Did you know that Fox News is a liberal news organization? Not because it’s part of the so-called liberal media, but rather because Fox is based in the liberal bastion of New York City. Following similar “logic”, DJ Drummond has labeled every single polling organization in the U.S. as liberal because they’re headquartered in liberal cities or states. Full story »

Scholars & Rogues wants to know: what do you think is the greatest technology in human history?

Before you answer, what do we mean by “technology”? I think we all have sort of an operational idea in our heads of what we mean by the term, but if you’re like most people, odds are pretty good that you’ve never sat down and tried to articulate a real definition. A couple pretty smart thinkers had some thoughts on the subject that you might find helpful. Or challenging. Let’s see.

First, Arnold Pacey, a British scholar whose Culture of Technology helps us understand that technology is a lot more than just the machine itself, which Pacey calls the “restricted” sense of the term. Full story »

• 70′s “cooling consensus” never existed
• Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf to be studied
• Efficiency created 1.46 million California jobs
• Memo: CO₂, wildlife conflicts of interest OK
• Rolls-Royce developing efficient new propeller engines for commercial aircraft
• Reduce packaging to save money, CO₂

Most scientists and activists who understand the realities of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have heard it repeatedly – climate scientists are wrong about global heating this time because they were wrong about global cooling in the 1970′s. Ignore for a moment the obvious logical fallacy here and focus instead on the claim that there was supposedly a scientific consensus in the 1970s that, due to global temperature data, the Earth was about to go into a new ice age. This claim by deniers is clearly verifiable, and that’s exactly what a team of researchers led by National Climatic Data Center climatologist Thomas C. Peterson has done. The team’s results revealed something surprising, given how widespread the “cooling consensus” claim is among climate skeptics and deniers: only 10% of related journal papers published between 1965 and 1979 supported a global cooling hypothesis – and 62% of papers supported the idea of global heating. Full story »

by Michael Tracey

In the spring of 2006 one email caught my attention. Daxis had been demanding that I provide him with contact details for Patsy, an email address and a phone number. I had of cohushurse refused to do this and, in a highly frustrated tone he wrote that he would be sitting in their living room in Charlevoix before he got the information.

How to interpret this? He claimed that he was out of the country, that there was an arrest warrant for him (which we now also know to be true) and that he could never return. What if all that was nonsense, what if he did intend to go to find Patsy, what might he do? Hindsight, to borrow a cliché, is an exact science but then it was less than clear as to what he was implying or threatening. I chose to err on the side of caution and interpret the message as a threat, that he would indeed turn up in Charlevoix. Full story »