Search Content

Displaying results 9351 - 9400 of 87950

Blogging groups and ethics

The latest Cites & Insights (v10i11) is out and in it Walt Crawford explores some of the recent developments in the blogging landscape in a section called The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics. It's a very good overview and analysis of what's going on both in the science and librarian blogospheres. It's well worth checking out. Some highlights: Blogging Groups and Ethics Do you blame Roy Tennant when the Annoyed Librarian writes posts that undermine librarianship and libraries? I'm guessing you don't. Whoever the Library Journal incarnation of the Annoyed Librarian might or might…

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Okay, I'm back. Did I miss anything? England ended up being a lot of fun, though it didn't start out that way. For reasons I won't try to explain here, Dominic and I took different flights. His landed early. Mine was two hours late. We had flown through the night, so it was now early Monday morning. We quickly discovered that virtually every piece of information we had about getting from Heathrow Airport to the conference site (that would be the University of Reading) was incorrect or incomplete in some way. Step one was to catch a bus from Heathrow to Reading. This was accomplished…

Is iStockphoto ruining the insect photo business?

The rise of microstock photography has many established photographers wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over how microstock companies are destroying the business. What is microstock? It is a relatively new internet-based business model that licenses existing images for scandalously low prices. Traditionally, images are licensed through highly selective stock agencies for amounts in the hundreds of dollars or so, but microstock turns everything upside-down, moving images for just pennies each. Microstock companies aren't choosy about the images they peddle, as they need vast…

A lapse of judgment at the CBC: A climate change denier goes unchallenged

A few weeks ago the nightly hour-long documentary series on CBC Radio, "Ideas," allowed Canadian climate change pseudoskeptic Larry Solomon an entire hour to make his case against the science of anthropogenic global warming. The producers offered not a single challenge to any of Solomon's arguments, despite the fact that practically every point he made on the science of the subject was either false or grossly misrepresented the science. Solomon is a "respected" enviromentalist. But he has decided climate change isn't as big a threat as just about the entire climatology community fears it to…

Does the lottery help or harm the vulnerable? Plus, a cool story.

When I was a kid, my father was notorious for two sayings, both of which came out when one of us kids wanted something we were told we couldn't have. The first saying was "life ain't fair," and I guess comparing your toy box to your best friend's is as good a way to learn that one as any. The second line was, "when I win the lottery." "When I win the lottery I'll work less and travel more." "When I win the lottery your mother and I will buy a condo in the mountains." "When I win the lottery you can have all the Barbie dolls you want." Now, my father is by no means a regular player, but…

The Cuban anti-obesity program -or- a theory of the Inverted U of obesity rates

Castro's Cuba has seen a precipitous drop in obesity rates and in the deaths associated with cardiovascular risk: Cuba's economic crisis of 1989-2000 resulted in reduced energy intake, increased physical activity, and sustained population-wide weight loss. The authors evaluated the possible association of these factors with mortality trends. Data on per capita daily energy intake, physical activity, weight loss, and smoking were systematically retrieved from national and local surveys. National vital statistics from 1980-2005 were used to assess trends in mortality from diabetes, coronary…

Minnesota al Qaeda Attack Thwarted by Patriot ... or maybe not

Americans revel in violence. We have an excuse for almost any kind of violent or oppressive act. When a young boy poking around, on a dare, in what he thought was an abandoned house was shot dead by my neighbor last year, the boy was vilified as a threat and the trigger happy crazy guy lauded as a hero, by my other neighbors. Why would that be? Earlier this week, an event happened in a nearby town that helps us to understand the sorry state our culture has attained. During a high school basketball game between local teams Shakopee and Prior Lake, a "fan" ran onto the basketball court…

Birds in the News 141

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter A Marsh Wren, Cistothorus palustris, gathers cattail material for its nest along the shore of Lost Lake in North Central Washington just 10 miles south of the Canadian Border. Image: Jeff Larsen, Writer/Photographer [larger view]. View more images by this photographer. Birds in Science News Now here's a fascinating research paper that I've been trying to get my hands on: The chicks of a species of Australian cuckoo can adjust their call in order to fool other species into rearing them, despite never having heard…

The Anti-Consumerist Gift Files: The Gift for the One Who Has Everything...Except Water During a Storm

Ok, Christmas is getting close, so is Kwanzaa and you are already late with your Chanukah presents. You've got one more present to buy, and it is for someone really tough. Something wonderful. Or something they don't have - which might be a challenge. What should you get them? How about a manual well pump? No, I realize it isn't a cashmere sweater, but hey, you can live your whole life without cashmere, but water...well, that's a bigger issue. And if your loved one is on a well, the chances are good that the next time there's an extended power outage, he or she is going to be out of…

Denialist comments---a brief analysis

My recent post on a local "holistic" doctor brought a number of considered and interesting comments (all of whom are quite polite and patient, even when I disagree with them). Some of the issues deserve fleshing out. Heart disease is a major killer. Hypertension is one of the strongest risk factors for heart disease. In some people, salt contributes to hypertension, and reduction of salt intake reduces bad outcomes. In people with congestive heart failure, salt-restriction is crucial. The statement of this idea led to some interesting objections, with a good helping of goalpost-shifting…

Recent Reading: Unusual Fantasy Settings

All the way back in 2001, I got started on the whole blog thing by beginning a book log. That's long since fallen by the wayside, but every now and then, I do read stuff that I feel a need to write something about, and, hey, the tagline up at the top of the page does promise pop culture to go with the physics... I've actually been on a pretty good roll with fantasy novels over the last few months, hitting a bunch of books that I've really enjoyed, without any real duds. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the first of these, Django Wexler's The Thousand Names. This got good reviews, but it…

Welcome to the Police State

I was going to put this on my facebook page, but it seemed worthy of a higher status. As it were. We live in a police state, here in America, in the same way one gives oneself a particular religion or non-religious label. Unless you are a priest, a habitually repentant sinner, or like me, a habitually annoyed atheist, you usually aren't anything. Someone can't look at you and pick out your belief system. It is in the background lurking around doing nothing, ignored and all but forgotten most of the time. But when needed out comes the book (The Bible, The Origin, whatever). Our police…

Kermit Roosevelt on Roberts

Kermit Roosevelt, who teaches con law at UPenn, has an interesting article at American Prospect about the John Roberts hearings. He points out, correctly, that the arguments for why a nominee cannot be specific about a case that may come before them on the court don't withstand scrutiny: What these remarks suggest is that Roberts will not be a wrecking ball, not a conservative out to change the tenor of the Court. That would have been a safe bet anyway; even aggressive conservatives like the young William Rehnquist tend to grow more moderate after assuming the chief justice's chair. We have…

Judith Curry advocates for a climate change "Team B"

Still back at Keith Kloor's place, Judith Curry seems determined to dig in to her position that governments and the IPCC and consensus minded science bloggers need to take the climate skeptics more seriously. Personally I think she completely misses the boat, because most of these folks have in fact been soundly debunked, or at the very least thouroughly addressed in purely scientific manners. We are talking about Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, these are her candidates. As well as having had their more serious contentions seriously looked at, these sites bury any potentially…

Peer review and science.

Chad Orzel takes a commenter to task for fetishizing peer review: Saying that only peer-reviewed articles (or peer-reviewable articles) count as science only reinforces the already pervasive notion that science is something beyond the reach of "normal" people. In essence, it's saying that only scientists can do science, and that science is the exclusive province of geeks and nerds. That attitude is, I think, actively harmful to our society. It's part of why we have a hard time getting students to study math and science, and finding people to teach math and science. We shouldn't be…

Pity the poor UK homeopath...

...because, via Skeptico and DC's Improbably Science, I've learned something that could only warm the coldest cockles of my evil scientific and skeptical heart. It's something that tells us that, maybe, just maybe, what we bloggers do in favor of evidence-based medicine may actually be having an effect. British homeopath Manish Bhatia, Director of hpathy.com, has sent out a frantic e-mail bemoaning how those poor, poor homeopaths are having trouble making a living, going so far as to say that homeopathy is "bleeding to death" (great analogy, given that homeopathy is a lot like the medieval…

Transgenic Silk

Silk is an amazing biomaterial, cultivated and prized for more than 5,000 years. The silk threads that we weave into our shiny fabrics are actually enormous protein crystals produced by insects. This industrial silk that you can buy at the mall is made by silkworms, which use the silk to form the cocoon that protects them as they transform into moths. Many other species of insect also produce silk proteins to protect themselves or their eggs, get around, or catch their prey, but none in such enormous quantity in such easy to harvest packages as the silkworm. Silks from different species are…

Mike Adams, blustering scoundrel

We all know about Mike Adams, notorious quack, conspiracy theorist, quantum dork, and raving nutball around here, right? If nothing else, you must have enjoyed Orac's regular deconstruction of his nonsense. Jon Entine has published a profile of Mike Adams in Forbes magazine that distills all the lunacy down to a relatively concise summary. For instance, it documents his recent public obsessions. Adam’s latest crusade: the world’s governments are covering up the fact that the doomed Malaysian Airlines jetliner was pirated safely to a desert hideaway by Iranian hijackers, and is now being…

Sproul interviews Stein

It has sometimes been said that the leaders of creationist ministries and advocates of intelligent design are charismatic, charming people who know how to play to the crowd. I don't believe it. Creationists are often just as loud, judgmental, and terse as the stereotype of evolutionary scientists that is so often hauled out to admonish students of nature for not being skilled enough at communicating their ideas effectively. Recently the Calvinist pastor R.C. Sproul interviewed Ben Stein about Expelled, and the result is the antithesis of stimulating discourse; (Note: The video did not load…

Imaging a Superior Mnemonist

In neuroscience, we spend most of our time trying to understand the function of the "normal" brain -- whatever that means -- hence, we are most interested in the average. Under most occasions when scientists take an interest in the abnormal neurology, it is usually someone with who has something wrong with them -- has brain damage or a disorder of some kind. In these cases, we try and understand what brain functions they have difficulty performing as a way to understand what each part of the brain does (and hopefully to someday be able to help them). The point is that when neurologists…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay".

Session description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your own in the future. Useful for anyone hoping to someday write for print or online publications. The session was led by…

Google's New Privacy Policy Unveiled

From Google: We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. This stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service now. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012. The privacy policy is here. The terms of service statement is here. Here's a few tidbits from the documents, but you should go look…

Announcing your findings (but not really).

Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne Dalcanton describes a strategy for scientific communication that raises some interesting ethical issues: Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature. Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments "Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo". In other words, you wrote the equivalent of "Well, we've…

Biopunks, biohackers, and the movement to own your own DNA

On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They'd do their standard scan of your genome for free, as long as you paid for a year's worth of their online subscription service. A much smaller version of that same genome survey would have cost you a thousand dollars or more only a couple of years ago. For your money, you get data on single nucleotide polymorphisms at about a million spots in your chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA: mutations that can tell you about your ancestors' migrations across the globe, about your propensity for certain diseases, and about…

Digital Humanities Librarian, York University Libraries

A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I can answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca. Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian Discipline/Field: Digital Humanities Librarian Home Faculty: Libraries Home Department/Area/Division: Scott Library Affiliation/Union: YUFA Position Start Date: August 1, 2011 Digital Humanities Librarian (Continuing Appointment) Scott Reference Department York University Libraries seeks a creative, motivated, innovative…

Fiddler On The Roof

As I'm sure you already know, I saw 'Fiddler on the Roof' this weekend at the new Durham Performing Arts Center. Actually, I did not see it once, I saw it twice (complicated story how that happened). Bride of Coturnix and I went alone on Friday night, and we brought the kids with us on Saturday afternoon. Which was good timing as today Topol had to cancel and Tevye is being played by his understudy. First, I have to admit I am very happy that DPAC (the Durham Performing Arts Center) is doing so well. As Breakfast with Pandora says, building an enormous new art and performance center at this…

Europasaurus holgeri: the Smallest Giant

Mother and child, deep in conversation. Models of newly described miniature sauropod, Europasaurus holgeri, adult with juvenile (Europasaurus; "reptile from Europe", after "Europe" and the Greek, sauros for "lizard"; holgeri after Holger Ludtke, who discovered the first bones). Image courtesy of Freilichtmuseum Munchehagen (Munchehagen Dinosaur Museum). At first, it was not especially remarkable when self-taught paleontologist, Holger Luedtke, found some small sauropod bones in a German quarry in 1998. However, scientists realized quite recently that the group of at least 10 diminutive…

Another Week of GW News, March 22, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Information overload is pattern recognition March 22, 2009 Top Stories: Earth Hour, Maldives, US Polls, Copenhagen Melting Arctic, Polar Bear, Arctic Geopolitics, Grumbine, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, World…

Around the Web: Elsevier vs. Academia.edu vs. Researchers

This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders. Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see. Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all…

EE Times Group to Feature 'Innovation Generation' at the USA Science & Engineering Festival, Dedicated to Helping Young Innovators Connect With the World of Technology

Shout out to EE Times Group for getting the word out about the Festival. SOURCE EE Times Group To Offer Teardowns of Popular Consumer Electronics and the Opportunity to Serve as Technology Journalists SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- EE Times Group, a UBM company and the daily source of essential business and technical information for the electronics industry's decision makers, today announced its plans for the USA Science & Engineering Festival, a two-week celebration of science in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, which begins on October 10, 2010. The festival will offer…

ATF obstructs safety investigators examining blast at West Fertilizer

When they toured the devastation caused by the April 17 explosion at West Fertilizer, Texas' U.S. Senators pledged that investigators would get to the bottom of what happened.  The disaster killed 15, injured hundreds of residents, and destroyed dozens of homes and buildings.  Senator Ted Cruz said: "We need to allow time for a careful investigation of what occurred. We all want to know what happened here." Senator John Cornyn said: "I'm confident there will be exactly the kind of review you're talking about on the local level, state level and the federal level.  We have authorities from all…

The Inter-Ghost Connection

The other day I was chatting with my brother (the smarter brother of Sherlock Holmes) on the phone, and he said something that may have some truth to it - I was predisposed, from early childhood, to understand and like the Web and the blogs. How? By reading and re-reading a million times the books about the adventures of The Three Investigators. Actually, only four of the early books in the series were tranlated into Serbo-Croatian, but I read them over and over. Later, here in the USA, I managed to find and read a few more in English. What does that have to do with blogging? Well, back…

EPA and the new TSCA – Stakeholders push agency in divergent directions  

As the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins work under the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century (LCSA) – the updated Toxic Substances Control Act – more striking divisions are emerging between what environmental health advocates and what chemical manufacturing and industry groups want from the law. These go beyond what was voiced during the public meetings the EPA held in early August to gather input on the rules it will use to prioritize chemicals for review and evaluate those chemicals’ risks. A look at the written comments now submitted to the agency underscores…

Satellites Observe "Traffic Jams" in Antarctic Ice Stream Caused by Tides

A fascinating press release I want to pass along.  At first I thought it was maybe good news in that rising sea levels would slow glacier drainage into the oceans but the affect is the opposite: For the first time, researchers have closely observed how the ocean's tides can speed up or slow down the speed of glacial movement in Antarctica. The new data will help modelers better predict how glaciers will respond to rising sea levels. Caltech's Brent Minchew (PhD '16) and Mark Simons, along with their collaborators and in cooperation with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), exploited four COSMO-…

A Female Viking Warrior Interred at Birka

In archaeology, we distinguish osteological sex from artefact gender. Osteo-sex is with very few exceptions (odd chromosomal setups) the same thing as what your genitals are like. Artefact gender is the material correlate of a role you play according to the conventions of your time: e.g. whether you keep your genitals in Y-fronts or lacy knickers. We judge these two parameters from separate source materials. Your skeleton can't tell us anything about your gender, and your grave goods can't tell us anything about your osteo-sex. They are in principle able to vary independently. Nevertheless,…

Madam Speaker, I Yield My Remaining Time to the Paleontologist from the Great State of California

Over at Aetiology, Tara Smith launched an interesting discussion by talking about why her heart doesn't automatically leap when a reporter wants to talk to her. That post was followed by a lot of scientists swearing up and down about the awful treatment they've experienced at the hands of reporters. Chris Mooney, a reporter, thinks the ranting is all misplaced, and wants us to understand that reporters who write about science are the best trained journalists of all. I thought I'd join the fray. I think, first off, that Chris is a bit off-base. He's not feeling the genuine pain being…

Minds of Babes, Agony of Defeat, Ocean Modeling, Oh MY

This week's Science is particularly rich in stories, it seems. These stories require a paid subscription, alas -- but the write-ups here, in Science's weekly mailing, make pretty good reading on their own for those without a subscription. My favorites: From the Minds of Babes I became fascinated with baby cognition when I did a story on Liz Spelke's work with infants while also raising a couple. Spelke and others have focused on the wee'ns's innate or very early powers of cognition, including numerosity and early logic and perception. Here, though, is an interesting study that proposes…

Welcome to the Club.

Hello, and welcome to the ScienceBlogs Book Club. This is a ScienceBlogs special feature: an online, round-table discussion of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, by Carl Zimmer. Carl will be joined on the blog by three expert guests—Jessica Snyder Sachs, John Dennehy, and PZ Myers. Microcosm reveals how a common bacterium, most often associated in this country with outbreaks of foodborne illness, has been a scientific workhorse for decades, quietly starring in some of the last century's most spectacular achievements in biology: the discovery of genes, the understanding of…

Disease hunting with whole genome sequences: the good news, and the bad news

Lupski, J.R., et al. (2010). Whole-genome sequencing in a patient with Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathy. New England Journal of Medicine advance online 10.1056/nejmoa0908094 Roach, J.C., & et al. (2010). Analysis of genetic inheritance in a family quartet by whole-genome sequencing. Science : 10.1126/science.1186802 Two new papers out today - the first ever studies to employ whole-genome sequencing for disease gene discovery - neatly illustrate both the promise and the challenges lying ahead both for clinical and personal genomics. The first paper presents the final - and successful…

Data, Copyrights, And Slogans, Part II

In the first post, I talked about how factual data aren't creative works, and how compiling them into collections doesn't make them creative - at least in the US. This aspect of data rips away the core "incentive" provided by copyright law to creators: the right to sue people who make copies. It also has a second aspect, which is that the international treaties that govern copyright don't apply. Whatever one may think of those treaties, they do a fair amount to normalize the laws worldwide - a copyright on a Britney Spears tune applies in much the same way in wildly different countries. For…

Watch what you say about my university!

The problem with having eyes and ears everywhere is that sometimes they deliver sensory data that make you want to rip them out of your head or stuff them with cotton, respectively. An eagle-eyed reader pointed me toward some eyebrow-raising comments on another blog, which would not be of much interest except they purport to transmit information obtained from one of the fine science departments at my university. So, to uphold the honor of my university, I have to wade into this. First, a representative sampling of the comments from the poster in question. He writes: I will leave this site…

Arithmetic on the Abacus: Part 1

If you want to talk about mechanical computing tools, you can't ignore the abacus. It's the oldest computing tool in the world; and it's still very commonly used. It's also about as different from the slide rule as you could imagine. The abacus is really fundamentally an addition device; the slide-rule is fundamentally a multiplier. And the slide rule is very complicated - all those different scales, in logarithmic relationships; the abacus is thoroughly simple - just beads hanging on wires. But don't let that fool you: the abacus is is a remarkable device, which is capable of a really huge…

From the Archives: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of A Short History of Nearly Everything, is from September 25, 2006. ======= I'm a bit of two minds on this book. Really, I almost consider it two different books that I could review separately. The first, a book I…

Two years after crane collapse killed four workers in Texas, an update

When one of the nation's largest mobile cranes--the Versa TC 36000---collapsed on July 18, 2008 at the LyondellBasell refinery in Pasadena, TX, four workers lost their lives: Marion "Scooter" Hubert Odom III, 41; John D. Henry, 33; Daniel "DJ" Lee Johnson; Rocky Dale Strength, 30. I wrote about this terrible crane disaster at the time, and used the incident to comment on OSHA's failure to issue a more protective rule for cranes and derricks. (A new rule has been in the making at OSHA since at least 2003, and it may be issued in a few months.*) At the time of the incident, their…

This Week's Spectrum of Tactics for Interfering with Government Science

For those whoâve been following the investigations into how the Bush Administration interfered with government climate science, the news about political interference into Interior Department science had a familiar ring. Chris Mooney sums it up well: âSubstitute for Philip Cooney an Interior Department official named Julie MacDonald, and it's basically the same story as it was with climate change: A political appointee, friendly with industry, overruling the determinations of agency scientists.â (Cooney was chief of staff on the White Houseâs Council on Environmental Quality â previously with…

Homeopathy and Nosodes

I've been meaning to write something about homeopathy at some point, because it's just so wretchedly stupid. But until now, I haven't sat down to actually do it, because it can seem rather like beating a dead horse: it's just so over-the-top goofy, and the goofiness of it is so well documented that I wasn't really sure what I had to add. Then I came across something that was new to me. As I've mentioned before, I'm a New Yorker. I live just north of the city in one of the Westchester suburbs. The anthrax attacks that happened a few years ago were a very big deal in my area - in particular,…

The Templeton conundrum

Money is essential to science, and at the same time it can be a dangerous corrupter. There's a common argument, for instance, that a lot of biomedical research is untrustworthy because it is done at the behest of Big Pharma dollars — it's more persuasive to people than it should be, because there is a grain of truth to it, and it would be easy to get sucked into the lucrative world of the industry shill. However, we also have a counterbalance: scientists don't go into research because they want to be rich, and we are also educated with a set of principles that puts the integrity of our…

The ACA is safe for now, but it’s still very much in danger

Yesterday, House Republicans failed to find enough votes to pass their Affordable Care Act replacement. It was a very good day for the millions of Americans projected to lose their coverage under the GOP plan. But let’s be clear: Obamacare is not safe. In a last-ditch effort to round up more votes, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed an amendment that would have, beginning in 2018, allowed states to determine the kinds of essential health benefits required in insurance plans purchased with tax credits. Under Obama’s health care law, insurance plans sold via the federal health care…

How Twitter Starts The Next Big War, Unless You Act To Stop Them

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911789314169823232?ref_src=t… A pair of American B-1 Lancer bombers is flying north northeast along the border of North Korean air space. Accompanying the bombers is a squadron of F-15C Eagle fighter jets. The crews are aware of the fact that North Korea may have a policy of shoot first and ask questions later, as a response to a tweet by the Russian-installed president of the United States, in which he threatened to kill the psychopathic leader of North Korea. (I fear for a big drop in Tom Clancy novels, as they are no longer challenging or…

The Nightmare That Was Christmas (Death Never Dies)

I remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday, even though it happened years ago, even before you were born. I screamed silently, pinned on my back by the massive weight of a cotton blanket, legs frozen, the dark lights flickering as the human-like form approached, its arms raised in front like The Mummy or Frankenstein's Monster, hands ready to grab, closing in. A strange net-like pattern covered the featureless humanoid shape, moving around on its surface like Saint Elmo's fire dancing on Jacob's Ladder, undulating, letting off light, disintegrating and reforming and making a crackling…