If a Jewish nonfiction writer sticks around long enough, he or she will be tempted to use the shop-worn “define chutzpah” rhetorical device, which consists of defining chutzpah and then applying the term to the acts or statements of someone or some group, or in simply saying that someone embodies the definition of chutzpah. Alas, […]
The news that Palinistas, followers of Sarah Palin, tried to rewrite the history of the American Revolutionary War on Wikipedia shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been following the news media for the past few years. Right-wingers, with a helpful assist from the mainstream news media, have had a lot of success revising our reading of […]
While still small, the movement to ban circumcision seems to be growing in California. A few weeks ago I read that a petition drive had yielded enough signatures to get banning circumcision of newborn males on the ballot in San Francisco. Now a similar petition effort is underway in Santa Monica. There is little likelihood […]
In his regular column on the Op/Ed page of last Saturday’s New York Times, Charles Blow presented survey results from the Pew Research Center in chart form without explanation. His article, titled “False Choices,” is loosely related to the chart and proposes that “we need both sensible tax increases and sensible spending cuts to address […]
I was having lunch the other day with about six other people. We included professionals in law, accounting, public relations, bookkeeping, business insurance, healthcare insurance and real estate. We all shared several characteristics. We all are white and all have small businesses that put us in the shrinking echelons of the upper middle class. And […]
Read More… from True believers don’t even realize when what they believe hurts themselves.
This past Memorial Day weekend brought news from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that it is taking the wrecking ball to the food pyramid, which USDA, nutritionists and countless school curricula have used to try to educate children (and adults!) about nutrition since 1992. As the article in the New York Times details, nutrition […]
Read More… from Food companies can now stop their “pyramid-scheming” and start to square the circle
Yesterday the Associated Press released the latest version of its surveys with GfK and it shows that two-thirds of the public say that Social Security or Medicare benefits can’t be cut because they are vital to their financial security as they age. Hey, let’s face it. One reason that Americans can spend so much in […]
Yesterday morning I entered the following search terms into Google News: “budget cuts school district.” I didn’t stop perusing the articles until I got through 40 of the more than 7,000 listed, and the articles were still dated May 21 and May 20 (the two prior days). I skipped ahead to the 120th article and […]
Read More… from Three ideas for public school districts facing massive budget cuts.
From time to time, I analyze pop science and pop psychology articles that try to infer in current mores the echoes of primordial genes trying to propagate themselves through the selfish behavior of the animals containing them. On any number of occasions I have demonstrated that these little Darwinian myths or fairy tales are pure […]
Torture supporters keep repeating the big lie that torture helped to find Osama bin Laden not just to re-spark the debate on the value of torture, but also to twist its terms in a way that assumes that it’s legal. Which it isn’t. The latest torturista to make the false claim that torture led to […]