Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2662

"When Cash Was Waved In Front Of Your Face, You Quit"

An Alaskan confronts celebrity muck-raker, Sarah Palin - in Homer, Alaska:

Sarah Palin - Homer - Homer Alaska - Web Design and Development - Hosting

Quote For The Day

"We believe that a conservative value is stable relationships and
stable community and loving individuals coming together and forming a
basis that is a building block of our society, which includes
marriage," - Ted Olson, on Fox News Sunday.

Fox News Sunday - Conservatism - Ted Olson - Community - Relationships

Are We Watching Less TV?

Carr checks the numbers:

To give an honest accounting of the effects of the Net on mediaconsumption, you need to add the amount of time that people spendconsuming web media to the amount of time they already spend consumingTV and other traditional media. Once you do that, it becomes clear thatthe arrival of the web has not reduced the time people spend consumingmedia but increased it substantially. As consumption-oriented Internetdevices, like the iPad, grow more popular, we will likely see...

Defending The Fundamental Right To Marriage

So great to finally see a real conservative on the Fox News Channel:

I've been making these points for many many years. I cannot express how affirming it is to hear such a distinguished conservative jurist defend the civil rights of gay citizens - especially such a fundamental, core right as civil marriage.
















Conservatism - Fox News Channel - Civil and political rights - Politics - Gay

No Church-State Divide

Theocrat Sharron Angle shows her true colors - and the religious core of what was once a political party. Her ferocious hostility to any civil rights for gay people extends even this far:

The questionnaire then asked:

In reference to question 35A, Intel Corporation supports
"equal rights for gays" and offers benefits to "partners" of homosexual
employees. Would you refuse funds from this corporate PAC?

Angle again checked the Yes box.

Sharron Angle - Intel Corporation - Civil a...

Not The Way To Fix Congo

Dan Fahey is skeptical that American conflict material legislation will do any good.

United States - Dan Fahey - Social Sciences - Wayne Rooney - Frank Lampard

Paul Ryan, Fraud? Ctd

Nate Silver piles on (reasonably):

Ryan's budget consists of a series of proposals that would cut spending on entitlement programs in a very serious way, coupled with an equally serious restructuring of the tax code that would have the effect of lowering taxes on most individuals and businesses. On the spending side, one can debate whether or not the cuts that Ryan proposes would be (a) wise and (b) politically tenable, but they would certainly reduce the debt in a very substantial way...

A History Of Tipping

Greg Beato supplies one:

These days, the idea of not tipping is almost as impossible tocomprehend as the idea of paying for news. Who does that? Crazy people?Criminals? ... Things were much different a century ago. Between 1909 and 1926, six states passed laws that made tipping illegal. Restaurants posted"Tipping is not American!" signs in their dining rooms. In a republicwhere the waiter was the political and moral equal of the millionairefactory owner, each endowed with the same essential...

The Brain Eating Vaccine That Wasn't

Jonah Lehrer rejected the bizarre, politicized distortions of his most recent Wired piece on the search for a stress vaccine. Then he explained the cognitive dissonance of said distortions and how the Internet feeds them:

While neuroscientists have begun to decipher the anatomy of this mental flaw - you can blame your anterior cingulate cortex - I sometimes worry that the internet is making things worse. Although we're all vulnerable to cognitive dissonance (and the paranoid style has always...

The Cognitive Surplus, Ctd

The online game "Foldit,"
released in 2008, "enlists the help of online puzzle-solvers to help
crack one of science's most intractable mysteries - how proteins fold into
their complex three-dimensional forms."

Some new data on the effort:

When the researchers analyzed the strategies employed by a group of 57,000 Foldit players,
they found that humans were better at some aspects of pattern
recognition and protein structure prediction than current computational
software.

As Bubble might s...