Unqualified Offerings

By Mona
If it is tough economic times time for the able-bodied and -minded, it is arguably worse for those with disabilities, especially since the vast majority of Social Security Disability applications are initially rejected. Such applications are being even more critically scrutinized now with unemployment having caused them to spike. Thus it is that a [...]

By Thoreau
The legal bloggers are busy figuring out whether a ban on D&D in prison violates the “rational basis test”, but isn’t it obvious that the real problem here is cruel and unusual punishment?
Besides, if you don’t let them role play a fight with dice and paper, they’re just going to LARP it.

By Alternative Universe Thoreau
Barack Obama has just announced plans to boost domestic spending, but he’ll keep it deficit-neutral by cutting military spending quite substantially.  How’s it going in your universe?

By Thoreau
This just makes me upset.

By Thoreau
A campus office sent out a request for faculty input on how they are doing.  This office has the power to cause me headaches, so I don’t want to be on their bad side, and I see no upside to trusting the assurances of anonymity.  Even if the responses are truly anonymous, I have [...]

By Thoreau
Scientists try to predict what alien life might look like.

So much for old-school, back-to-basics football. Shall we recapitulate the state of professional football in the real world? Because of the NFL’s legendary parity, even very good – hell, great – teams will find themselves behind from time to time. Sometimes substantially behind. Such as the Colts today – down 17-6 at one point. When [...]

Hugh O’Shaughnessy’s article about how the United States government is in the early stages of quietly giving up the War on Drugs is so thinly sourced I’d believe he was setting up some elaborate practical joke on me personally if I were slightly more narcissistic than I already am. I’d love it to be true. [...]

Perhaps there will be some livetweeting of the football today.

To read books and blogs by animal trainers and behaviorists means coming to know, or think you know, their pets as well as their ideas. Good writing does that, and my favorite animal behaviorists are very good writers. So I find Patricia McConnell’s latest post about her dog Lassie’s serious illness to be very moving. [...]