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Newsfilter: PBS Station Nixes Show On Terrorism. Following last-minute cries of protest from Muslim leaders last week, a Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Dallas canceled the premiere of a documentary on the roots of Islamic terrorism.
comment posted at 10:38 AM on Feb-10-06
comment posted at 11:03 AM on Feb-10-06

USAF Changes Guidelines to Allow Religious Discrimination Apparently, mainstream media considers this close to a non-story : "The Air Force released new guidelines for religious expression, dropping a requirement for chaplains to respect others' rights to their own beliefs and no longer cautioning top officers about promoting their personal religious views." ( AP ) The NYT carried a a one paragraph AP release on this. Forbes carried an extended AP story. Other coverage ? Well, there's the Daily Kos, Metafilter...
comment posted at 10:09 AM on Feb-10-06
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comment posted at 10:21 PM on Feb-10-06

Real Estate Value + Google Maps Fly around a neighborhood with Google maps and see not only the houses but what they are worth. Click on an individual house for recent selling information, house details, tax assessments etc., all for free and no strings attached.
comment posted at 10:41 PM on Feb-10-06

Was Gonzales truthful? Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said. So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.
comment posted at 11:39 PM on Feb-8-06
comment posted at 4:24 AM on Feb-9-06

Anatomy of an Affair. An honest account of one man's affair and the ways it changed him forever.
comment posted at 11:16 PM on Feb-8-06
comment posted at 4:42 AM on Feb-9-06

Hardball's Chris Matthews beats the crap out of former Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clark on the WMD issue. I've never heard a member of the mainstream media so outspoken and heated in slamming the Admin's position on this before. Is the tide turning? (Video-WMP; Video-QT)
comment posted at 4:44 AM on Feb-9-06

The New England Belt Sander Racing Association has just held their 2006 Winter Nationals. The results aren't up yet but you can watch a movie of the 2003 championship. [via]
comment posted at 4:48 AM on Feb-9-06

First it was announced that an Oregon State University graduate student was publishing a story in the journal Science. titled, "Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk," which undercut Bush administration-backed arguments for post-wildfire logging. A week later it was made public that nine professors in the College of Forestry (which gets 10% of its funding from a logging tax) lobbied the journal not to publish the article. Among them was John Sessions, lead author of a report that pressed the U.S. Forest Service to expand salvage logging. After attention was brought to the professors' attempts to keep the article from being published, many worried about the university's reputation regarding academic freedom, if not the state of academic freedom throughout the academic world. However if it wasn't difficult enough to just worry about your own professors standing in the way of getting your data published, you also have to worry about the government pulling your funding if your data doesn't match the data they want to see.

"The Bureau of Land Management acknowledged Monday that it asked OSU if the three-year study led by graduate student Daniel Donato and published last month in the journal Science violated provisions of a $300,000 federal fire research grant that prohibits using any of the funds to lobby Congress and requires that a BLM scientist be consulted before the research is published."

"It's totally without precedent as far as I can recollect," said Jerry Franklin, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied Northwest forests for decades. "It says, 'If we don't like what you're saying, we'll cut off your money.' "
comment posted at 11:25 PM on Feb-8-06
comment posted at 11:36 PM on Feb-8-06

Evidence of a slippery slope continued: Newsweek reports that White House counsel Steve Bradbury believes President Bush can order killings on US soil as part of the Terrorist-Surveillance Program^TM. Meanwhile, while Attorney General Gonzales "lashes out" at the media and insists that the TSP^TM is "not a dragnet that sucks in all conversation and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest," the Washington Post reports it's precisely that -- "computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears" -- and has led to very few leads. (See also discussion of Arlen Specter and the legality of the TSP^TM here.)
comment posted at 10:07 AM on Feb-6-06
comment posted at 4:51 PM on Feb-6-06

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program appears to be illegal. Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Specter called the administration's legal reasoning "strained and unrealistic" and said the program appears to be "in flat violation" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
comment posted at 8:10 PM on Feb-5-06
comment posted at 9:04 PM on Feb-5-06

We Are All Danes Now is a great editorial run today in the Boston Globe. Why does radical Islam suffer such a fundamental disconnect with the rest of the world?
comment posted at 8:20 PM on Feb-5-06

73% of American Teens Experimenting with the Occult Fundamentalist religious research group the Barna Group has published the results of a study with 4000 teens that shows that a third of American teenagers have used a Ouija board, 1 in 10 have been in a real seance and 1 in 12 have cast spells or made potions. Also here, here. I for one blame this guy and this girl.
comment posted at 8:31 PM on Feb-5-06
comment posted at 8:57 PM on Feb-5-06

Religious Nuttery Wins Out over Scientific Fact George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times. The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.
comment posted at 8:45 PM on Feb-5-06
comment posted at 10:14 AM on Feb-6-06

Physicist Bruce DePalma has a 100 kilowatt generator which he invented, named 'The N Machine', sitting in his garage. It could power his whole house, but if he turns it on, the government may confiscate it. This is because the U.S. Patent office automatically denies a patent to any gizmo which purports to produce more energy than it consumes, on the grounds that its personnel are not equipped to evaluate such claims. [more inside]
comment posted at 10:29 AM on Feb-5-06

"Drove my Chevy to the levee..."? That's a lawsuit. "Pass the Courvoisier"? Yup. Lawsuit too. Artwork using Barbie Dolls? Lawsuit again... It's all part of the Trademark Dilution Revision Act, which would eliminate the non-commercial "fair use" protections of trademarks in art, literature, and speech-- To amend the Trademark Act of 1946 with respect to dilution by blurring or tarnishment. It goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the 16th, and there's a large roster of groups fighting it, including the American Library Association, EFF, and more, saying that consumers as well as artists would be preventing from exercising their free speech rights unless it's amended.
comment posted at 10:35 AM on Feb-5-06

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.
comment posted at 8:56 PM on Feb-1-06

Interpreting Revelation's "Millenium." Outside of the all-too-virulent rapture-crazy pre-tribulational dispensationalist premillenialism permeating JesusLand, some Christians hold to other, more nuanced eschatological alternatives. You've got historic post-tribulational premillenialism, which places the transformation of the faithful at the final judgment rather than before it; amillenialism, which regards Christ's "millenial" reign as a symbolic spiritual reign culminating in the last judgment; and postmillenialism, which sees the millenium as a gradual progression towards goodness and light. Overlapping those, you have the "it's all been fulfilled" preterists, and their prophecy-party-pooping compatriots, the hyper-preterists. It's a debate just slightly more fun than the end of the universe. Meanwhile, the noncanonical apocalypses sit in a corner, sadly ignored, and sunny Megiddo is still waiting for some end times action.
comment posted at 8:30 PM on Feb-1-06

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, a Mass. newspaper which shares a computer system with the Boston Globe (both of whom are owned by the New York Times), has inadvertently released close to 240,000 Globe and T&G subscriber credit card and bank routing records. The records, accidently printed by employees on two separate occasions, were apparently placed into the recycling bin at the T&R, which then used that paper to bundle the Sunday edition prior to distribution.
comment posted at 9:08 PM on Feb-1-06

How much time do you spend online? The internet is taking over our lives. Worldwide it is changing the way we live. Everything from complete wastes of time to complex profit schemes to finding love, an entire lifetime can be spent online. But is it really the same?
comment posted at 4:40 AM on Feb-1-06

Cindy Sheehan arrested for wearing anti-war T-shirt at State of the Union Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush's State of the Union address.

"She was asked to cover it up. She did not," said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman, adding that Sheehan was arrested for unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor.

Remind me not to wear my "Impeach Bush" button on my next trip to D.C.
comment posted at 7:47 PM on Jan-31-06
comment posted at 5:03 AM on Feb-1-06

Last winter, Sweden was blasted by the first storm in recorded history to ever deliver hurricane force winds, devastating the country's forests. Logging crews came from all over the world. This massive collection of wood is now stored at a former air strip. via Inhabitat
comment posted at 4:09 PM on Jan-31-06
comment posted at 9:16 PM on Feb-1-06

Operation Anthropoid. In 1942, a group of Czech and Slovak exiles parachuted into their Nazi-occupied homeland and assassinated (hi-res pictures, scroll down) SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution, the "Butcher of Prague." For the first time since the end of the World War Two, a German museum is offering a close look at "Operation Anthropoid," the codename for the only successful assassination of a member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle.
comment posted at 12:27 PM on Jan-31-06

The Family Research Council is claiming victory in their fight to have the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services remove a web site "Celebrating the Pride and Diversity Among and Within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations." [Google Cache Links: 1, 2, 3, 4] But the FRC are not very happy about the "derogatory and even threatening responses to the messages they sent to their own government."
comment posted at 12:35 PM on Jan-31-06
comment posted at 1:14 PM on Jan-31-06

Spiral Scouts are the wiccan/pagan answer to Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts, since they're not a gender specific organization). And since pagans are apparently the new black, the scouts have been getting some recent attention. Although the Spiral Scouts started through a wiccan church, they've made a point of including all religions and/or non-religions (as opposed to the Boy Scouts). And while you can imagine what the conservative response might be, the left has found enough dirt on the Boy Scouts over the years that the Spiral alternative seems to be getting a fairly warm response so far.
comment posted at 12:56 PM on Jan-31-06
comment posted at 4:14 PM on Jan-31-06

CBS' 60 Minutes asks: "Hundreds of thousand of people could die in a nuclear attack, but hundreds of thousands of others could be saved. That’s because the Pentagon — after decades of searching — believes it has found a drug to treat radiation exposure. Why isn’t that drug available? "
comment posted at 1:19 PM on Jan-31-06

Media outraced by Bloggers, Kerry appeal to netroots galvanizes suprise drive against Alito On Google News, you'll read how US Democratic Senators Obama and Biden are against a filibuster. Old news. They've agreed to support it. Encouraged by direct appeals by Senators. Kerry and Kennedy to internet activists, a blizzard of calls, emails, and faxes, organized via the Daily Kos and other blogs - with tactical direction from Kennedy - have helped flip the positions of several Democratic senators, and as of Saturday some claimed the push was already within 2 votes of forcing continued Senate debate on the Alito nomination. In fact, the pro-filibuster bloc might have started with 37 votes Meanwhile, today, Morning Edition, which declined to run the filibuster push as a top story and failed to mention the internet effort, asked Senator Kennedy on Senator Hillary Clinton's opposition to the filibuster: actually, she joined the effort last Friday [ see main link ] : D'oh !
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comment posted at 11:48 AM on Jan-30-06