Well, the Fox story was truly awfully written, beginning with this gem,

Based on the statistics in the article itself, even if two thirds of species are redundant, we will still have a few million left. And then there was this sentence,

Despite the...WHAT? Now, science reporting is normally awful from any "mainstream" journalist, and even "science reporters," but botany is a lot harder to mess up than particle physics, and the Fox article was full of ridiculous misleading innuendo like the quotes I included. I wouldn't normally expect any better from the HuffPo (or the NYT, or Reuters, etc.), but in this case their article is simply more correct (though still not terribly informative), since it doesn't contain the extraneous uninformed bloviation--starting with the title.

Hannibal Lecter only pours Chianti in the movie for the benefit of the ignorant viewing public; in the original book, he sips an Amarone.

Apparently the speech focused on one of those situations where "tradeoffs are inevitable." If Hassan and Shahzad were "inspired" by radical internet posts, I cannot conceive of any further investigative tradeoff that could have been made while still maintaining constitutionality. Even if they had made radical internet posts, they would have to be inciting imminent lawless action or alluding to their participation in criminal plots/conspiracies/etc. to justify a search warrant. The FBI is already on the lookout for people who post such things on public online forums.

I would hate to think that anyone liberal on civil rights would find these statements comforting...

Yes, I'm sure "liberals" will be relieved that Stewart Baker, former Assistant Secretary (nice research, AP) of the DHS for George W. Bush, approves of the Obama Administration's "security" policies. When Republican hawks talk about "mature" security policies, they mean the ones that Dick Cheney dreams about at night, the ones that Bush was trying to step back from in his final two years; they mean Obama's current policies.

In the federal courts, if both the prosecution and defense agree, any trial, even a felony trial, can be a bench trial. It is apparently a fairly controversial defense tactic, but I was reading an article the other day that contended that the conviction rates in bench trials had gone down during the period with federal mandatory minimum sentencing drug laws.

The hypothesis is that while the jury is not allowed to know the weight of the sentence before convicting (and will thus convict fairly easily), the judge is much more careful about what constitutes a "reasonable doubt" in light of the certainty that he will be compelled to send some guy to prison for ten years for having a few pot plants.

First of all, I think that people do need a video to realize that war, and in particular the Iraq war, is tragic and disturbing. It's one thing to hear that lots of civilians are mistakenly killed in the course of our military occupations, it's another thing altogether to see some of the exact circumstances in which that occurs.

Do you recall the story that broke soon after the video, regarding a house that special forces stormed on bad intel, in which various people were killed, including two women that the soldiers apparently arranged deceptively so that they could claim in their report that they were previously killed in an "honor killing?" The incident that the commanding general of SOCOM had to fork over a wad of cash and apologize for? If there had been a video of that, with black-clad soldiers going "Oh shit! I think these people were just civilians!" and then digging out their rounds from the bodies, tying them up, artfully arranging them, and discussing their cover story, how do you think that would have gone over? Instead of everyone forgetting in a few weeks, we'd still be watching the congressional hearings on CSPAN.

Regarding the guncam video, do you find the destruction of the van, and the attack on the building with missiles while apparent bystanders walk by to be equally unavoidable as the deaths of the journalists? I am a little surprised that the video didn't at least make you wonder at all about the wisdom of the RoE they were operating under. You don't have to demonize the pilots and gunners personally to find fault in the incident. The military's reports found that the crewmen did make the right call in every case, and summarily declared all 20+ men killed in the various attacks "AIF" (Anti-Iraq Forces), so you can't write everything off as a tragic mistake; it was tragic official policy.

Even if all of these things are rendered "unavoidable" by our political need for near-airtight force protection (like the dozens of unarmed civilians killed at Afghan road checkpoints), many people are not aware that they occur. If everyone knew exactly what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they might not support the military missions there (or future hypothetical invasions) so much; war reporting certainly had that effect during Vietnam. If no one ever gets outraged, what motivation is there to avoid these entanglements, or even to try harder to avoid civilian casualties in the conflicts we are already fighting?

I can only imagine that all the random milita members on the streets with rifles and RPGs that day didn't realize that the helicopters ~1km away were or could be targeting them. I agree that the Reuters stringers took a foolish risk, and that the initial incident is not indefensible. Maybe "AIF" ambushes are always that ridiculously nonchalant. Everything that happens afterward, though...

Also keep in mind that the only reason anyone (any American) ever cared about this incident was that it was subsequently discovered that two of the "AIF" were Reuters stringers. Imagine how many incidents there must have been where people who didn't work for a major Western news organization were creatively classified as insurgents. I'm sure that some of them weren't pointing giant telephoto lenses at the Bradley convoy down the block, and would be harder to blame for their own demises.

Wikileaks hasn't posted anything except the Apache guncam video since March. Who knows what Assange is holding on to? The website wasn't even back up until a few weeks ago, supposedly because they needed $750,000 to pay their bandwidth bill and other expenses. Does most of that money go to support Assange's pointless paranoid nomadic lifestyle? I would think that frequently crossing national borders would make him more of a target. If I had something to leak, I wouldn't send it to Wikileaks, because I would have no confidence that it would ever be "leaked," just like these alleged embassy cables. They also have an awful, inaccessible web design.

That said, if Wikileaks does have the cables and was still "evaluating" them or something when the Manning story broke, lying about it now protects Manning from further (260,000 more) criminal charges. He can argue that the video should have been FOIAed in the first place, was shown to Reuters journalists, etc., but those arguments wouldn't get him very far with the diplomatic cables. Even if he can't dodge the charge for the video, there was only one video. Perhaps Wikileaks is merely trying to protect their source, and avoid foreclosing his legal defense that "I was just bragging and exaggerating to compensate for my deep sense of personal inadequacy; there were no cables."

You link to a shrill neo-prohibitionist website, which bases their entire claim of negative physiological effects on one page (25) in report from the Surgeon General, which in turn cites only a single human study which used fMRI on 34 adolescents (age 15-19) who had engaged in binge drinking.

As you can see, the single human study can be used to conclude...basically nothing. There may be a permanent link between alcohol use and brain structure...but that link might very well be causal in the other direction. This study won't give you much reason to lean in either direction. They didn't even find testable behavioral effects to go along with their fMRI statistical voodoo; it isn't really convincing evidence that a link exists in either direction. In the previous section of the report ("Personality Traits, Mental Disorders, and Adolescent Alcohol Use"), however, a much greater profusion of studies suggest that alcohol abuse is caused by mental disorders.

In that vein, other studies have shown that people with unmedicated ADHD are more likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol and other drugs, conversely, have not been shown to give people ADD.

If you're a neo-prohibitionist, though, you don't really give a shit about the science. You already have the solution, and just need to find a problem.

The formulas used to calculate the octane rating on the pump differ between continental Europe, where RON generally prevails, and the U.S./Canada, which use the (R+M)/2 method.

Unless you have one of the discontinued 4-wheel steering Yukons XLs! But seriously, the point of having a giant land-yacht isn't that you can offroad with it, but that it has vast amounts of room. You can only cram so much luggage or so many passengers into a Civic.

If you read TFA, you will see that

They just have a problem with other companies selling similar products that compete with their own line of sex toys, allegedly infringing their patent.

The real news here is that the daughter (in the picture) is actually 35. Who would have guessed?

I own a Serious Bicycle, and it would be a faux pas to put a kickstand on it, much less regenerative braking! You might as well chuck your all-carbon frame and make it out of steel tubing.

I think you would have more luck appealing to self-hating middle aged people with plenty of money who only use their cycles twice a year.

I had to slog my way through all five pages of the dull anecdote-filled profile of some random internet entrepreneur just so I could deride it on Slashdot. There are a handful of studies cited in TFA, all of which have been reported on before, and none of which actually establish the premise of the article. My primary conclusion was that the boring subject of the article (and possibly the rest of his family) would benefit a lot more from pharmaceutical amphetamines than from junking his Blackberry.

My approval of Congress is as nonexistent as the next guy's, but I still think calling Representatives and Senators "Congresscritters" makes you sound like a parody of a right-wing milita member.

It is true that the content of the after-action reports was seriously under-reported, but that is all. There is no evidence that Manning (or Wikileaks!) edited the video. Wikileaks released a short version on youtube, but the 39-minute version was available the whole time. That video may very well be the only one Manning had access to, since the included sections of the video were the only actions that were under review (by the military). Considering that Manning released ~250,000 diplomatic cables (only a tiny fraction of which could have been incriminating), I find it hard to believe he would go to the trouble to edit out a part of the video that showed U.S. helicopters gunning down even more Iraqis, child-less or not.

A higher body count would have only added to the effect of the video--that the helicopters were just orbiting that area of the city, looking for groups of "military-aged males," at least some of whom are armed, to kill without warning. You can (I guess) argue in favor of that as a military tactic, but it wouldn't have made the pilots any more sympathetic to a civilian audience.

I believe it (it's in the reports that were released along with the video), although that is apparently what happened in the "missing" 30 minutes, not beforehand. I don't think that refraining from shooting obvious children is enough to make the policy of executing all the military-aged males in the area justified, however.

If you watch the video, the end actually seems even more dubious than the incident at the beginning. At the end they fire three missiles into a building as what appear to be random civilians walk by (the target building is on a street with moderate traffic). After the first one is hit, a few more rush in to the rubble, only to be (presumably) hit by subsequent missiles.

I doubt that releasing the video of the Apaches executing yet another random group of Iraqi men standing around their neighborhood with AKs would really "soften the blow." It would just reignite this story, which is already basically dead in the minds of the public and the media.