Live Free or Die

“Runoff from confined animal feeding areas, where cramped livestock leave cesspools of their manure in tanks that can leak into the water supply, is probably the source for the E. coli and salmonella we find on vegetables and nuts. Those facilities also leave pathogen-soaked waste on the animals themselves, and butchering facilities more interested in productivity than safety introduce them into the meat we buy in grocery stores. More than that, our process of raising animals — feeding them grain, keeping them in tight spaces and giving them tons of antibiotics — probably alters the balance of fats in food so much that it’s contributing to the rise of health problems like heart disease. And all of the ways producers try to mitigate those harms after butchering — like irradiation, ammonia, chlorination, tenderization, and blasting meat with carbon monoxide — might be making meat even more dangerous.”

This sentence has a peculiar horror: “Hickman was instructed to make no record whatsoever of the movements of one vehicle in particular—a white van, dubbed the “paddy wagon,” that Navy guards used to transport heavily manacled prisoners, one at a time, into and out of Camp Delta. The van had no rear windows and contained a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner. Navy drivers, Hickman came to understand, would let the guards know they had a prisoner in the van by saying they were “delivering a pizza.””

“Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.”

“The point of the chart is simple: Some energy efficiency measures have a net cost and require fairly careful analysis to decide if they’re worthwhile. Those things are shown on the right side of the chart. But there are lots of efficiency measures that not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but produce net cost savings at the same time. These are the low-hanging fruit of climate change, otherwise known as “no-brainers.” There are tremendous savings out there for the taking.”

“The Christmas bombing attempt might well turn out to be a serious intelligence failure. But the evidence so far suggests that the only red flags known to U.S. intelligence were (a) a walk-in warning of dubious value from Abdulmutallab’s father, (b) warnings that a Nigerian” was planning an attack, (c) Abdulmutallab’s recent trip to Yemen, and (d) his lack of checked luggage. That’s not very much.”

“What’s worrisome is that such statistical manipulation occurs even when no drug companies are clearly involved; an astounding 40 percent of drug trials funded by the Canadian government selectively omitted key outcome data, perhaps because researchers want their pet projects to be winners.”

“A British newspaper today published a list of “100 reasons why global warming is natural”. Here we take a quick look at the first 50 of their claims - and debunk each one.”

“Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.”