Oregon: “Our laws are copyrighted.”
I’m really getting a kick out of Oregon’s insistence that their laws are copyrighted, and to reproduce them you’ve got to pay a licensing fee. (Texas tried to pull the same thing a few years ago.) If Virginia tried that, you’d better believe I’d have a mirror of the state code set up before the [...]
Virginia political events calendar.
Lobbyists David Bailey and Associates provide this fantastic calendar of political events throughout Virginia. I really had no idea that there were so many political events every month.
VPAP relaunches.
The Virginia Public Access Project has a totally new website, rebuilt from the ground up. The best open government resource in Virginia just got a lot better. Their totally new data structure is going to let them do all sorts of new things, while this new design makes the site way friendlier to Joe Citizen.
“Expelled”: No intelligence found.
Everybody agrees: Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution documentary is terrible. Surely these bad reviews are part of the grand conspiracy to stifle cdesign proponentsists.
Talking heads controlled by the Pentagon.
An extensive investigation by the New York Times has uncovered that military analysts appearing on TV are being paid to parrot the Pentagon’s talking points, and have been doing so since the buildup to Bush’s war in Iraq. In the words of one former Fox News military analyst, “It was them saying, ‘We need to [...]
How much does a kilogram weigh?
Nobody knows. The ninety “perfect” platinum/iridium 1kg ingots cast in 1878 all weigh different amounts now, for reasons that may challenge our basic understanding of physics and the natural world.
Brownlee resigning.
John Brownlee, U.S. attorney for the western district of Virginia, is resigning, effective one month from today. Either he’s in trouble for something or he’s running for a higher office. The fact that this doesn’t take effect for a month tells me it’s probably the latter.
I just elected myself chair of the Albemarle Democrats. It was a very small meeting.
More great political news from Augusta County — Virginia Republicans are continuing their slide into feudal irrelevance. Where do I get my “Kurt Michael for Chair” bumper sticker?
Elimination of the Automobile from Towns
I enjoyed Jim Bacon’s article about building small, car-free villages. It’s a radical notion, but there’s a lot to like about it.
Our morality, shared and unshared.
A significant reason that I find traditional partisan political discourse increasingly frustrating is each side’s unwillingness to comprehend that their opponent’s perspective is almost surely an honest one, rooted in firm moral beliefs. Lakoffian disciples believe that this is a problem of language, that they’re talking past each other. But it’s more than that. It’s [...]
No need for those eight glasses of water.
A medical myth that drives me nuts (as I’ve mentioned) is the claim that drinking X glasses of water each day is good for you. NPR’s Morning Edition debunked that claim this morning, demonstrating that there’s no benefit to doing so. It doesn’t help “flush your body of toxins,” improve your skin, help you lose [...]
Global warming’s got nothing to do with the sun.
Yet another study has shown that there’s no correlation between levels of solar activity and global climate change. Global climate change deniers have largely realized that their position is akin to denying gravity, and have largely moved along to asserting that the problem is solar flares. The trouble, of course, is that the facts just [...]
Space Shuttle porn.
Oodles of photos of the shuttle being prepped for launch. I want to see how the liquid fuel tanks are recovered.
“End women’s suffrage now!”
Hampshire College students are demanding their school become actively anti-racist, and have made 17 specific demands of their school. My favorite? Segregated student housing. FAIL.
Ol’ Virginia Soul.
WVTF is running a “Captive Audio” series, and they’ve been featuring audio that’s been unearthed from 60s Virginia record label Arcania. I loved today’s segment about Roanoke soul singer Junious “Bugs” Hughes.
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