Industry Figure Tom Chappell

(Back to Part One)
Well, this business of genetically-obese mice, that’s not so convincing, is it? I mean, they’re mice, not humans, and specially-fat mice, not normal humans, and they get fat on most any diet, not just on certain diets. Doesn’t seem too compelling.
No, that was irony, just now. I’ve got all kinds [...]

Back when I posted the rule-of-thumb about the relationship between a 10-calorie-a-day change and overweight (+10 calories a day from eating or sloth equals +1 pound a year, -10 calories a day from diet or exercise equals -1 pound a year), my old friend Jeff Lorenzini e-mailed me to say that this was complete nonsense. [...]

Back in 2002, Andrew Card, Bush’s White House Chief of Staff, famously declared, regarding the administration decision to put off pushing the War Against Iraq until after Labor Day, 2002:
“From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
Well, here we go again.
From Juan Cole’s group blog, Informed Comment Global Affairs, a [...]

Don’t ask me, it’s from The New York Times:
CAIRO, June 11 — First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said [...]

Somehow, I never seem to see these stories in the U.S. media. From The Guardian:
This week, the BBC reported that the government’s own scientists advised ministers that the Johns Hopkins study on Iraq civilian mortality was accurate and reliable. This paper was published in the Lancet last October. It estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians [...]

“Although we cannot find that a fundamental right to same-sex marriage exists in this State, the unequal dispensation of rights and benefits to committed same-sex partners can no longer be tolerated under our State Constitution. With this State’s legislative and judicial commitment to eradicating sexual orientation discrimination as our backdrop, we now hold that denying [...]

…well, in surveys of the people of 34 developed countries, we were less retarded than the people of Turkey, and…oh, sorry…no, that’s it, just Turkey.

Public Acceptance of Evolution:

You know, I try to be tolerant of religious beliefs, but delusion at this level is willfully ignorant to the point of being dangerous.
Read the Full Article in [...]

In a recent University of Minnesota Study measuring attitudes about minority groups, Americans ranked atheists as the single least-trusted group of people in the country. In fact, atheists were listed below Muslims, recent immigrants, and homosexuals in terms of “Sharing America’s vision of society.”
Out of anyone their kids could end up with, parents said [...]

Despite overwhelming evidence that the United States’ Presidential Election was stolen for the second time in a row in 2004, the press chose to promote the party line that “there might have been irregularities, but they weren’t enough to shift the result.”
But they were, and they did.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., writes, in a [...]

The Latin/Rap music publisher Urban Box Office is releasing a Spanish version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on Monday, to coincide with the immigrants-rights demonstrations planned for May Day.
You’ve probably heard news reports about it, but none of them played the whole thing. UBO is streaming it from their main web page, so you [...]