That was pretty bad. It got progressively worse until the last line. I doubt without that last word the reaction would not have been nearly as bad. Overall, this is pretty appalling.

The only thing more amazing than the fetishes in question are that the government would waste its time and our tax dollars with this. And can anyone say "selective prosecution"?

McCain has certainly changed a lot since when he called the religious right "agents of intolerance".

Pauldrye, Max Mosley is actually Oswald Mosley's son which is part of why this is such a big deal. His father founded the British fascist party.

All of this said, I'm Jewish and I don't see why all these Jewish and other groups are condemning him. Given his history he clearly has unresolved issues with the Nazis (he took part previously in criticizing German automakers who were involved with the Nazis). People have strange ways of coping with things, apparently he handles his strained relationship with his father with some sort of weird sexualization. And it isn't like he's even only taking part as a Nazi but also takes part as a prisoner in one part. That's really his own business. I'd much rather he do that with consenting adults then actually promote Nazism or such. He clearly understands that Nazism is bad, feels guilty about and also given his family has a weird set of kinks about it. Fine. Now let him get on with his life.

And in related news, Ben Stein is now claiming that there is something wrong with "Darwinism" because it doesn't explain planetary orbits. No really, I'm not kidding. Watch the interview at:

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/338668.aspx

This seems familiar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Doll_%28The_Twilight_Zone%29

Dominos are fun. You can actually use them with no other objects to evaluate the truth value of any statement in propositional calculus for fixed truth values of the variables (this isn't that hard to do - the main challenge is making a functioning not-gate).

Any idea how common this is? The article doesn't say and quick google search doesn't turn anything up. I would naively guess that there was maybe some sort of chimaerism here but given that it is only the kidneys that doesn't seem completely plausible. So maybe it is just random. Pretty cool regardless.

Raccoons in daytime are often sick and should be avoided. However, raccoons generally come out close to evening so it is possible that this raccoon was out at a normal time for raccoons. Furthermore, raccoons like some other animals have had their sleep schedules disrupted by human cities. Thus. I wouldn't be surprised if in an urban environment one saw a fair number of healthy raccoons in daylight.

Meh, I'll wait to buy it when they start selling the homeopathic version.

Teresa, the relevant deletion discussion was at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ball_piston_engine_%28Wolfhart_engine%29
which I found by looking at the deletion log http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Ball%20piston%20engine%20(Wolfhart%20engine) Wikipedia is generally transparent but one needs to know where to look. (The fact that you were treated horribly by a certain admin and his compatriots is highly unfortunate but doesn't make Wikipedia in general not transparent).

I'm sorry, but I can't take audiophiles seriously at all given how many of them buy products to help with sound that have no real basis in science and that the audiophiles can't tell the difference with in double blind testing. See for instance http://www.randi.org/jr/121004science.html and much else of what James Randi has to say about this.

Wow, I'm applying to grad school and was considering UCLA. This is a very good reason to be around LA.

Wow, and only a few days about a recent Questionable Content that advertised a similar food:

http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1023

Mark, well I might be able to put you in touch with the RationalWiki people who run the bots. My general impression is that they don't like talking much about their more greyhat activities (like running these bots). I'll send one of their heads an email and see what he says.

Mark, it is common knowledge among the right circles. I am a Wikipedia admin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JoshuaZ )
and helped Conservapedia when they were young (I'm not completely sure why)(http://www.conservapedia.com/User:JoshuaZ ) so I have contacts among some of the more sane people at Conservapedia as well as among the people who went and founded RationalWiki in response to Conservapedia (see http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=conserv23&date=20070623 which has some details about RationalWiki's history)(and sorry about the long link which may do some ugly wrapping). If you want I'll ask around and see if I can get anyone at either RationalWiki or Conservapedia to consider talking to you about it.

This appears to be due to people at rationalwiki http://www.rationalwiki.com/ who made a program that messes with Conservapedia page stats.

While this is amusing, I'd be interested in seeing an actual comparison with CNN (you'd have to be careful about how to define things, like take a list of specific things (such as people in their underwear) and compare. I'd also prefer if they gave the date and context of each image and video(incidentally, the videos seem to be down at the moment).

When I saw the headline I thought it was talking about a game where you hijack a plane. That would have been more interesting.

This is incorrect, the phrase "cdesign proponentsists" only occurred once in the draft (in the second 1987 draft of Panda's). See http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missing_link_cd.html for more details. Also see http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=80 which has scans of the original texts. Note the the first copy of "creationists" is changed to "cdesign proponentsists" while the second time "creationists" is correctly changed to "design proponents". So "wherever" is clearly incorrect. Also this isn't at all "new"- the NCSE link above is November 7 2005, so this was known about two years ago.

Almost no Lolcats are funny. Lolthulhu ( http://lolthulhu.com/ ) was funny for the first 48 hours. And all of these Lolvariants are generally unfunny. I can't wait for this meme to die.

At the risk of joining the chorus on this: there's go good evidence for this occurring at all. The only substantial difference that we can tell that moder technology has made is that people with disabilities are more likely to survive and reproduce. The fraction of the population that is blind has gone up drastically in the last few hundred years. Similarly, being deaf at a young age or from birth used to just eliminate you from the gene pool. It doesn't do that anymore. And there are many examples of specific diseases connected to specific alleles such as phenylketonuria. So if any substantial trend has been occurring it has been a trend to have weaker physical bodies.

Furthermore, it appears that in many countries, smarter more educated people reproduce less(this is arguable since this sort of thing is based on standardized test scores or level of education which have strong sociological elements). But if that trend continues we'll just end up really stupid but good looking. But none of these trends are strong enough to change the overall makeup of the species for the indefinite future. And there's no good reason to expect some sort of speciation event within 100,000 years. Our generation time is much too long for that.

There was a brief scandal in 2005 during the Katrina aftermath where FEMA used firefighters to do PR. Looks like they really didn't learn from that.

Michael, it is unconstitutional for states to restrict interstate commerce (and even that isn't strictly speaking true. There are many conflicting rulings about what precisely is entailed by the dormant commerce clause). There is nothing unconstitutional about the federal government restricting interstate commerce. Article I, Section 8 says that Congress has the power "To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes." Remember, stupidity is not unconstitutional.

The title "Prior Governent Permission" is mispelled. Noen, actually many European countries already use national IDs. For many purposes they make things less rather than more inconvenient. There are serious worries (such as ID theft and surveillance) but the notion that you will need an ID to cross state lines is ridiculous; the only thing I can think of that's more ridiculous is to compare these restrictions to facism.

I at least don't see much of a problem with requiring ID for flights aside from it being uneccessary and inefficient. Letting the airlines keep extensive data seems like much more of a concern.

I was always brought up to see hollowing out books as a very bad thing. There's no good reason to destroy a book. If one needs to hide something there are much better places.

The Court may have made the right call here. Just because a law is stupid doesn't mean its unconstitutional.