Part two of a series.

Since The Heartland Institute came to the attention of Scholars & Rogues in early 2010, S&R has documented a pattern of double standards and institutional hypocrisy in Heartland’s activities. While the Heartland’s billboard advertisement comparing climate realists to terrorist Ted Kaczynski is perverse on its own, an essay explaining Heartland’s rationale is worse, albeit less obvious. That essay, titled “Our Billboards”, continues Heartland’s long history of hypocrisy. Full story »

At ten minutes before ten o’clock on a morning absent of fog, a worn-out, wood-sided cottage began rolling down from close to Russian Hill’s top. The uncommon sight of a house moving down the street stopped the tourists who’d just stepped off the cable car. They leaned forward, their rectangular digital cameras raised, though they didn’t have a clue why this strange thing was happening. But they were in San Francisco after all, on vacation from cookie cutter suburbs in Ohio, Tennessee, New Jersey and Illinois, where nothing of much interest ever happened. Several women were already thinking that this little old house rolling down the hill on some sort of flatbed truck would make a great story, along with the cable car ride up a street so steep, it made their hearts throb in their throats.

Further down the hill, a crowd of a different sort had gathered. These were working men, mostly dressed in navy blue nylon windbreakers, with their union local stitched in white, over diagonally zippered pockets that carried half-smoked packs of cigarettes. These men knew about the cottage, why it was being moved and where the truck towing it was headed. Full story »

Every once in awhile we will, for a variety of reasons, pick out a word that has positive connotations and proceed to flog that motherfucker to death. Like “engineer.” Engineer is a word with a meaning. From the Oxford:

Pronunciation:/ɛndʒɪˈnɪə/
noun

1. person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or structures. - a person qualified in a branch of engineering, especially as a professional: an aeronautical engineer Full story »

by Evans Mehew

An interesting article dropped last week on Marketwatch.com:

Job Security a Top Concern Among New Grads, SimplyHired.com Reports

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 02, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — SimplyHired.com(R), the world’s largest job search engine, today announced insights from a survey of job seekers from the college graduating class of 2012. Students’ concerns about job security outweighed those for salary and benefits, and new grads were least likely to select a startup as a future employer.

Well … duh. Job security should be a “top concern,” but they’ll have better luck hunting unicorns. Full story »

Here’s what I wrote last night:

On the other side of the fence, those of us who genuinely care about freedom and fairness are more outraged than ever. Outrage is motivating, and by the way, polls show that at least half of Americans support equality for LGBT citizens. It’s about six months until Election Day – how much mobilizing do you think we’re capable of?

Obama may or may not want the issue to go away, but from where I sit the religious right has today handed him a very large stick. Here’s hoping he has the courage and insight to use it on them. And let’s make sure that we, the people, make him embrace this, the most crucial civil rights issue of our generation.

Today, as if on cue, the president stepped up to the plate, big stick in hand. Full story »

Facebook reminded me of an important lesson this morning.

When I was young, I was an idiot. A well-intentioned idiot, to be sure. And in my defense, it must be said that I was probably less of an idiot than most kids my age. But still, I look back on the things I did, the things I believed, the insecurities and the ignorance and the utter five-alarm cluelessness that once ruled my life like a petulant child emperor and I can’t help being embarrassed. I know, kids will be kids, and it’s true that there were moments of rampant joy that I will likely never equal again. Still.

Through the years I have learned. Lots. I’ve seen more of my country and even a bit of the world beyond, although not enough. I’ve met people from just about everywhere and gotten to know them a little. Full story »

Finally, erratic Obama wordsmiths have slogged their way to the ideal slogan: “Forward,” aptly safe and succinct and vacuous. What if it echoes MSNBC’s “Lean Forward,” itself no powerhouse of punch? Less is certainly more these days, and this president notches one more historic threshold: no other slogan since 1844 relies on only one word.

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic explained, slogans vary when focus shifts — from foreign policy to health care, now to the economy. But “nobody seems to know exactly what the message is, or what this campaign is about,” she opined, a main “part of the problem with Obama’s presidency. It’s sort of been all over the place.”

Full story »

Let’s go ahead and call it. It’s 9:47 on the east coast, and with 54% of precincts reporting, North Carolina’s anti-LGBT Amendment One is passing by better than a 60-40 margin. “Pro-marriage” social conservatives are undoubtedly hailing this as a major victory for the “family” and the “sanctity of marriage,” but from where I sit the state’s reactionary forces have done little more than win the battle that loses the war. If I’m Mitt Romney’s advisors (and, despite ample evidence to the contrary, I’m assuming he actually has some), this is one I’d much rather have lost. Full story »

Felix scanned the room for a response. I knew he wanted me to look up. He was perched on the edge of a table, his legs stretched out in front of him, his body twisted discreetly in my direction. I added trees and two stick figures to my doodle of a house. Felix re-phrased his question and threw it out again.

“Can anyone think of a time they felt they were being bullied or harassed ?”

My phone vibrated on the table. It would be Marianne. A woman with glasses answered Felix and was whining about something that had happened when she was a child. Her voice was barely audible and her lips moved so slightly I was surprised she had managed to form words at all. I checked Marianne’s text and sent a quick reply. Felix nodded along obediently as she quivered through her story but his eyes kept flicking in my direction. He was barely listening to her. Full story »

Remember back in 2008, when John McCain was the Republican nominee, and he was campaigning somewhere, Minnesota actually, and a McCain supporter claimed that “Obama is an Arab,” and McCain, in public, took the microphone from her and replied, “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues?”

McCain could have gone further—actually, in this instance, he did—but still, this is what you would expect pretty much anyone to do—or at least we would have, even in 2008. Of course, McCain was booed for this by the crowd. Full story »

I’m a North Carolina native. Full story »

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Director of National Intelligence released a tiny sample of the documents that U.S. Special Operations Forces captured at Osama Bin Laden’s compound to the Combating Terrorist Center (CTC) at West Point  for it to analyze. Still reading Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?, we’ll single out one Focal Point™.

In contrast to Bin Ladin’s public statements that focused on the injustice of those he believed to be the “enemies” (a`da’) of Muslims, namely corrupt “apostate” Muslim rulers and their Western “overseers,” the focus of his private letters is Muslims’ suffering at the hands of his jihadi “brothers” (ikhwa). He was at pains advising [the latter] to abort domestic attacks that cause Muslim civilian casualties and instead focus on the United States, “our desired goal.” Full story »

Part one of a series

On Thursday, May 3, The Heartland Institute ran a digital billboard advertisement featuring Unabomber Ted Kaczynski that implied climate realists who accept the reality of human-driven global warming are terrorists. According to their explanation of the billboards, Heartland planned on comparing climate realists to dictator Fidel Castro, lunatic Charles Manson, and possibly Osama bin Laden. But by late Friday, a backlash from Heartland’s critics, allies, and onetime supporters had forced The Heartland Institute to remove the advertisement from the billboard. Full story »

I thought we’d start with something a little friendlier—Plants vs. Zombies, maybe—but this is my son’s chance to take me to school, and he’s taking it seriously. He’s going Full Metal Jackson: We’ve rented Call of Duty: Black Ops, one of the most popular video games of the last year, which has a zombie mode, and he’s giving me the tour. “I love zombie games,” he tells me, mustering all the authority a twelve-year-old can—which, in the world of video games, is a helluva lot more than me.

I hear Call of Duty can get splattery, so even though it seems counterintuitive for a zombie experience, I ask him to disengage the graphic content.

“Good,” he says. “I don’t like that stuff.” Full story »

by Greg Thow

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This semester probably was my most satisfying in the 10 years I’ve been teaching, but even so, I faltered down the stretch.

During a class last week, students and I discussed George Orwell and his essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell wrote in 1946:

“[a] mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” Full story »

On Friday, the Chicago Tribune posted an AP article by Brock Vergakis about a recent federal court decision as to whether “liking” a page on Facebook constitutes free speech. In brief, employees “liked” a competitor’s Facebook page. The employer (a sheriff running for re-election) fired them. Fired employees sue. Plaintiff’s claim, paraphrased? “Our first amendment rights have been violated.”

Now, as anyone who reads even a little of my occasional screed knows, I’m a huge fan of free speech. I love that I live in a nation where I am free to say or express whatever comes to mind within certain reasonable bounds. Full story »

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