Earlier this week, Jonah Lehrer responded yet again to some of the criticism leveled at his recent New Yorker article. Orac, who wasn’t pleased with the article, is still not pleased with Lehrer’s defense of it. This is a case of an expert (Orac) thinking that he is the prime audience for a general interest…Continue Reading…
Marc Morano is touting this accolade that refers to him as a “master of parody.” Eager to live up to his billing, I see Marc is running this ad at the top of Climate Depot. I wonder if his funding is running out.
Every so often I think about why America doesn’t feel like a country at war. Richard Cohen, in his WaPo column today, reminds us why: The all-volunteer military has enabled America to fight two wars while many of its citizens do not know of a single fatality or even of anyone who has fought overseas….Continue Reading…
PZ Myers has a suggestion for the media: When apocalyptic cults come along and announce disaster and doom, ridicule them. Just rip into them, send your most sarcastic, cynical reporters to cover the story, and just shred all the followers as loons and gullible freaks.
This is a fun little riff from Steven Hayward, one of the authors of the Post-partisan paper. I’m not sure who he means by the “climate establishment,” but this is a wickedly legitimate observation of the hardcore climate doom crowd: The climate campaign establishment increasingly looks like its own self-contained and self-referential lunatic asylum, unable…Continue Reading…
People have been teeing off on this
I thought I’d add a few new wrinkles to the blog for 2011. If you look at the top left corner of the home page, you’ll see I added a new page called “Regular features.” It contains headlines that you’ll see recurring in the blog. Feel free to send me your nominations/suggestions for any of…Continue Reading…
Julia Whitty asks: Are prophecies of conservation doom self-fulfilling? Summarizing a recent paper by Australian researchers, Whitty writes: the authors suggest that relentless communication of an impending mass extinction is failing to motivate politicians, policy makers, or the public, and is likely to be counterproductive. Hmm, perhaps this will resonate with the climate doom crowd.
I’m going to nitpick this lament by James Fallows: One of the basic functions of journalism is to say: This is true, and that is false. There are other functions, but establishing bedrock “world is round / sun rises in the east / 1+ 1 = 2” verities is a big one. In today’s political…Continue Reading…