Unqualified Offerings

Checking in long enough to thank the guest-posters and to note that a couple of you have been unjustly caught up in Akismet’s spam-filtration. Akismet seems particularly hostile to abb1, Gary Farber and the Wine Commonsewer. I on the other hand am fond of all three. Unqualified Offerings regrets the error. I haven’t discovered any [...]

(posted by Jennifer)
Look at all those brilliant posts Mona and Thoreau already put up! Jim said he was leaving for vacation August 9, so I waited until then to post and discovered I came late to the party.  By the way, I’m Jennifer, the third of the guest bloggers and Hit and Run commenters Jim [...]

(Posted by Mona)
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Bruce Kesler has denominated Ned Lamont as a pink diaper baby, because Ned’s grandfather, Corliss Lamont, was a member of the Communist Party USA. Kesler coyly states he is not, oh not at all, claiming Ned is a communist. But:

The ideological inheritance is still there.

And was it not just yesterday that Lanny [...]

Birds and reptiles see 4 primary colors:  Red, Green, Blue, and Utraviolet.  Most mammals see 2 primary colors:  Red-green and Blue-green (cyan and yellow).  Primates are the exception, seeing 3 primary colors:  Red, Green, and Blue.  (From Scientific American)
I had no idea.
So it isn’t really true that dogs only see black and white.  They see [...]

Yesterday’s issue of Nature Medicine has an article on antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Apparently, bacteria can actually evolve more rapidly (and increase the odds of picking up a trait that confers resistance to drugs) in response to antibiotic therapy:
Genetic change has traditionally been thought to be a passive process; however, recent evidence has shown [...]

Today’s issue of Nature has some discussion of compensation for egg donors. I had no idea that women donating eggs for stem cell research are not compensated. I know that women sell eggs to couples undergoing fertility treatments, and I know that lots of other research subjects get compensated. Hell, I’m getting [...]

As Jim said when he introduced our trifecta, Thoreau, Jennifer and I “know” one another from Reason’s Hit ‘n Run blog, where the three of us prodigiously comment. (Me, not so much lately, especially since I undertook my own blogging career at Inactivist, where most of my guest posts here will be cross-posted.)
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Many [...]

(Posted by Mona)
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Adam Nagourney at The New York Times parses Ned Lamont’s defeat of Joe Lieberman in yesterday’s CT primary thus:

The victory of Ned Lamont over Joseph I. Lieberman, a three-term senator and former vice presidential candidate, was a vivid demonstration of how the Iraq war is buffeting American politics and of the [...]

In June, the Heritage Foundation convened a distinguished panel on terrorism, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Heritage Foundation Scholar James Jay Carafano, Actress Mary Lynn Rajskub from 24, and…wait, Mary Lynn Rajskub? That’s right, Heritage invited several people from the cast and crew of 24 to discuss terrorism. In case the underwhelming [...]

In attempting to refute something our currently very own Mona wrote at Inactivist, Dale Franks writes of people like me and Radley Balko that our antebellum objections to the Iraq invasion were “philosophical reasons, not substantive ones.” This strikes me, first of all, as a weird dichotomy – how are “philosophical reasons” not substantive? Secondly [...]