The Flag
Independence day is a great time to (re)start a blog on independent thinking, and what better subject than the flag. If you see an American flag outside a house, odds are the owners are Republican. In Britain, the ultra-right National …
Author: Phil Mayes
Does Christian Morality Benefit Society?
The average Christian in the US believes that society’s social problems are due to poor application of Christian morals. A paper published by the Journal of Religion and Society finds just the opposite; it measures homicide, youth suicide, STDs, teen …
Selective reporting
Intersting Salon article on the absence of media reports of public opinion polls on Terry Schiavo: When public opinion doesn’t matter “in the past week, an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — of Americans polled by ABC News and the …
Microsoft makes good patent recommendations
I’m not usually a fan of Microsoft, but they presented some very sensible proposals in a lecture to the American Enterprise Institute.
When Socialism works
In Slate, The Triumph of Socialized Medicine comments on a Washington Monthly report that VA hospitals provided better quality of care than fee-for-service Medicare. Such news must be anathema to free-market ideologues, but the reasons given make sense; for instance, …
How true is the news?
Media everywhere ran the story about Harvard rejecting 119 aplicants because they tried to learn their admissions status early by “hacking into a Web site“, but the initial stories gave no details of the “hack”. Now we learn that it …
Drug costs and medical research
The pharmaceutical industry claims that the high cost of drugs in America is necessary to support the costs of research, but a more likely cause of those costs is in the NYTimes article which says “[t]he drug industry has long …
The Gannon affair
MediaBistro is not finding it as easy to get a press pass as James Guckert, the amateur correspondent who covered White House press conferences for several years.
World falls to pieces; more news at 11
The latest report on global warming says that “[w]e were stunned by the similarities between the observations that have been recorded at sea worldwide and the models that climatologists made,” said Tim Barnett of the University of California’s Scripps Institution …
Liberal bias in the press again?
Slate says “Over the course of four hours of continuous inauguration coverage from 8 a.m. to noon (collectively, that’s 24 hours among the six outlets), the topic of the president’s (historically poor) approval ratings came up exactly four times, according …