63% of Republicans still think that Iraq had WMD in 2003 and that the president is not an American.
This should be a wake-up call to the grown-ups in the Republican Party. Fetishizing ignorance and demonizing education has led to two-thirds of the party’s members being morons. I can understand why some people are confused about global climate change and evolution—there’s been a well organized attempt to spread misinformation on these scientifici topics. But [...]
Muller concludes that humans are behind climate change.
Physicist Richard A. Muller was in the news last year after his Koch-funded study of global climate change concluded that it’s real, surely to the Koch brothers’ dismay. Now he’s penned an on-ed for the New York Times in which he says that his ongoing research has led him to the same conclusion as 99.9% [...]
New Virginia Decoded features.
Since March, my 9–5 job has been building The State Decoded, software based on my Virginia Decoded site. Although it would be fun to have spent all of this time adding new features to Virginia Decoded, most of it has been spent adapting the software to support a wide variety of legal structures. I released [...]
43% of Philadelphia voters lack photo ID.
Approximately 437,237 Philadelphia residents will not be able to vote under Pennsylvania’s controversial new voter ID law. Statewide, it’s 1.6M people, or one in five voters. This law was pushed strongly by Republicans and—damnest thing—it’s mostly Democrats who are disenfranchised by this law. It’s no wonder that the U.S. Attorney General is investigating whether the [...]
There is no voter fraud in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is defending their voter ID law in court, and they’ve just dealt themselves a serious blow. In a filing, they’ve admitted that there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states,” as [...]
Unsurprisingly, Medicaid helps people.
Some conservatives have long argued that Medicaid doesn’t actually help people—that private charity is sufficient and, anyway, most doctors don’t accept Medicaid. Many others, of course, argue that privacy charity is far from sufficient, and people fare much worse without health insurance. Oregon accidentally provided the first test of this with a control group, for [...]
“Yeah, no.”
Language Log had an interesting discussion about the language construct “yeah, no.” It exists in a bunch of language, and it seems to serve at least a couple of purposes in conversation. →
Racial resentment correlates with support for voter ID laws.
Let’s put on our best surprised faces. There is one interesting bit. Republicans support voter ID laws no matter how much they dislike non-whites. The biggest variable comes among Democrats, among whom it’s the racists who support voter IDs. →
The NRA just keeps going too far.
I have no doubt that I would have been a member of the NRA as it existed a few decades ago. Every time I think about joining, they do something absolutely insane. It seems they tried to do just such a thing in Tennessee, and it’s backfiring on them. The NRA tried to get a [...]
Sunlight Foundation “OpenGov Champion.”
The Sunlight Foundation has put together a very kind mini-documentary about my open government technology work. (I can’t see that any of its contents will come as news to anybody who reads this blog.) It was fun to participate in the making of it, and it was a joy to watch filmmakers Tiina Knuutila and [...]
Wikipedia: South Asian numbering system
In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, they don’t group numbers by three decimals like we do, but by two. That is, while we have thousand (1,000), million (1,000,000), billion (1,000,000,000), etc., they have lakh (1,00,000), crore (1,00,00,000), etc. Sometimes there are two decimals between each comma, sometimes three. Somebody with 10 million rupees would have [...]
UVA hijinx.
My blogging for the past three weeks has all been over on cvillenews.com, entirely on the topic of the University of Virginia’s unsuccessful ouster of President Teresa Sullivan. That imbroglio has largely wrapped up, but you might be interested in reading through my coverage. (If you read just one thing there, make it my translation [...]
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Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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