Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Science is important.  Experts know things.  All of this is true.  And I am certainly not an expert on food safety.
I do know, however, that multiple generations of kids packed sandwiches in bags, left them in backpacks or lockers, and at them several hours later.  Some of those lunches even had dairy products.  And [...]

By Thoreau
Salon.com has a slideshow about the cultural legacy of 9/11, and item 13 is 24.  I don’t deny that this show about a counter-terrorism agent almost certainly achieved a lot of its popularity because of the post-9/11 zeitgeist.  However, I have to disagree with this part:
Its high-tech action, military machismo and enthusiastic defense of [...]

From James McMurtry. As I type, Weather Underground places the storm near Fruitville, NC, heading North Northeast at 14mph. To be fair, this is faster than most weekend traffic leaving the Outer Banks.

By Thoreau
Um, shouldn’t a Teabagger be glad that as a federal employee he is getting paid less than he would in the private sector?

By Thoreau
A:  That’s not funny!
Las Vegas is, of course, sin city.  It preys on gambling addicts, it is excess of every sort, it’s run by some mixture of mobsters and big corporations, and it is awash in sex work, sexual images, and just sex in general.  There are plenty of good reasons to dislike that, [...]

Fascinating interview with anthropologist David Graeber about the historical origins of money and debt, and the implications for our present predicament. As a bonus, he explains the literal origin of the term “clean slate.” Surprise: the standard fable that money arises only after barter becomes too complicated to manage has no historical basis. Next thing [...]

By Thoreau
There’s a reason why Science, Nature, and the other Nature journals are called “Glamour” journals:  Because they are prestigious and shiny and totally blind you with their shiny surface features.  Way back in grad school, I started off doing experiments, and I tried to replicate some stuff that got published in Science and Nature.  [...]

By Thoreau
It is very likely that Cameron Todd Willingham, executed on Rick Perry’s watch, was innocent of the crime he was executed for.  It has been going around the internet for several weeks that Kay Bailey Hutchison considered attacking Rick Perry for this in the 2010 gubernatorial primary, but relented because somebody in a focus [...]

By Thoreau
I’m staying in a lodge near the beach, and I hear a faint sound like seals barking.  Or maybe there’s a bunch of coyotes.  Hard to say.

By Thoreau
Honestly, I think that The Onion has perfectly explained the potential problem facing Libya.  This is not the first time that they have succinctly and presciently covered the problems inherent in a transition of power.