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Blame the pope...for everything!

A reader sent me a link to this very strange site, and I've been trying to determine whether it's a satire or not. It seems the answer is…not. There's a huge amount of kook screed here. We get to learn that we Americans are actually living in Cabotia, named after the one true discoverer of North America, John Cabot (oh, and since North and South America are all one connected land mass, he gets to claim both continents.) Pope Pius IX had something to do with Lincoln's assassination, and Kennedy's assassination was the work of a conspiracy by Nelson Rockefeller. The author is not a fan of…

UARS Satellite Crashing Into Earth Update: North America LEAST Likely Spot

As you know, the UARS (Satellite) is in the process of de-orbiting. It is a bit more like a death watch (have you ever done one of those?) than a technological procedure. The satellite was pushed into a dangerous orbit that would drag it down within several days, and it is now losing its grip on orbital inertia as it plows ungracefully through thicker and thicker regions of the upper atmosphere. One wonders what might affect UARS's orbit. Would a powerful weather front with tall thunderheads, or a hurricane cause enough extra molecules of air to be pushed up a bit farther, to cause the…

The Internet is Very Interesting Today

Did we miss an opportunity over the last few months? For several months, since Last April, SETI has been in hibernation, not taking calls from aliens living in other worlds with radio sets. Phil Plait reports that SETI is back on line after a revival of funding. The question is, did we miss any calls? The funds are private donations. Phil "... was happy to see that people such as Jodie Foster (who played SETI astronomer Ellie Arroway in the movie "Contact") and science fiction author Larry Niven were among people who had contributed, as well as Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. The $200k…

Alternative medicine and "alternative" methods of payment?

I don't know where EoR finds this stuff, but I like the way Deborah Ross thinks when she discusses offering alternative medical practitioners alternative methods of payment. Not surprisingly, they aren't interested: There has been much fuss this week about the 'scientific status' of homeopathy, just as there is always a fuss about 'alternative' treatments generally. Personally, I have no patience with the dismissive and often contemptuous attitude these therapies can attract, as there are many useful treatments and products on offer out there. These include: THE ALTERNATIVE CREDIT CARD (…

UPDATED: Major Funding for Science Friday Ends; What will happen next?

It is hard to imagine a world without science Friday. But it is easy to image a world in which our collective respect for the National Science Foundation, who is pulling their funding for the program, is seriously compromised. Also, it is easy to imagine a world in which we do NOT renew our memberships to NPR because they are ALSO pulling funding. UPDATE: Ira Flatow, host of Science Friday, has added a comment below which you should read. As you know, I tend to be bit radical in these areas. I may very well shift my personal donation to Sci Fri despite Ira's suggestion, or perhaps split…

What is life? New Biology Textbook

My old friend, colleague, suaboya, and educator extraordinaire, Jay Phelan has written what many believe will be the next Campbell. The name of the book is What Is Life?. There are two versions: one regular, and one with extra physiology. And both are based firmly on and integrated thoroughly with excellent evolutionary biology. The text is fully modernized, using inquiry based learning (called "Intriguing Questions" or "Red Q" Questions. For instance, "Why doesn't natural selection lead to the prodution of perfect organisms?", "Why is it easier to remember gossip than physics equations…

The daily egnorance: the mind reels

What are we going to do with Michael Egnor? He seems to be coming up with a new bit of foolishness every day, and babbling on and on. Should we ignore him (there really isn't any substance there), or should we criticize him every time (although he's probably capable of generating idiocy at a phenomenal rate—he's got a real talent for it)? I'm not going to link to the awful "Evolution News & Views" site, and I'll make this brief. His latest gripe is with the recent Newsweek cover story (that I had some problems with, too), but his argument is silly. This is your assignment. You are to read…

The Pepsi Maneno: Further Thoughts

Having read my colleagues blog posts and many comments thereon and elsewhere, I want to suggest that we consider the new blog, "Food Frontiers," a little differently than some have suggested (see my original post) and, actually, welcome it to the Sb fold. As painful as it is to admit (and I'm really squirming here) Isis and Drug Monkey were perhaps right to reserve judgment. Perhaps they recognize that what others have made into a stark distinction is really a gray area: There are in fact many science bloggers (here on Sb and elsewhere) who are paid fully by a single company from a major…

No, emails you send me are NOT private

I have an ex facebook friend with no sense of proportion, no sense of humor, and very little sense of her own lack of importance. We disagreed on guns. She wants unfettered gun ownership. We disagree, apparently, on anthropogenic global warming. She thinks its made up. I don't. And now, she wants the whole world to know that I treated her badly, and she will do so by posting a screen shot of our last interaction on facebook "everywhere she can" Well, I'd like to help with that: First, her name on Facebook is Gwenny Todd, if you'd like to friend her or verify any of this with her. Second,…

Bird Pwns Moth, Crowd Cheers!!!

I have now been out for two drives in a row during which I did NOT see a bald eagle. Until now, almost every drive I've been on this year had yielded at least one. But, there is always something: last night a big red tail and the other day the usual egrets and an urban vulture. But I would have had very different, and interesting luck had I gone to the Twins game last night. A miniature falcon, which I assume was a kestrel, found a hunting perch in the stadium, and from that location grabbed and consumed a number of moths, as the fans watched and cheered. There are two especially…

The racist harvard law school email maneno

I've spent a fair amount of time at the Harvard Law School. In fact, I was there when Barack was there. I didn't attend the school, but I drank beer in the school's beer hall, lived in a dorm shared by the law school and the science area, and cut through the main law school building on my way to the square when it was raining or really cold. The main thing I took away from that is how obnoxious and rowdy Harvard Law Students are. They can't handle their beer at all. I saw several fist fights among the students break out over conversations people were having, not even that late in the…

Ono: I Want To Just Say No

Update on the Ono Law Suit ... As you most certainly know, Yoko Ono and her two sons have sued the producers of Expelled! for their use without permission of the song Imagine by John Lennon. Well, it appears as though a ruling from the court is imminent. AP is lubing the shoots with a retrospective summary of the suit. Ono is not asking that the film be pulled, but rather, that the song she controls the rights to not be used. At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan this week, the filmmakers' lawyer, Anthony T. Falzone, said that if the judge granted Ono's request for an…

Is this important new research, or is it "flu denialism"?

This is a press release pertaining to an article coming out next month in the American Journal of Public Health: The widespread assumption that pandemic influenza is an exceptionally deadly form of seasonal, or nonpandemic, flu is hard to support, according to a new study in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The study challenges common beliefs about the flu--in particular the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claim that "the hallmark of pandemic influenza is excess mortality." Peter Doshi, a graduate student in the History, Anthropology, and Science,…

Twin Cities Radicals: Civil Disobedience Training and Organizing Meeting

Saturday March 22 at 3:30 p.m. at Mayday Books. 301 Cedar Ave. S, Minneapolis. (Located below Midwest Mountaineering and The Hub Bike Co-op, on the West Bank side of the University of MN campus) If you want to be truly subversive, read to the bottom of this post. CODEPINK: Women for Peace Seventy percent of Americans now oppose the war in Iraq yet the U.S. occupation continues. We've signed petitions, called our representatives, and attended vigils. We've rallied and marched locally and nationally. Yet after 5 years, the war is still on. A coalition of Twin Cities activists believe it's…

Colonization of the New World

There is a fairly new paper in PLoS on the colonization of the New World. It is the latest in a series of attempts to synthesize biogeography, climate change related paleoenvironmental reconstruction, genetics, and archaeology. The authors draw these conclusions: These results support a model for the peopling of the New World in which Amerind ancestors diverged from the Asian gene pool prior to 40,000 years ago and experienced a gradual population expansion as they moved into Beringia. After a long period of little change in population size in greater Beringia, Amerinds rapidly expanded into…

Does Apple Throttle The Competition, Microsoft Style?

The developers of Firefox ran into an interesting situation with Firefox 3.0 (in production). There are reasons for it to have run faster than Firefox 2.0 on a Mac, but in some ways it ran more slowly. After a great deal of research, they figured out why. Essentially, there is a thing that happens to software running on a Mac that does not use certain native Apple system software ... causing it to run much more slowly. But a very simple change (which is somewhere between undocumented and very very poorly documented) in the software can fix it easily. When this article was picked up on…

Murdered 15 year old deserved what he got

... according to mainstream Christian leaders. This is about Larry King, who was fatally shot in the head on February 12 in a classroom. Larry was murdered by his classmate, Brandon McInerney. It appears that Brandon shot Larry because Larry was openly gay and a transvestite. TUIBG notes on his blog that Bishop Fulton Sheen blames the policy of "tolerance" (a word rarely used because if its innate offensiveness by the GLBTA community). Larry was murdered because the community he lived in generally accepted him. Another way of putting it is that Larry was murdered because the community…

So Al Gore didn't invent global warming? Who knew?

If there's one characteristic of denialists of all stripes, it's that they have a strong tendency to personalize their dislike of their particular bete noir science. For instance, anti-vaccine activists tend to attack Paul Offit as though he were the Dark Lord of Vaccination. Creationists tend to attack Charles Darwin (who, being conveniently dead, can't defend himself) and Richard Dawkins (who, being one of the most vocal atheists in the world, makes a convenient target because creationists are almost invariably motivated by religious objections to evolution). Climate change denialists tend…

Dammit! Where's my thimerosal?

As I mentioned earlier this morning, I went to get my annual flu vaccine. It's the least I can do to protect myself and to protect the immunosuppressed patients around me in a major cancer center. I was looking forward to cheekily asking the nurse administering the vaccine to make sure mine had thimerosal, but when I got to the part of the clinic where the flu vaccines were being administered I was in for a nasty surprise. The first indication came when I had to fill out a form similar to last year's form asking me if I had ever had a reaction to egg products or the seasonal influenza vaccine…

Quoth Elsevier: "Whoops, I did it again." (Six times, actually)

Remember about a week ago, when I lamented how scientific publisher Elsevier had created a fake journal for Merck that reprinted content from other Elsevier journals favorable to Merck products in a format that looked every bit like a peer-reviewed journal but without any disclaimers to let the unwary know that it wasn't a peer-reviewed journal? Whoops, Elsevier did it again. Six times: Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did…

Time for a refreshing facial of...bird poo?

Feeling stressed? Run down? Is your face not as chipper and toned as it might be? Of course you are. We all are from time to time, particularly as we journey into middle age and beyond. So what better than a bit of pampering at the spa? There's nothing like a soothing facial to get the skin toned and the face all relaxed. But what kind of facial? What is best to get that blood flowing, those dead skin cells exfoliated, and that skin all toned and tight? Bird poop, of course. Just check out the Ten Thousand Waves spa in New Mexico and its Japanese Nightingale Facial: This is our signature…

Desiree Jennings: Worst reporting ever?

I hate to revisit this case again. However, some of my readers have sent me links to something that compels me to dig up the rotting corpse of Generation Rescue's despicable attempt to use the suffering of a troubled young woman to push the idea that vaccines are harmful. I'm referring, of course, to the Desiree Jennings case. As you recall, Desiree Jennings is a 25-year-old woman who claimed to have developed dystonia after receiving the seasonal flu vaccine back in August. Based on the disconnect between her symptoms and what real cases of dystonia look like, discovery of what was very…

Another look at Ham's Folly

Stephen Bates of the Guardian gets an advance tour of Ken Ham's new creation science museum. It's amusing and creepy at the same time. When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world. The Creation Museum — motto: "Prepare to Believe!" — will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its…

Well, duh: Insured cancer patients do better

Maybe it's unfair to proclaim this a "well, duh!" study, but its conclusions do seem rather obvious. On the other hand, it's information that we need in a cold, hard scientific form, and I'm glad that the investigators did it: (AP) -- Uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years as those with private coverage, according to the first national study of its kind and one that sheds light on troubling health care obstacles. People without health insurance are less likely to get recommended cancer screening tests, the study also found, confirming earlier research.…

The Creationist consensus on global warming

We all know that the scientific consensus on global warming is that humans are causing most of it. The Creationist consensus is that humans aren't causing it. But just as their are divisions in the Creationist camp between Old Earth and Young Earth Creationists, they are divided on why people believe that humans are warming the planet. Creationist Julia Gorin thinks it's to avoid thinking about the threat from fascist Islamonazi Hitlers Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look…

Burying the Lancet

MediaLens has a two part article (part 1 part 2) on the shoddy press coverage of the Lancet study. They describe how Mary Dejevsky, senior leader writer on foreign affairs for the Independent dismissed the study because: personally, i think there was a problem with the extrapolation technique, because - while the sample may have been standard for that sort of thing - it seemed small from a lay perspective (i remember at the time) for the conclusions being drawn and there seemed too little account taken of the different levels of unrest in different regions. my main point, though, was less…

The PIG-fest continues

The ongoing dissection of Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design continues, with two new disembowelments on display. Andrea Bottaro rips up Chapter 9, "The Secret of Life". In this one, Wells makes the tired old argument that only intelligent agents can create information, therefore informational macromolecules must have been created by intelligent agent(s). It's also got a sharp, succinct critique of the Sternberg affair, in which Stephen Meyer smuggled an ID paper into Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. (Don't ask what those two subjects…

Not hate mail

From the gentleman (and this time I'm not being sarcastic) who wrote to me earlier: I'm sorry I acted the way I did in the email. It was wrong of me and only hope you accept my apologies. Behaving the way I did shows me in a pretty bad light. Some of us have built some pretty strong pre-conceived ideas about issues and when the opposite argument turns up which in your case seems well-thought out I have to offer my grudging admiration. In my job, rigidity means an early grave career wise at least. Case in point- Climate change. I spent some time reading your stuff fairly extensively and I have…

How to get unscientific rubbish in the Age's science section

This [story](http://theage.com.au/news/Science/Global-warming-cyclical-says-climate-…) on Bob Carter in the Age is a good one for playing [Global Warming Skeptic Bingo](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/04/gwsbingo.php). Though I think I should add a rule to the effect that if a numerical claim is wrong by more than an order of magnitude you get a free square on the bingo board. Look at what Carter claims: >Carbon dioxide was a minor greenhouse gas, responsible for 3.6 per >cent of the total greenhouse effect, [Carter] said. Of this, only 0.12 per >cent, or 0.036 degrees Celsius…

Science Links

William Connolley lists another ten global warming myths. PZ Myers delivers a righteous smackdown to Paul from Wizbang for Paul's profoundly ignorant attacks on evolution. (Paul's responds by calling evolution a cult.) As well as having totally demolished\* the theory of evolution, Paul has also done for global warming: Which is more plausible: The established theory: CFC's (et al) don't destroy ozone at seal level, (or we would not have smog) they magically hold there electron stripping potential till they get to a higher altitude where they strip electrons off ozone and blah blah…

It's official

As hard as it is to believe, it's official. It appears that Respectful Insolence won the 2006 Weblog Awards as Best Medical/Health Issues blog. I had waited to announce this until it was official, plus a little time because I still couldn't believe it. It would also appear that one other ScienceBlog, Pharyngula, edged out Bad Astronomy Blog to claim the Best Science Blog crown. Other nominees from the ScienceBlogs collective were also nominated in these two categories, including The Cheerful Oncologist (one of the first medical blogs I discovered and a blog whose style I still sometimes wish…

Holocaust denial, religion, and ideology

We often hear atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and P. Z. Myers castigating the excesses and irrationality of religion. (Heck, I'm often game for joining in when it comes to fundamentalist religion.) While discussing the recent Holocaust denial conference in Iran, Massimo Pigliucci makes a good point when he argues that focusing on just religion is missing the broader context: The answer, I think, is similar to that of the other unnerving question raised by this week's events: how can some people deny one of the best documented (and recent) historical events of all times? I mean,…

Happy Birthday, Rachel Carson

Today is the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson's birth. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the 20th century: Silent Spring, serialized in the New Yorker in June 1962, gored corporate oxen all over the country. Even before publication, Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid - indeed, the whole chemical industry - duly supported by the Agriculture…

Pinata etc

After Team Blair was beaten by six year old Ryan Gwin, Tim Blair tried to rewrite history: Nine-year-old Sydney boy Ryan Gwin suffers anxiety over the fuel consumed by his father's bus; Because if Ryan had really been nine it would have been less embarrassing to lose to him... Then Blair lets his commenters loose on a quote from me: Computer instructor Tim Lambert explains: If the law disarms attackers, then it can make self defence possible where it would have been impossible if the attacker was armed. Team Blair came up with stuff like this (and these are the more rational ones): A…

Middle Muddle

James Annan summarizes the whole non-skeptic middle heresy thing with: "No, I'm in the middle". The RealClimate team check the list Revkin gives and find that they also qualify as NSMHs. (See also Revkin's response.) Andrew Dessler (who was one of the people Pielke Jr originally labeled as a NSH) writes that: The problem I have with the article is that it confuses two separate debates, one scientific (is climate change real?) and one value-based (what should we do about it?). By putting these two issues into the blender, the article confuses rather than clarifies. ... The Revkin article would…

Planetary conspiracy theories

The dwarf planet formerly known as Xena has been renamed Eris, and it's companion has been named Dysnomia, and Phil finds something funny: a guy who thinks renaming planets after discord and strife is a moonbat plot to mock the Bush administration. Seriously. He's nuts. War and chaos don't come to anyone's mind when they hear the name GW Bush. We all know the real devious reasons for juggling the names around. It's an anti-feminist plot to deprive that famous female historical figure and butt-kicking lesbian, Xena the Warrior-Princess, of her due honor. It's a feminist plot to punish Xena…

Roy Spencer says that if you don't admit that environmentalists are guilty of genocide then you are like a Holocaust denier

Sideshow Roy Spencer writes: Our environmental protection practices have already caused the deaths of millions of people, mainly in poor African countries. By far the most humans -- mostly women and children -- have been sacrificed in the mistaken belief that the use of any amount of the pesticide DDT would harm the environment. As a result, the preventable disease malaria has continued to decimate Africa. Only recently has this genocide disguised as environmentalism been partly reversed through the reinstituted practice of twice-yearly DDT treatments of the entryways to homes. While most…

CAM in medical schools: A marketing tool?

Fellow ScienceBlogger (I'm not all that enamored of the term "SciBling") Abel Pharmboy has finally weighed in on the issue of alternative medicine woo finding its way into medical school curricula and its promotion by the American Medical Student Association, which Dr. RW, Joseph, and I have been discussing the last few days. Besides using his experience in natural products medicine to discuss this issue, Abel asks a very pointed question from a patient's perspective: So, someone like me who feels a doctor doesn't have time for them might approach any one of the growing number of integrative…

The Tripoli Six: The blogosphere keeps up the pressure

I wrote last week about the Tripoli Six, six health care workers who were jailed by Libya on trumped up charges of infecting patients at a hospital they worked at with HIV. Since then, many other have chimed in, and the most recent count of blog posts about this case is well over 100. According to Nature, this attention is starting to have an effect: Bloggers have rallied around a call from a humanitarian lawyers' organization for greater international pressure to free six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya on charges of deliberately infecting over 400 children with…

The Conversation on climate change

The Conversation has launched a series of articles on climate change, introduced by editor Megan Clement here. The first three are: Climate change is real: an open letter from the scientific community: The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes. Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now. Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most…

Repost: Sugary drinks, weight gain and diabetes

*From Deltoid archives for 2004, a [repost](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/09/zywicki.php)* In my previous post I mentioned Daniel Davies' demolition of yet another dodgy Steve Milloy article. Milloy attacked a recent JAMA study that found: Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a greater magnitude of weight gain and an increased risk for development of type 2 diabetes in women, possibly by providing excessive calories and large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars. Todd Zywicki, who endorsed Milloy's piece as a "devastating…

Leakegate scandal grows

There have been new developments in Leakegate, the scandal swirling about reporter Jonathan Leake, who deliberately concealed facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin. Deltoid can reveal that Leake was up to the same tricks in his story that claims that the IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters". Bryan Walker has the detailed dissection, but the short version is that Leake took one part of the discussion of one paper in the IPCC WG2 report and pretended that this was all it said, entirely ignoring the WG1 report and the discussion of other papers in the WG2…

Accept no substitutes for Skeptico

Yikes. Grant crunch time or no grant crunch time, I couldn't let this pass. This week's host of the Skeptics' Circle, Skeptico, has been one of my favorite skeptical bloggers for a long time now. As a measure of how good he is, he now has a doppleganger blog. Damn, I'm a bit envious. No one's seen fit to try that with me, other than J. B. Handley's rather pitiful attempt at cybersquatting the domain oracknows.com. On the other hand, it's a creationist using Skeptico's name. Besides, spouting bogus "critiques" of Darwin (just how tiresome, bogus, and unoriginal, Bronze Dog shows here) this…

I toady to my Seed overlords

In an attempt to periodically provoke discussion on various issues, our overlords at Seed plan on posing questions to us ScienceBloggers. The first question, which some of us have already answered is this: If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why? At first, I was going to go with RPM's answer (and Razib's almost answer), nuclear weapons. But then I thought about it again, and changed my mind. For one thing, it is unlikely that nuclear power would have been invented without the prior development of nuclear weapons.…

New Star Trek movie to be released in 2008

According to Trek Today: Paramount Pictures announced today that Lost creator J.J. Abrams will co-write, produce and direct the eleventh Star Trek film, set for release in 2008. According to an article in the Daily Variety, the new film will be a prequel to the original Star Trek series, featuring younger versions of characters like James T. Kirk and Spock. The movie will chronicle events such as their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and their first mission into outer space. The as-yet untitled new film will be written by Abrams together with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Abrams is the…

River Health: No Mattresses, No Problem

The NYTimes reports today that the Charles River is clean enough to swim in. Well, sort of. Caveats: No diving...lest that stir up the toxic sediment at the bottom of the river. Do not expect to see the river bottom. The water is too murky. Be prepared to encounter bits of flotsam and jetsam. Toxic sediment? Doesn't sound so good to me. I'd like to know more about the toxic sediment and how this river has been cleaned up. You too? Well, you're out of luck because the rest of the article is largely devoid of any facts (other than the helpful fact that the river which once got a 'D' now gets a…

Are You Smarter Than A Medical Student?

'Tis the time of year to bring tidings of joy and celebrate Homo sapien-kind's (formerly known as mankind's) spirit of generosity. Not being one to scoff at this equitable terpsichore of self-esteem, we here at the Cheerful Oncologist have a quiz of medical knowledge guaranteed to raise the confidence of every person who takes it. Initial beta-testing has shown that 99% of testees (please don't confuse this term with any androgenic anatomical appendages) obtain a perfect score. What better way to promote our citizen's intelligence than to give everybody an "A," right? Now sharpen your…

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

Looking for something to read that's a little more thought-provoking than the usual beach book detritus pushed on the unwary consumer this summer? Fly, don't waddle, to the nearest bookstore and take a gander at The World Without Us, a fascinating "thought experiment," as one reviewer called it, that ponders what would happen to our planet if all humans suddenly disappeared. Before speculating on what changes, both nurturing and poisoning, would be loosed upon Earth by our absence, the author, Alan Weisman, first chronicles with precise and first-hand knowledge what humans have done to our…

The Death of Spring

Something unusual happened to the season today, to this season which has been dragging its cold, wet feet across the month of May. The day started inauspiciously. After parting the curtains only to see another morning cloaked in gray, lethargy enveloped us like the fog outside our bedroom window. At the end of the driveway we stooped over the newspaper and then shuffled back inside, avoiding the ocean of dreariness suspended above, as if even one furtive glance would release more rain. Spring has been an imposter this year, a slow, cold turning of the earth that has kept us frowning, if…

Washington Times whitewash

Robert Stacey McCain has a disgraceful whitewash of the affair in the Washington Times. The most important thing about this affair has always been whether Lott's 98% brandishing claim is true. By any objective reading of the existing evidence it is not. On the one hand we have nine surveys that say the number is much lower, on the other hand we have Lott's new survey, where even Lott concedes that the sample size is so small that it does not contradict the big surveys. By advancing this 98% figure over 50 times Lott is giving people dangerously misleading advice. Advice…