Declaration

Glenn Beck called Charles Darwin "the father of modern-day racism" on Thursday's edition of his Fox News program.

By some accounts, the heated opposition to the so-called Ground Zero mosque has been drummed up by a telegenic blogger with a strong New York accent and even stronger opinions.

Corporate profits are soaring. Companies are sitting on billions of dollars of cash. And still, they've yet to amp up hiring or make major investments -- the missing ingredients for a strong economic recovery.

A 14-year-old Dutch sailor departed in secrecy from Gibraltar Saturday on her quest to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world – avoiding the media because, her manager said, she didn't want the attention.

As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.

The American invitation on Friday to the Israelis and Palestinians to start direct peace talks in two weeks in Washington was immediately accepted by both governments. But just below the surface there was an almost audible shrug. There is little confidence — close to none — on either side that the Obama administration’s goal of reaching a comprehensive deal in one year can be met.

The Army said Friday it was investigating a claim that dozens of soldiers who refused to attend a Christian band's concert at a Virginia military base were banished to their barracks and told to clean them up.

More than 18 months after President Barack Obama announced a $75 billion program to help three to four million homeowners avoid foreclosure, the administration's primary foreclosure-prevention initiative is slowing to a crawl.

Swedish authorities revoked a short-lived arrest warrant for the founder of WikiLeaks on Saturday, saying a rape accusation against him lacked substance.

A flower shop in Florida that saw a drop-off in weddings this summer is probably out of luck. So is a restaurant in Idaho that had to switch seafood suppliers. A hardware store on the Mississippi coast may be left out, too.

According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: 'Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.' According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was 'an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.

With the recent launch of Facebook Places, the rise to prominence of Foursquare and GoWalla, and articles in the New York Times about the increasing popularity of 'checking in' to locations using GPS-enabled mobile phones, a number of businesses are wondering how to reward frequent patrons. But exactly how susceptible are these 'location based services' to being abused? A researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago shows how easily Foursquare can be gamed in 9 Perl statements, and invites readers to submit more succinct versions of the code to game the system.

A warrant has been issued in Stockholm, Sweden for WikiLeaks founder and spokesman Julian Assange. The investigation apparently involves "one report of rape and one report of harassment." The story was broken by Swedish tabloid Expressen (original in Swedish), and later picked up by more reputable sources like CNN and the BBC, who say the warrant has been confirmed by Swedish authorities. The WikiLeaks Twitter feed has commented three times about the charges so far, first saying they were warned of 'dirty tricks,' then that they hadn't been contacted by Swedish police, and then a statement from Assange saying the charges are without basis.

How the Fox host used raw corporate power to crush a critic

Apple yesterday applied for a patent to allow remotely disabling electronic devices when 'unauthorized usage' is detected. The patent application covers using the camera to take pictures of the unauthorized user and using GPS to determine location, and it involves ascertaining whether the phone has been hacked or jailbroken, using those as criteria for detecting 'suspicious behavior.' The patent would allow the carrier or any other 'authorized' party to disable or restrict the functionality of the device. Is this Apple's latest tool to thwart jailbreaking?

A book editor at Houghton Mifflin argues ebook advertising is 'coming soon to a book near you.' (Paywalled unless you go through Google.) Amazon has filed a patent for advertisements on the Kindle, and the book editor joins with a business professor in the Wall Street Journal to make the case for advertisements in ebooks. Book sales haven't increased over the last decade, and profits are being squeezed even lower by ebooks. According to another industry analyst, Amazon is being pressured to make ebook sales more profitable for publishers, partly because Apple offers them more lucrative terms in Apple's iBookstore. One technology blog notes that Amazon's preference seems to be keeping book prices low, and wonders whether consumers would accept advertising if it meant that new ebooks were then free. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren has confused the issue even more by publishing a 'shoppable' children's storybook online, prompting a fierce reaction from one blog: 'I hope it's the last. Books are one of the last refuges in our world from the constant cry by advertisers to spend money and fill our lives with unnecessary things.'

Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle once partook in a campaign against a local high school's use of black football jerseys, arguing that the dark color was ungodly and wicked, Bill Roberts of Nevada's Pahrump Valley Times recently reported.

Proposition 23, the so-called "California Jobs Initiative" threatening to suspend some of California's unprecedented clean air and renewable energy legislation, is raking in millions of dollars from Texas oil companies and special interest groups in the Midwest that stand to profit from rolled-back environmental regulation.

In March 2003, federal officials were being criticized for disrespecting the rights of Arab-Americans in their efforts to crack down on domestic security threats in the post-9/11 environment. Hoping to calm the growing tempers, FBI officials in New York hosted a forum on ways to deal with Muslim and Arab-Americans without exacerbating social tensions. The bureau wanted to provide agents with "a clear picture," said Kevin Donovan, director of the FBI's New York office.

This disturbing graphic, by Latoya Eguwuekwe, charts the rise of unemployment across the U.S. from 2007 on. (Hat tip to Daily Kos, which posted it earlier this month.)

Focus on the Family, George Soros's Open Society Policy Center, the American Conservative Union and the American Civil Liberties Union are all furious with Attorney General Eric Holder -- and amazingly enough, it's about the same thing.

Christopher Hitchens is known as much for his hard-drinking, chain-smoking lifestyle as he is for his controversial writings. But when asked by Charlie Rose if he regrets having burned the candle so thoroughly at both ends -- given that he has now been diagnosed with esophageal cancer -- Hitchens was adamant: absolutely not.

During his visit to the the Swedish capital Stockholm, Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange has struck a deal with the local Pirate Party. The party, which participates in the national elections next month, will host several new Wikileaks servers to protect freedom of press and help the whistleblower site to carry out its operation.

Ars Technica has an article detailing the difference between ISP advertised 'up to x Mbps' speeds and the actual speeds, in addition to some possible solutions. They find that on average, the advertised speeds were 'up to 6.7 Mbps' while the real median was 3 Mbps and the mean was 4 Mbps. This implies that ISPs were falsely advertising by at least 50%.

Federal prosecutors have decided not to file charges against a Philadelphia school district or its employees over the use of software to remotely monitor students. From the article: 'US Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.

In a weekend, programmer Austin Heap transformed from an apathetic MMO player to a world class regime-slayer. When word for Iran's rigged election broke over Twitter, Heap decided to dedicate himself to building a better proxy system for people behind Iran's firewall. Heap's creation, Haystack, conceals someone's real online destinations inside a stream of innocuous traffic. You may be browsing an opposition Web site, but to the censors it will appear you are visiting, say, weather.com. Heap tends to hide users in content that is popular in Tehran, sometimes the regime's own government mouthpieces

The era of the $35 cup of coffee has come to an end, for most. Unless a consumer chooses to opt-in for overdraft protection, their ATM and debit purchases will be declined if an account has insufficient funds. Prior to Sunday, banks could automatically enroll their customers in the service, which covers the point-of-sale transaction but can result in steep penalties. Shoppers at the counter might turn red with embarrassment when their purchase is refused, but the alternative is for their account to go further into the red -- with fees up to $35 for each swipe of the card.

Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul took harsh digs at President Barack Obama while mining for votes in Kentucky coalfields Saturday, saying busybody regulators backed by the president are stifling the coal sector.

Steven Schwarzman, the billionaire founder of private equity giant, the Blackstone Group, has long bemoaned bank bashing. But, on the subject of taxes, he's apparently not afraid to cast aspersions on the Obama administration.

BEIJING — China has eclipsed Japan as the world's second-biggest economy after three decades of blistering growth that put overtaking the U.S. in reach within 10 years.

The U.S. economy and stock market ended one of the grimmer weeks of the year, as disappointing retail sales figures released Friday combined with other dismal data to heighten fears that the nation's nascent recovery is stalling.

“Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the economy has yet to hit bottom, a sharply higher percentage than the 53% who felt that way in January,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll.

Buried amidst the increasingly gloomy economic news of the last few weeks -- which includes stubbornly high unemployment, rising foreclosures and a grim outlook from the Fed, among other factors -- is a growing sense of doom among some prominent economists.

"QUICK, you've got to come now or you'll miss him," says the press officer. I'm being ushered down a corridor in the back of the Randolph hotel, Oxford, UK, to meet Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and the founder of the whistle-blower's website WikiLeaks.

WHILE Congress toiled on the financial overhaul last spring, precious little was said about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance companies that collapsed spectacularly two years ago.

It was an odd but intriguing experience to sit at a press breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor last week and listen as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell strongly rebutted one of my recent columns, implicitly endorsed the message of another and sent a disquieting signal about the prospects that might follow a Republican victory in the midterm elections.

When U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker struck down California's Proposition 8 on Wednesday (Aug. 4), he said voters' motivation for outlawing gay marriage was clear.

You might think that scientists and Evangelicals have nothing in common. But you'd be wrong. Large numbers of both agree on one thing: the end is near.

An 18-year-old Iranian is facing imminent execution on charges of homosexuality, even though he has no legal representation. Ebrahim Hamidi, who is not gay, was sentenced to death for lavat, or sodomy, on the basis of "judge's knowledge", a legal loophole that allows for subjective judicial rulings where there is no conclusive evidence.

Top Republican leaders in the House offered a fairly strong signal on Sunday that they would favor a down-the-road raising of the Social Security retirement age as part of an effort to revamp the entitlement program.

While a high-profile battle rages over a mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, heated confrontations have also broken out in communities across the country where mosques are proposed for far less hallowed locations.

This White House has "vilified industries," complains the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. America is burdened with "an anti-business president," moans the Weekly Standard.

A research team conducting a survey has found that about 86% of wild canola plants in North Dakota have genetically modified genes in them, and 'two samples contained multiple genes from different species of genetically modified plants.' Canola usually has little competition when cultivated but does not fare well in the wild. The Roundup Ready and Liberty Link strains of genetically modified canola appear to be crossing over to wild plants and helping it survive. The University of Arkansas team claims that the ease in which genetically modified canola has 'escaped' into the wild should be noted by seed makers like Monsanto because this is proof that it will happen.

Robert X. Cringley has an op-ed in the NY Times in which he contends that Google has found a way to get special treatment from Verizon without actually compromising net neutrality, by beginning to co-locate some of their portable data centers with Verizon network hubs. 'With servers so close to users, Google could not only send its data faster but also avoid sending it over the Internet backbone that connects service providers and for which they all pay,' writes Cringley. 'This would save space for other traffic — and money for both Verizon and Google, as their backbone bills decline (wishful thinking, but theoretically possible). Net neutrality would be not only intact, but enhanced.' So why won't Google and Verizon admit what they're up to? 'If my guess is right, then I would think they're silent because it's a secret. They'd rather their competitors not know until a few hundred shipping containers are in place — and suddenly YouTube looks more like HBO.

Independent game Machinarium, released without DRM by developer Amanita Design, has only been paid for by 5-10% of its users according to developer Jakub Dvorsky. To drive legitimate sales, they are now offering a 'Pirate Amnesty' sale until August 12, bundling both the cross-platform game and its soundtrack for $5. Ron Carmel, designer of DRM-free puzzle game World of Goo, stated that his game also had about an 80-90% piracy rate, claiming that the percentage of those pirating first and purchasing later was 'very small.' He said, 'We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet!

Bill Gates attended the Techonomy conference earlier this week, and had quite a bold statement to make about the future of education. He believes the Web is where people will be learning within a few years, not colleges and university. During his chat, he said, 'Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.

Police cannot surreptitiously stick a GPS unit on your car and track your movements without a warrant, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled. In an opinion published Friday, the court said that police use of GPS evidence to convict two individuals was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements over an extended period of time.

Cellphone battery dead? No problem: Just borrow a charger from a friend. Oh, wait — you can’t, because your friend doesn’t have the same phone as you, and his charger won’t work with your phone.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is getting involved in the dispute between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Research In Motion (RIM) over UAE's BlackBerry ban. Clinton said during a press conference Thursday that the US government was helping to work out a compromise between the UAE and RIM on the matter, but the issue may get more complex as more countries hop on the BlackBerry-banning bandwagon.

The deadline for the last round of Recovery Act grants for broadband stimulus projects is September 30, less than two months from now. But the Government Accountability Office isn't sure that the key federal departments handing out these funds have the resources to keep tabs on where that money's all going.

We call upon Congress for a truly independent investigation with subpoena power. We believe that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the World Trade Center buildings #1 (North Tower), #2 (South Tower), and #7 (the 47 story high-rise across Vesey St.) were destroyed not by jet impact and fires but by controlled demolition with explosives.

We live on a boat. We are a family of 4 – Ma, Pa, The Boy (3 1/2 yrs) and The Girl (8 months.) We live on Lake Ontario in the city of Missisauga. We are year round live aboards. Yes, we spend our Canadian winters aboard a boat … in Canada. Crazy Canucks we are!

Living and Cruising Aborad a Boat

A few years back I made the decision to cut my ties to land and live aboard a sailboat. Living aboard means different things to different kinds of boaters. If you don't plan on leaving US waters but do plan on making a boat your home it will probably involve living in a marina, hooked up to shore power, cable TV and having all the conveniences of the modern world nearby.

Living on a sailboat.

As we have promised we will show you how living aboard a sailboat is cheap and doable. We did it so can you.

Kids around the country are getting high on the internet, thanks to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. And it could be a gateway drug leading teens to real-world narcotics.

There are any number of reasons why an American might oppose the Cordoba House, the planned $100 million Muslim-financed community center that has come to be known in the press as the "Ground Zero mosque." I don't think any of them are particularly good reasons, but the universe of potential justification is much broader than the narrow scope of this humble blog. There is one justification being floated around, however, that is both within this blog's purview and completely and totally bogus.

Zakaria says that the man behind the proposed Ground Zero Islamic community center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, "has spent years trying to offer a liberal interpretation of Islam" and "argues that America is actually what an ideal Islamic society woudl look like because is it peaceful, tolerant and pluralistic.

Is the future of the human race in outer space? Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, in an interview with Big Think, warns that if humans can't find another planet to inhabit, they will face extinction.

The online whistle-blower WikiLeaks said it will continue to publish more secret files from governments around the world despite U.S. demands to cancel plans to release classified military documents.

An online whistle-blower's threat to release more classified Pentagon and State Department documents is raising difficult questions of what the government can or would do, legally, technically or even militarily to stop it.

Federal regulators are abandoning efforts to negotiate a compromise on so-called "network neutrality" rules intended to ensure that phone and cable TV companies cannot discriminate against Internet traffic traveling over their broadband lines.

Are Verizon and Google near a deal to put pay tiers on the web? Have they even been negotiating a deal? Could the two companies' (alleged) agreement kill net neutrality?

The Senate agreed Thursday to add $600 million to the effort to stop the flow of illegal immigrants across the U.S. Mexican border.

Over the past few months, I've encouraged anyone with any interest at all in the amount of oil that gushed forth from the Deepwater Horizon well into the Gulf of Mexico to check in regularly with Sarabeth Guthberg who, at 1115.org, has been keeping a close eye on a lot of fast-moving numbers -- the estimates from the Flow Rate Technical Group, competing numbers from other scientific authorities -- and the many ways in which BP worked to undermine the measurement effort.

Over the past few months, Congressional Republicans and skittish Democrats who've lingered too long at the Deficit Panic Kool-Aid Stand have made life extraordinarily difficult for the most vulnerable members of society -- the nation's unemployed.

FOR generations, the Avidians have been cloning themselves quietly in a box. They're not perfect, but most of their mutations go unnoticed. Then something remarkable happens. One steps forward, and that changes everything. Tens of thousands of generations down the line, some of its descendents will evolve memory.

This beats the hell out of Gaylo 2 and 3!

Chris Dodd gathered with the Democratic Senate freshman class on Tuesday night at a dinner organized by Mark Warner to persuade them to back off their push to change Senate rules when the chamber returns in January, the first opportunity there will be to do so.

Anthony Graber, a Maryland Air National Guard staff sergeant, faces up to 16 years in prison. His crime? He videotaped his March encounter with a state trooper who pulled him over for speeding on a motorcycle. Then Graber put the video — which could put the officer in a bad light — up on YouTube.

The Obama administration on Wednesday delivered an upbeat verdict on the fate of the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed out of BP's blown out well in the Gulf of Mexico, saying that most of it has either been dispersed, burned off, skimmed up, directly recaptured through containment efforts, evaporated or dissolved.

Malicious advertisements are getting more and more common as the Bad Guys try to use reputable ad networks to spread malware. Julia Casale-Amorim of Casale Media details the lengths that some fake companies will go to to convince ad networks to take the bait.

MIT's OpenCourseWare, possibly the best place to go if you want to study physics in your pajamas, has been awarded the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) by Science magazine. OpenCourseWare receives close to 1.5 million pageviews a month, with traffic from educators, students, and especially independent learners.

A quantum memory may be all scientists need to beat the limit of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, according to a paper published in Nature Physics. According to a group of researchers, maximally entangling a particle with a quantum memory and measuring one of the particle's variables, like its position, should snap the quantum memory in a corresponding state, which could then be measured. This would allow them to do something long thought verboten by the laws of physics: figure out the state of certain pairs of variables at the exact same time with an unprecedented amount of certainty.

The big telco and cable ISPs are always busy beavers over at Capitol Hill, lobbying Congress on a wide variety of issues. But our perusal of the relevant public disclosure databases suggests that Verizon wins the prize for money spent on convincing Senators and Representatives to see broadband- and mobile-related matters the wireless giants' way.

The progressive action committee MoveOn.org is threatening a national boycott of Target if the retail giant doesn't cease spending money on the Minnesota Governor's race, the group announced on Tuesday.

Marketers are spying on Internet users — observing and remembering people’s clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology.

Tea Party-backed contender Ken Buck, who's facing-off against Jane Norton in Colorado's GOP Senate primary says he firmly opposes abortion rights and doesn't "believe in the exceptions of rape or incest."

Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle has moderated a host of policy positions in her transition from a primary candidate to general election contender battling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. One thing she has not backed away from has been her insistence that abortion should be outlawed universally, even in cases of rape and incest.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) says that execution would be an appropriate punishment for Private Bradley Manning in the wake of charges that he helped leak classified military documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.