’t [...]
Today’s column asks whether the Climategate e-mails are the new Downing Street Memo:
Both the Downing Street Memo and the Climategate e-mails suggest political pressure led some people in high places to massage the intelligence to fit a predetermined conclusion. . . .
On the other hand, the Downing [...]
As a follow-up to Friday’s column, take a gander at this Sunday story in the Roanoke Times:
“We really need to know now ... that the Surfaces property will be available when we need to start road construction,“ Mills wrote in an [...]
A game to make you think.
[...]As Today’s column explains, Roanoke has just won the right to condemn a property on behalf of a company that says it doesn’t even want it.
Postscript: Atty. Gen-elect Ken Cuccinelli and other lawmakers are not pleased:
“It points out the need that we have more [...]
Boudreauxism of the Day:
3 December 2009
Editor, New York Daily News
Dear Editor:
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) is upset that Adidas will shift its manufacturing of National Basketball Association jerseys from New York to Thailand, and he menacingly calls upon the N.B.A. to terminate its contract with Adidas (“Sen. Schumer rips Adidas for [...]
From Shikha Dalmia of Forbes:
It is worth recalling that Bush too was relying on an international consensus—especially reports by U.N. arms inspectors—that Saddam Hussein was sitting atop stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction as a justification for war.
(Just for snorts and giggles, here’s a compendium of [...]
Here’s a readable and seemingly sincere effort to put the East Anglia CRU e-mails in a broader context, from an actual scientist, who comes down on the alarmist rather than the skeptical side of the discussion. Nut grafs:
But do the potentially unethical acts implied by [...]
Sabato’s latest Crystal Ball looks at the upcoming Senate races, in which Democrats will have to defend twice as many seats as Republicans.
[...]Michael Paul Williams absolutely nails Henrico County Public Schools on the system’s bizarre, two-faced policy on who can speak to students. If the speaker is President of the United States Barack Obama, there is deep concern about indoctrination and parents are given lots of opportunity to opt [...]
A lot of the coverage of the infamous Climategate scandal has failed to make clear exactly what the CRU e-mails about hiding the decline referred to. John Tierney thoughtfully provides a comparison of the graphs and an explanation of them. For an even more detailed look, see [...]
It’s hard to know if Tim Kaine is telling the truth in this story about his proposed cigarette tax hike and the smoking ban.
After all, if he’s telling the truth now, that means he was dissimulating [...]
Today’s column looks at the state’s licensure requirements for yoga schools that teach yoga teachers.
[...]Sheldon Richman points out how conservatives and liberals borrow each other’s arguments, depending on the subject:
[M]ost conservatives enthusiastically support “the drug war” and “energy independence,” although virtually every argument they use against the health-care grab and other economic intervention applies to those government objectives.
The progressives are [...]
The Muppets, doing “Bohemian Rhapsody.“
(For my money, the mashup of Bert and Ernie doing a scene from “Casino” is even funnier, but it’s also got more F-words in it than, um, something with a whole bunch of other F-words in it. So you’ll have to seek [...]
The Nation’s Katha Pollitt is sick and tired of commentary about Sarah Palin, and she can’t stop writing it, either. The result is a very funny riff on the maddening frustration of trying to analyze Alaska’s giant bundle of internal contradictions.
' [...]Today’s column about developments in climate science, or lack thereof, says none of us really knows the truth for certain, one way or the other.
[...]Plymouth was an early economic object lesson:
In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on equality and need as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not [...]
The Roanoke Times agrees that the eminent-domain case involving Carilion, Virginia Tech, and the city teaming up to seize a couple’s land by force is riddled with problems:
The facts as presented in Broadhurst’s ruling call into question the legitimacy of the process that led to this [...]
Bonus point: The car dealership owner who put up the billboard evidently hasn’t learned the First Rule of Holes. His choice of words in an interview with FOX 31 News was, shall we say, dismally awful.
[...]The NYT was extremely interested in a purported relationship between John McCain and a female lobbyist, and spent an awful lot of shoe-leather and time putting together a front-page story that eventually earned it a defamation lawsuit.
Its interest in the e-mails hacked from the Hadley CRU in [...]
If false modesty is half the sin of pride, then James Delingpole is without sin:
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books . . .
Today’s column suggests the election results might not be so gloomy for the GLBT community as they could appear at first blush.
[...]Searching for an apparently elusive Christmas item, I began googling keywords in curious combinations. One search turned up Makezine.com, a site for do-it-yourselfers. Inside: An etch-a-sketch interface using an Altoids tin, a lunch-box laser show, a binary, marble-based calculator, a homemade bottle rocket . . .
[...]I was under the impression that U.S. manufacturing was on the tail end of a long downhill slope. GMU’s Donald Boudreaux suggests otherwise:
Editor, The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
To the Editor:
Bob Herbert insists that manufacturing in the U.S. is a mere shadow of its past [...]
Remember when climate porn was just a metaphor? Not anymore!
[...]Folks who reprogram their scientific calculators to do all kinds of cool stuff.
' [...]Today’s column provides the denoument to the story of Jay and Stephanie Burkholder, whose property Roanoke has been trying to seize so it can give it to the valley bigfoot, Carilion.
[...]A common assumption among advocates of nationalizing health care seems to be that reform is necessary because insurance companies, being evil, deny coverage to people who need it. Of course they deny coverage. But it’s fallacious to think that a public option, single payer, or any other system won’t. [...]
The email rumor mill once again is circulating claims that Michele Obama has more personal attendants than Buckingham Palace, and lots more than nice First Ladies like Laura Bush. This supposedly proves something about her, which supposedly proves something about him.
A new report provides data showing that the structure of Virginia’s tax system hasn’t changed much: the poor still pay more as a percentage of income.
[...]Glenn Greenwald points out, quite reasonably, that when the Bush administration releases someone from Guantanamo for lack of evidence that he’s a terrorist, calling him a terrorist because he was held at Guantanamo is, well, kinda stupid.
[...]
