choofnagle
Posts by this author
September 16, 2008
[Update: The WSJ reports that you're now bailing out AIG.]
For years working in Washington, I listened to libertarian tripe about how privacy law would prevent free markets from operating, and how banks should be able to freely trade personal information to assign risk and create new credit…
September 10, 2008
All, I'm sorry for abusing you with posts concerning the Berkeley Tree Sitters. For those of us at UC, this has been an enduring pain. And it's been embarrassing. Why? In part, because this is the type of rhetoric common to the debate:
And of course...
I promise, this is the last posting on…
September 9, 2008
It's been an exciting day here at UC Berkeley. Four helicopters have been buzzing the office since about 8 AM, because the UC decided to erect a scaffold around the lone tree left in order to extricate the tree sitters. I got to watch about 12:00 today. There were probably 400 observers for the…
September 8, 2008
The nerve! Carolyn Jones of the Chronicle reports:
In their most recent demand, the tree-sitters said they would come down if the university gives $6 million to environmental and Native American groups, creates a public committee on campus land use and allows protesters to use the stump from the…
September 6, 2008
Berkeley's latest political battle may be coming to an end: the UC has won a series of decisions in cases brought by local activist groups seeking to prevent the destruction of grove of trees right next to the law school. UC wants to build a sports facility there for our athletes.
The battle over…
September 2, 2008
Regular readers of Denialism Blog are familiar with my love for the skymall catalog. I just love all the pictures of the kittens and the babes in their homes with gadgets that make their lives better.
And the quality of marketing, wow! You'd think that the makers of the SkyRest® Travel Pillow…
August 29, 2008
As PalMD has pointed out, millions of Americans use detoxification to improve their optimal health and well being. But the wisdom of detoxification has an underbelly, one not discussed in the MSM: what happens to those toxins after detoxification?
Unfortunately, those toxins do not just disappear…
August 29, 2008
Sciblings, I know you all are going to run out and buy my new nutritional supplement, Pb®. Pb® is all natural. Pb® is pure. Pb® is elemental. Pb® is balanced. Pb® affects one's optimal health. Pb® is readily absorbed by the blood stream and accumulates in the body, competing with unnatural…
August 28, 2008
Today's Journal reports on the delicate task of creating a monument to Galileo Galilei at the Vatican. But there's still some opposition. Check this out from the very end of the article:
On the other side of the barricades, meanwhile, some Roman Catholics think the church has already done more…
August 27, 2008
The new students have arrived at UC-Berkeley, closely pursued by hordes of credit card marketers. Right by my office is a bank that literally has 12 employees out front hawking credit cards and new accounts.
Freshman friends, don't get your first credit card from the guy on the street offering you…
August 21, 2008
by the San Francisco Chronicle for giving a lot of uncritical coverage to a pet psychic in "Marla Steele makes pet talk a two-way street." This "psychic" discusses Reiki (and the ability to do it from a distance--"energy broadcasting"), among other thing. And here's the reporter's hardball…
August 19, 2008
Today's Journal is worth a read for this important development: something reasonable actually appeared in the Opinions section! Scott Gottlieb, one of the AEI's ogres, penned a review of Trick or Treatment, a book on America's obsession with alternative medicines, by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst…
August 14, 2008
The FTC has piled on Airborne, one of the most annoying consumer scams in the market. The vitamin pill was advertised to prevent colds. And it was created by a teacher! But the FTC concluded:
...there is no competent and reliable scientific evidence to support the claims made by the defendants…
August 8, 2008
Is Obama the Antichrist? No, according to Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series, who told the Journal that:
"The antichrist isn't going to be an American, so it can't possibly be Obama. The Bible makes it clear he will be from an obscure place, like Romania," the 82-year-old author said…
July 25, 2008
Okay, as Denialism's lawyer, let me get to the issue of the rose tattoo.
A medical procedure is a battery. Patients consent to it, thus allowing the doctor to engage in even invasive touching without liability for the battery. The scope of consent is key, however. Many individuals have a rough…
July 22, 2008
I just returned from a wonderful trip to Turkey and London, and the flight gave me the opportunity to spend hours with one of my favorite diversions, the Skymall Catalog. Admit it! You look at this thing full of wonders, and wonder who in the world buys them!
Check out this whopper: the "Aculife…
June 27, 2008
I wonder whether the Heller decision is broad enough to give me an individual right to own a poop gun, AKA, the "Brown Note."
June 27, 2008
Mark, I find your post on DC v. Heller lacking in enthusiasm. It is not often that our Supreme Court finds a new constitutional right (except when big business wants more rights). We should celebrate this, thing--the Second Amendment. It must be important, right, since it becomes before the…
June 25, 2008
This is fun. Someone's created a new NNDB mapper on the Discovery Institute. It's called Theocracy Now!
June 23, 2008
The hat tip has to go to that self-love-fest, BoingBoing...nevertheless, this is a masterpiece.
June 23, 2008
Jon Hurdle reports in today's Times on nine Philadelphia-based institutions that are planning a "Year of Evolution" program for February 2009, to celebrate Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species.
Check out the comments of Ken Ham, which I think are totally off message:…
June 4, 2008
Yesterday, it was the Times with "Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer". Today, it's the Journal with "Do Fuel-Saving Gadgets Take You for a Ride?", which includes this little gem from a gadget maker:
The EPA and FTC "only test the ones that don't work," says Louis H. Elwell III,…
May 2, 2008
Stephanie Simon of the Journal reports today on what Sciencebloggers already know: that the creationists have shifted their tactics from focusing on activism on local school boards to pitching their cause to state legislators:
Their new tactic: Embrace lessons on evolution. In fact, insist students…
April 26, 2008
You've probably heard that Wesley Snipes received the maximum sentence for not paying his taxes--3 years based on 3 misdemeanor violations. His "advisors," tax fraud denialists with crackpot legal theories received 10 for conspiring to defraud the government of tax revenue:
Snipes' co-defendants…
April 22, 2008
An oped in today's Journal by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, argues that he left the organization because it abandoned scientific justifications for its advocacy. Moore argues:
At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales,…
April 21, 2008
...because today, the first lobbying disclosure reports are due to be filed with Congress under new rules that flowed from the Jack Abramoff scandal. The new law requires quarterly reports, lowers the dollar amount of activity that triggers reporting requirements, and (my favorite), requires trade…
April 21, 2008
John Schwartz reports in the Times that PETA:
...said it would announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012."
I love it! This, in my opinion, is great news. Now…
April 20, 2008
The financial services industry pumps a huge amount of money into politics. So much so that the industry has special status and gets pretty much what it wants. Things are a bit different now, because the downturn in the economy and mortgage screwup has given Washington some leverage to examine…
March 24, 2008
By way of AP and BoingBoing, one can find this post by Dale Daugherty on O'Reilly Radar about the newest attack of the tinfoil-hat-wifi-radiation brigade:
Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week,…