…DJ: That’s a very common question that is asked: Hasn’t science done a lot of good for the world? For the world? No. Show me how the world—the real, physical world, once filled with passenger pigeons, great auks, cod, tuna, salmon, sea mink, lions, great apes, migratory songbirds, forests—is a better place because of science. […]

Obama claims that he is going to fight terrorism by attacking Afghans instead of Iraqis, as well as maintain an “overwatch” presence of tens of thousands of troops in Iraq. Where will the troops come from?
Well, he has stated that he wants to expand the ground forces by 93,000 (both Army and Marines).
Lyndon Johnson started […]

Elaina’s post below refs Kate Harding’s blog, Shapely Prose. This one is a guide for “strange men” approaching women, with an internal reference to something called “Schrödinger’s Rapist,” a clever bit of synthesis if ever there was one.
Gentlemen. Thank you for reading.
Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a […]

…With the outsourcing of accountability, public actors emptied of responsibility for actual deeds become instead vessels of traits and qualities – they become, in short, personalities. But this is not only celebrity-star-gazing. There is a compulsive way in which the inner intentions of this president, his good will, and most of all his “tone,” […]

In keeping with our interest in cultural criticism as revelatory, Lou Proyect’s very good review of Inglorious Basterds.
In a comment under my review of “Valkyrie”, a movie starring Tom Cruise as a Nazi officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler, MN Roy suggested I look at GW Pabst’s 1955 “Jackboot Mutiny”, another movie dramatizing the General’s […]

High-fructose corn syrup rose from obscurity to ubiquity starting in the late 1970s, borne up by an informal public-private partnership between grain-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland and the federal government. For me, HFCS is at best a highly processed, lavishly subsidized, calorie-heavy, nutritional vacuum.
I recently visited a public high school in Boone, N.C. The main […]

…not the content, the article itself. The NYT is pushing for war… Iraq redux.
Damn. I guess they need to sell more papers.
Report Says Iran Has Data to Make a Nuclear Bomb
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 3, 2009
Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a […]

Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?
The behavior of our ape relatives, known as peaceful vegetarians, once bolstered the view that our actions could not be traced to an impulse to dominate. But in the late 1970s, when chimpanzees were discovered to hunt monkeys and kill each other, they became […]