Month: February 2014

Whole Foods pseudoscience

Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It’s all pseudoscience—so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?

If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired 100s of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.

But you don’t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.

an inconvenient truth for people who watched an inconvenient truth in theaters.

Theranos

while everyone is complaining about obamacare, theranos is improving health/$ dramatically. their blood tests cost dramatically less, are much faster and require much less blood. they will save $200b from medicare/medicaid in the next 10 years. coming to your walgreens soon.

Stupor mundi

A man of extraordinary culture, energy, and ability – called by a contemporary chronicler stupor mundi (the wonder of the world), by Nietzsche the first European, and by many historians the first modern ruler. Speaking 6 languages (Latin, Sicilian, German, French, Greek and Arabic), Frederick was an avid patron of science and the arts. Frederick’s religious skepticism was unusual for the era in which he lived, and to his contemporaries was highly shocking and scandalous. To the dislike of some of his contemporaries, Frederick did not believe things that could not be explained by reason

Taking away mall cop toys

What do you get when you equip mall cops with military hardware? A banana republic.

The proposed legislation is now in committee. If it’s passed and signed into law by the governor, state and municipal agencies in New Hampshire will be barred from buying or even accepting free offers of “military style equipment” for police use, except with the approval of the assembled citizenry at a public town meeting.

i’m sooo proud. AMERICA!!!!!

Paramilitary Police Are Changing Law Enforcement in the Suburbs. SWAT teams, riot gear, armored vehicles, and other super-sized police equipment and tactics are spreading into smaller spaces and conflicts.

the difference between rank amateurs with a rambo complex, playing with toys several sizes too large for them, and professionals trained in deescalation is enormous.

The Missouri Highway Patrol relieved the Ferguson PD today. Captain Johnson, a Ferguson native, is leading the new security. He started out by removing the tactical units, setting up a media staging center, vowed not to blockade the streets, ordered police working crowd control to take off their gas masks — and marched along with the protesters himself.

(That’s not him in this picture, by the way — Captain Johnson is black. Not sure who the cop in this picture is, but apparently quite a few of the members of the Missouri Highway Patrol marched alongside the protesters today. ETA: Here’s a picture of Captain Johnson.

There’s a bunch more in the story, and I recommend you read it, because it’s such an antidote to the news stories of the past few days. It appears that there’s one cop, at least, who still remembers what the job is all about.

Captain Ronald S. Johnson: Doing it right.