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An annual income of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars puts you in the top three per cent of American households, and is more than four times the national median.

On February 8th, there was a great Fresh Air with Terry Gross interview about this article in The New Yorker.

Terry Gross has this way to get really interesting information from her guests and to do it in a very engaging way. And this episode is no exception.

You forgot to link to this piece: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all

Conversely, if you see an impulse on the part of a human being to control you, you know very well that that human being is lying to you

From http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright
"...anything that's characterized as disconnection or this kind of thing, it's just not true. There isn't any such policy."
...
"We all know this policy exists. I didn't have to search for verification -- I didn't have to look any further than my own home." Haggis reminded Davis that, a few years earlier, his wife had been ordered to disconnect from her parents "because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did twenty-five years ago when they resigned from the church. . . . Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them." Haggis continued, "To see you lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying about?"

Also http://www.npr.org/2011/02/08/133561256/the-church-of-scientology-fact-checked

Public health care should be targeted at prevention and diagnostics. Catastrophic health care should be covered by insurance; if you don't pay for insurance, you're out of luck. That still doesn't change the fact that 90% of most people's health care expenses are incurred in the last 5 months of their lives, but cutting off funding for that would amount to a real version of the "death panels" the Republicans have falsely associated with the new Health Care act. Health insurance is so expensive because we simply refuse to let people die in peace.

Given that people who are most likely dying, but possibly not -- terminal cancer patients, who spend unbelievable amounts of money on the slight chance they'll beat cancer -- have zero incentive to die in peace and an extremely high incentive to spend every penny they have on the slight chance they'll beat cancer, especially if the money actually belongs to their insurance company, and given that the health care industry, who makes money off providing health care, also has absolutely zero incentive to let people die in peace, *and* given that the general public shows strong support for keeping people alive through extraordinary medical efforts and even a whisper about managed health care and providing treatment based on statistical analysis will have the AARP so far up a politician's butt that blue hair will be sticking out his nose... what do we do to actually implement a plan wherein people die in peace? In an article on this subject by Atul Gawande, a surgical oncologist, he pointed out that the quality of life for people who went through Hospice was significantly better than that of people who went through extraordinary medical procedures, and I think articles like his, that convince people that life-prolonging medical treatments are painful, expensive, and don't actually do any real good, is probably the only way we as a culture have to fix this problem. But I don't think even that's going to do much. I know in my family my religiously-oriented aunt and uncle think it would actually be sinful to let my grandmother "just die" rather than doing everything they can to try to keep her alive, even though she's always said she wanted to die peacefully when it was her time, rather than hooked up to a machine, and the same certainly seemed to be the case when hundreds of thousands of people were shrieking wildly that Terry Schiavo should be kept alive against what appeared to be her own written wishes.

When faced with those three problems: individual, institutional, and cultural pressure to preserve life at any cost, I think we as a culture are simply facing inevitable bankruptcy, as our medical industry provides ever-newer, ever-more-expensive ways to give people another couple of days of life.

A professor at Stanford did a less rigorous version of this study using marshmallows and bells in the 1960s: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer

Before you read this, read http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer MUCH bigger news.

It's worth noting that parent is in response to the original summary, which seems to have changed drastically. Pasting the original here.

"According to The New Yorker: 'It seems Eric Schmidt didn't like the decision to deliver uncensored searches in China. It is reported the decision to withdraw censored searches in China was made by co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin and probably an internal battle for power begun. Schmidt also wasn't happy with the 'don't be evil' policy, something the Google founders were prepared to protect anytime. Schmidt lost some energy and focus after losing the China internal battle and decided to leave the position of CEO. It is also reported that the chairman position is a temporary one until he finds another business to take care.'"

You need a primer in confirmation and publication bias.

And that would be awesome. See the success of the Six Word Memoir - the presidential ones are great. But so what? It's humorous and amusing and translating a work doesn't diminish it in the original language. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn't make Jane Austen any less wonderful, so if there's a market for a twitter account condensing books ("Dammit where is that white whale?!") then full speed ahead!

There's a strong possibility that you're mistaken in your assertions there. There has been some reporting in the press that Wikileaks activists have actively eavesdropped on data by running one or more rogue Tor servers:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all#ixzz0pWdlAepe
There has also been reporting as recently as today that Wikileaks actively gathered data from peer-to-peer file sharing networks:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-20/wikileaks-may-have-exploited-music-photo-networks-to-get-classified-data.html

I'm sure if i looked around the numerous scientific fields I could find stupid comments made by scientists. I suspect that the author misunderstood the lesson or was so blinded by his faith in science that he misquotes Feyerabend "that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests" but then again I have never been taught by Feyerabend and if Feyerabend had said something so stupid then he is deserving of ridicule

At the start of my masters programme in the history and philosophy of science and medicine we were reminded of one key thing. I will paraphrase my professors here "planes fly, humans don't" Science clearly works, we live in a world of technological innovation but that doesn't mean what scientists say they are doing is what they are actually doing.

The scientific method is all very well, the problem is that it is being performed by humans, who have a tendency to see correlation and to see that as confirmation. A better place to start with an analysis of science would be bruno latours science in action http://is.gd/myOXXC http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sC4bk4DZXTQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bruno+latour+science+in+action&source=bl&ots=W8mIxp89UA&sig=EUuZoalIj9J7Nh_gGckWURJq8lM&hl=en&ei=YcswTcTvIJO6hAfx3aTCCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

Another place to look might be at the apparent failures in the scientific method http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all - where an apparently strong signal overtime falls back into background noise. The issue here is not fraud but merely that what is published, what is funded has more to do with human failings and the need to provide clear evidence in fields where given an environment where all aspects of all conditions are controlled the organism will do as it damm well pleases

"People today spend decades in solitary confinement and come out relatively unscathed."

Thats absolutely false. For interesting reading about what solitary confinement does, read
this new yorker article.

First read this article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all

I think it will paint for you a picture of a very unusual person, clearly flawed but also clearly motivated by a quest for righteousness. I think he wants to stop wars more even than he wants to release information. He is certainly not doing this for money or comfort, though I hope he eventually finds both. He wants desperately to make an impact, and he was enraged at the Guardian for wanting to release the leaks on a different schedule because he wanted to optimize the timing for the sake of maximum impact. Yeah, it was stupid to threaten to sue and claim "ownership" - but even the article says that he later backed down from this, after a great deal of coffee and wine. Haven't we all said stupid things while overworked, stressed and sleep deprived? I don't think this episode should be taken to reveal too much about Assange. The article linked above is more informative, though also not exactly flattering.

It's not scalpels that are expensive. It's MRI's and PET scans, and more to the point, that when you're dying, and your doctor is, in essence, working on commission, you and your doctor both are very willing to try any and every high-tech, high-cost diagnostic and treatment, to put off dying in the hopes that you'll be that 1-in-100 miracle cure. Here's a good article about this problem written by an oncology surgeon in The New Yorker a couple months ago, where he talks about how 25% of Medicare's current budget is being spent by people who are in their last couple of months of life, and that money provides an average of less than two months' delay in death.

The article can be viewed on a single page here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

Not surprisingly, most of the posts so far show no signs of having actually RTFA.

Lehrer goes through all kinds of logical contortions to try to explain something that is fundamentally pretty simple: it's publication bias plus regression to themean. He dismisses publication bias and regression to the mean as being unable to explain cases where the level of statistical significance was extremely high. Let's take the example of a published experiment where the level of statistical significance is so high that the result only had one chance in a million of occurring due to chance. One in a million is 4.9 sigma. There are two problems that you will see in virtually all experiments: (1) people always underestimate their random errors, and (2) people always miss sources of systematic error.

It's *extremely* common for people to underestimate their random errors by a factor of 2. That means the the 4.9-sigma result is only a 2.45-sigma result. But 2.45-sigma results happen about 1.4% of the time. That means that if 71 people do experiments, typically one of them will result in a 2.45-sigma confidence level. That person then underestimates his random errors by a factor of 2, and publishes it as a result that could only have happened one time in a million by pure chance.

Missing a systematic error does pretty much the same thing.

Lehrer cites an example of an ESP experiment by Rhine in which a certain subject did far better than chance at first, and later didn't do as well. Possibly this is just underestimation of errors, publication bias, and regression to the mean. There is also good evidence that a lot of Rhine's published work on ESP was tainted by his assistants' cheating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine#Criticism

A cap of 250k passed here in Texas years ago.

Result? Jack shit. McAllen, TX is second place in the US for healthcare expenditure per capita (being greater than per capita income). Lawsuits ground to a halt, malpractice premiums plummeted... and physicians spent the money on new equipment to sell more services. They built hospitals to send their patients to for tests, pocketing a referral bonus plus the income from the hospital, and many of them ran the tests themselves so they pocketed the money for performing the test as well. When you own an MRI, every little headache needs to be scanned at $5000 a pop.

So sorry that you live in fear of lawsuits, but don't pretend you'd charge a penny less if you were never sued again.

Here goes. Yes it is sort of a screed written today:

How to organize for a political push to restructure copyright and patent law?

Advocating for changes in copyright and patent law is basically a sharks versus minnows problem. The sharks are the relatively few businesses who are able to write laws and lobby for their passage. The minnows are the 200 million plus people who buy material covered by copyright and patent protection.
At the level of Federal law, the sharks have been winning by arguing for and lobbying for broader laws and longer terms of copyright and patent protection.
I write here about the problem by cutting it into three parts. One part is “How do you organize the minnows.” Part two is: “How do you argue for less restrictive copyright and patent laws? Part three is: “What law do you write and what do you ask elected representatives to vote for?”

On the problem of “How do you organize the minnows?”

I recently discovered an article that shows how and why an organization effort could plausibly employ a social network site like Facebook. The kind of action group that is plausible is: A loose social network.
The article title is “Small Change Why the revolution will not be tweeted.” by Malcolm Gladwell, published in The New Yorker magazine, October 4, 2010.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

1. Copyright and patent reform needs to be a non-partisan movement.
2. As an issue for the large numbers of “minnow” advocates, this will be a relatively small commitment activity that does not require the intense friendship and hierarchical structure of the American Civil Rights movement. The Malcom Gladwell article above eloquently disassembles the presumption that a Facebook type advocacy program can create a disciplined, hierarchical organization. Instead of an institution, a Facebook advocacy program tends to create a loose network.
3. The hundreds of thousands of reform advocates need a set of winning arguments.
4. Money and rhetoric: In the absence of a better rule of thumb, the lobbying and campaign donation dollars deployed needs to match or exceed by a factor of two the lobbying and campaign donation dollars spent by the “shark”advocates. The movement needs a well documented estimate of the shark lobby hours and dollars and shark campaign spending and a matching tally for the “minnow” advocates.
Unless something changes, let's assume that money talks in politics. The movement needs both money and quality talk. The copyright and patent reform activity needs both a coherent rhetorical argument and matching donations.

On the problem of “How do you argue for less restrictive copyright and patent laws?”

There are many instances where copyright and patent protections are an encumberance and annoyance. For instance:

German Kindergartens Ordered To Pay Copyright For Songs http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/12/29/169253

Several legal arguments are of great importance to the development of an effective advocacy argument. Some thinkers are:
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation.
http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society-2/
Lawrence Lessig, law professor and copyright lawyer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig

The intellectual property and entertainment industries have a very strong argument for more restrict

Wikileaks is guilty only of receiving the data and publishing the parts they feel are morally justifiable to make public, not stealing, and not espionage, and certainly not treason (they aren't even eligible to commit that one).

Well, thats kind of the problem.

Taliban Study WikiLeaks to Hunt Informants
WikiLeaks Comes Under Fire from Rights Groups
Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review

This could turn into a feedback loop. If enough informants against the Taliban and Al Qaeda are killed as a result of Wikileaks, it could have consequences in the United States or Europe.

The diplomatic consequences have already been considerable.

What motivates Assange?

In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China. The document called for the execution of government officials by hiring “criminals” as hit men. Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?”

The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself. Several weeks later, Assange flew to Kenya for the World Social Forum, an anti-capitalist convention, to make a presentation about the Web site. “ No Secrets

Assange the Anti-American

Manning supposedly had some encrypted chats with Assange prior to releasing any material. It will be very interesting if those come to light.

Are you serious? Read this article and then tell me that he's not doing journalism. I don't really see much of a difference between what he does and Woodward and Bernstein publishing the insider tips from their informant "Deep Throat". And everyone needs to get over the impression that Assange is just passing on documents. He and his organization are doing a ton of work in fact-checking, redacting, mediating with other media outlets, etc. (If you don't realize how much redacting there is in WikiLeaks, you don't know shit about this issue and need to do more reading before you comment again. The staffs of four of the most important newspapers in the world are collaborating with the WikiLeaks staff on the gigantic project of figuring out what needs to be redacted. That's why the release of the cables is basically a trickle. Processing them responsibly takes a ton of work.)

But I do think that Assange would serve well the cause of WikiLeaks if he got a job from a proper newspaper somewhere - I'd recommend Iceland. That way, the "leaks" would be called "newspaper stories" in Geysir News or whatever. If WikiLeaks were a newspaper, they would be by far the most successful and talked-about newspaper in the world. I think the rebranding of their operation would be a good start to help remedy misperceptions like yours.

You're quite right, but I think that it's a huge misconception to think of WikiLeaks as being an organization that focuses on American transgressions. Their first huge story uncovered sickening, systematic corruption in the Kenyan government. They've leaked evidence of corruption in Swiss banks. They've done lots more. Of course the US only inflates the story into a big stink when it's their shit that's smeared everywhere, but that's not because WikiLeaks ignores non-US corruption.

What Assange really needs right now are leaks about human rights abuses in China, as you say - something serious enough that the Chinese would be calling for his head using exactly the same words used by US Republicans. I think that would make the cognitive dissonance complete.

This New Yorker article from the more innocent days of June is something that everyone needs to read before they can really make sense of WikiLeaks. It's about what those people actually do, and it's an excellent read. Even if you've read a hundred stories about WikiLeaks, you probably don't have this background and it will change the way you look at their work.

Some critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

A 10 page article in the New Yorker, which is likely tldr; for most -- considering that a single "New Yorker" page is about the equivalent of a 10 page expose on PCMag/ZiffDavis et al ;)

No, it's an objet d'art.

Excellent post. You should read this piece by Atul Gawande about treating people at the end of their lives:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande

Two takeaways. First, hospice is the work of the angels. I have observed this with my mother-in-law's death from cancer, and almost everyone I've talked to seems to agree.
Second, your remark about Vietnamese having incense and pictures of ancestors is incredibly on-point, and that's what brought to mind Gawande's article. People need traditions and structure around dying to guide them through it, and that's largely missing in modern American life. My wife, who has seen a lot of death in her 35 years (mother, father, grandparents, close family friends, etc.) keeps a fair number of her ancestors close. WASP that I am, my family has none of these traditions and little to guide me when it comes to death. The Vietnamese have it right.

I first heard rumor not about a Syrian program in 1994, it was emphasized by the CIA (2003), and the Israelis (2007).

Keep in mind that the Israelis bombed it in 2007. And they did so by completely compromising one of Russia's most advanced air defense systems. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Syria is still working on its program, but evidence seems to indicate that they suffered a big set back. But yes, you do have a point about Syria being fairly sane by Middle East standards.

Here's a New Yorker cartoon, 1972.

In the cold war, Americans were afraid of losing their freedom to the Soviet Union. But according to the article, the cyber cold war is about America holding on to its "intellectual property":

In the cyber cold war, the capabilities and resources of our adversaries refers to the ability ... to steal intellectual property from businesses, secrets from governments and money from everybody.

Very interesting. Especially because theft of 'intellectual property' is usually called 'espionage'. While spying and intelligence-gathering happens quite a bit during times of war, it is not warfare, per se.

As usual, the redoubtable Seymour Hersh got there first with this observation.

Here's an interesting read from Malcolm Gladwell about why the Internet actually hinders revolutions.

Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

I want the health care system improved in this country as well, but being forced to buy over-priced insurance or have the IRS fine me $2000 is not what I or most people had in mind.

Then find people who are willing to take serious looks at what is wrong with it rather than insisting that they know the problem.

Take, for instance, tort reform: Texas passed the toughest tort reform in the country, so explain why McAllen, TX is in second place in healthcare spending per capita with per capita spending being greater than per capita income.

When you actually look at it over time, it's pretty easy to see what happened, the progression from the POV of a doctor goes something like this:
"Damn, better run these 20 tests or else the patient might sue me"
"Hey, I got a check for running these 20 tests. Not bad!"
"Lawsuits? What lawsuits? I'm raking in the dough here, pap smears for everyone!"

Other than HM, the other patient coming to my mind is Clive Wearing - here is a very insightful article by The New Yorker back in 2007 - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks?currentPage=all

Though I am not sure how much he contributed, but his case is every bit as (or more?) interesting as HM.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price Podcast

Priced to sell: Is free the future?

"No privacy" coded into Facebook's DNA... so true. Reading Zuck's interview in the Sept 20th New Yorker allows one to better understand this explicit point, beyond the coarse Harvard email zingers. As the writer points out, Mr. Zuckerberg can afford to take the "open book" approach to life, since he's been on the favored side of the US economy - with the means to protect his livelihood - literally since childhood.

better link, better story--
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2008-09-15#folio=063

Both stories about the Gotthard Base tunnel and the boring machines used to dig the tunnel.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/15/080915fa_fact_bilger

Although the picture of the boring machine is probably not what you're looking for.

Why argue about about electric power? You can find North Korean famine graves on
Google Earth.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-korea-uncovered-palaces-labour-camps-and-mass-graves-1711573.html

That's some economy they've got going there. From what I have read, North Koreans
that live in the north have access to the Chinese border. Some with savings cross the border,
buy a large can of cooking oil, and resell small bags of oil for people to buy for special
occasions. They wouldn't be able to do this if there was cooking oil in the local shops.
To make sure that private savings would not become a threat to the regime's power, they
devalued the currency.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/12/100712fa_fact_demick

If you are a subscriber, you can read the whole article. If you are not, you have to drive down to the library or skip the whole thing.

Lots of posturing, no substance. Obama sold out on fighting climate change long ago.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza

Fossil Fuels get their own share of subsidies.

On the subject of Libertarians, I was astounded to find that the Cato
Institute was essentially founded by Charles and David Koch. They just
happen to be in the fossil fuel business and drop tens or hundreds of millions
of dollars into think tanks and institutes to pay for scientists and other
seemingly independent writers to promote lower regulations and corporate taxes.
It just so happens that those issues will personally increase their wealth substantially.
Apparently $20 Billion is not enough.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

They first tried the direct approach. David Koch ran as Vice President on the 1980
Libertarian ticket. They did very poorly in the election. Since then, they have changed
their approach and spent enormous sums quietly influencing public opinion.

When I heard about this last month, it really changed my view of the range of political
opinion in America. Perhaps the slow shift of public opinion to the right has been
funded by people who stand to gain from it. It also explain why public figures on the
right rarely warn about the dangers to our freedom from private interests. You only
hear about that dangerous government.

As many here have pointed out, it's absurd to think that this app would be useful for a terrorist who has the resources to obtain a surface to air missile. If you're going to shoot down a civilian plane, do you really need to know the flight number? Or do you just pick the one you see above you?

A more likely concern is that the device can be used to reveal government misconduct. It was hobbyist plane-spotters who, through their observations of civilian air traffic, exposed the CIA's Torture Jet flights or "extraordinary renditions", wherein they kidnapped people abroad and transferred them to third countries like Egypt, Jordan and Uzbekistan for interrogation using tortures that even the CIA wouldn't use (I guess there still are some).

If the choice is between ceasing their crimes against humanity, or trying to cover them up better: they prefer the latter strategy.

"Wouldn't a bunch of crazy incompetents do a better job than the current batch of well connected thieves?"

The "crazy incompetents" are FUNDED BY the well-connected thieves who have decisively demonstrated their intelligence dwarfs that of their pawns! (Sourcewatch makes for entertaining reading.) The "crazy incompetents" will get affirmation. Their backers will get power, which is different.

It doesn't matter what you, personally, are "not", for you are a soldier for something else. That "something else" has destroyed most campaign finance accountability and dumps millions of dollars into TP candidates. Altruism it ain't! They aren't trying to buy more influence for the public good:

LOVE the background painting!:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

The Koch brothers and the like will get what they want, TP partisans have no choice but to give it to them, and TP adherents will never be interested in changing that relationship because their binary choice is Republican/Teapublican or Democrat. The game was over before it started. Sucks, too bad, so sad.

That's the beauty (and it IS beautiful, a work of political art) of the strategy. The UNWITTING participation of the well-intentioned in a movement that affirms them (and caters to _some_ of their genuine, reasonable concerns!) makes them an effective political weapon. The Christian Dominionists so grossly outnumber the secularists that it makes the secular Libertarians an ornamental joke.

I live in the heart of Tea Party country, and this is dead accurate:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

WHO is running the Tea Party? (I assume you don't mean the World Health Organization.)

David and Charles Koch.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

It's good to see the Greatest Deliberative Body in the world getting back to the important business for America.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer

Very well put. Consider recent New Yorker article: at age 11, Mark Zuckerberg's parents were hiring a private computer tutor for him, and soon thereafter driving him to graduate-level computer classes at Mercy College. How many parents could recognize/ know what to do to develop a prodigy like that? Not many.

Link.

If any of the post-9/11 acts of violence by muslims have been denounced by the thought leaders of Islam, I've never once heard it. Apparantly neither have the terrorists. Perhaps they should denounce louder.

Maybe you just need to listen better because they do it all the time,

Here's just the latest - over 80 imams, scholars, community leaders, journalists, authors, and cartoonists have signed a denunciation of the extremists who scared the "draw muhammad day" artist into hiding. Funny thing about that - her cartoon was hijacked by anti-muslim extremists, not free-speech advocates, just muslim haters looking for any sort of politically correct cover for their raging.

What her cartoon expressed and what the haters made it into were polar opposites. Kinda like the way the original danish cartoon issue was ginned up with 3 totally fake and unpublished images created by al-qaeda associated imams looking to ignite conflict.

"I thought Teabaggers were all for restoring the rights given by the constitution, regardless as to whether what's being said doesn't agree with their worldview?"

That would conflict with being the same Religious Right who Karl Rove so brilliantly exploited in the past. Rove is mostly out of the current game, but it's being played by very capable (and rich) people.

Unwitting and very earnest sock puppets are still sock puppets:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

Good point. Colbert fans don't have a billionaire Obama-hating family to bus them out to the event like Glenn Beck does.

When the Obama campaign opens the books on all the Democratic sponsors, like the one he allowed to shut down Los Angeles a week back, I'm sure you'll eat enough crow concerning what people are sponsoring what party members.

Good point. Colbert fans don't have a billionaire Obama-hating family to bus them out to the event like Glenn Beck does.

Some strange birther-blather there. So how was Washington DC this weekend? Did Glenn smile upon you?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

The Koch brothers are getting their money's worth out of the troll this season.

Long article on the subject:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_TNY_CARDS_000347146?currentPage=all

If you screw up on military hardware, your ability to kill the enemy is reduced, but your ability to kill friendlies (the operators of the hardware, their wingmen/platoonmates/whatever, other technicians on the apron or in the laager) is enhanced. Just like in the "mecical" world.

Both of which are discussed in this story in the context of checklists, a pretty good read. Props also to the very apropos Idiocracy reference; I won't give away the joke as its one of the best ones in the movie:

from the no-wait-this-one-goes-in-your-mouth dept.