California Prop 37 is on the ballot for this November. I'm concerned that I'm writing this too late - some of you may have already filled out your early voter / absentee ballots. For the rest of you I think this is bad legislation, and that you should vote no. This is why.

18 years of study : zero cause for concernThe first GMO food product was ( Read more... )

My brother commented on yesterday's post, pointing out that I'm only telling half the story. After the NDAA was passed from the House to the Senate, more provisions were added including the one allowing the President to detain anyone, not just foreigners, without trial. He included this clip of Senator Carl Levin saying that the President requested ( Read more... )

I'm pissed about sections 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA. Extrajudicial detention has been a pet issue of mine for a long time. It's bad if George Bush does it, and it's bad if Obama does it. But who exactly did what? Here's the rough overview showing for how NDAA became law.

§1021 was added to NDAA in the House by H.AMDT.325, sponsored by Rep Connie ( Read more... )

One of the reasons why I left American Conservatives, and then America, is because conservatives were getting hijacked by insanity. I can't say it any better than Fareed Zakaria did. Conservatism used to be a hard-headed set of ideas rooted in reality, starting with the world as it actually exists, rather than those liberal Marxists with their ( Read more... )

In high school I considered myself quite clever for inventing "The Reeses' Defense". Since the famous TV commercial claimed that "There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's", I reasoned that if you robbed a bank while eating a Reese's that could serve as your legal defense.

Recently there were rumors that people would try to disrupt BART service, in ( Read more... )

In August 2010 when "Perry V. Schwarzenegger" was released I skimmed the court decision, got engrossed, and read the whole thing. It is a fascinating and remarkably sensible analysis of pros and cons. I started writing about it, got most of the way through, but never quite finished it up. I don't have time to get through the last few pages but I'm ( Read more... )

Field experiments and natural observations are two kinds of tests that aid in understanding big complex systems. In the former, you verify your theories by messing with the system and see how it reacts. In the latter, you make inferences from observing the system as it behaves normally. An observer might watch a colony of beavers working on a dam ( Read more... )

This website is making the rounds in a few of my circles, and it frustrates me. Numbers ending in "-illion" and require context, but visualizations comparing giant things to other giant things seem unproductive or counterproductive. Visualizing the size of a stack of $100 bills representing "US unfunded liabilities" is meaningless without a similar ( Read more... )

Since 2009 the political strategy of the Republican "loyal opposition" has been, essentially, to shit on Obama's carpet and then blame him for being a poor housekeeper. Take Obama's "failure" to close Guantanamo. In late 2009 he signed an executive order which Republicans successfully resisted by convincing idiots that this would be "letting ( Read more... )

I went to school in Tucson, and I've got a few classmates who stuck around after I left. A friend who wants to be credited as "Darth Thulhu" had this comment about the Tucson shooting, its effects on the community, and the memorial. He doesn't blog, and said I could repost his comments here.

So, needless to say, Tucson's been relatively somber ( Read more... )