Oregonian To Drop Daily Newspaper Delivery — A sign of the times.
Do You Really Want to Know Your Future? A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast — About genetic testing for health risks.
Summer solstice 2013: Google celebrates the longest day of the year
Found at Auction: The Unseen Photographs of a Legend that Never Was — I've posted links to this story before, but the narrative has progressed. This is so cool. (Via Lisa Costello.)
3-D Map of Human Brain Gives Unprecedented Detail — The photo with this article is more than a little strange.
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science — How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link. Willful ignorance is a pretty simple explanation, too.
Undoing Shoulder and Knee Obsession in Mormon Kids — This post is another example of why I am fascinated by the blog Feminist Mormon Housewives. What it documents is the intellectual train wreck of an otherwise sensible, intelligent person trying to reconcile their firm grasp of objective reality with some of the bizarre and pointless strictures of faith. One of the biggest reasons I'm an atheist is I'm not willing to compromise my intellectual honesty like this.
The lies of Exodus were a bearing wall for evangelicalism — Evangelicals’ treatment of LGBT people could only be defended by the false claim that such people were making a “lifestyle choice” — that they were willful sinners choosing sin who therefore deserved to be shunned, deserved to be denied full participation in the church, deserved to be denied full legal equality and civil rights. Without that lie, all that remains is transparent malice, a naked refusal to love our neighbors, and an unseemly eagerness to puff ourselves up by stomping down on those we can outnumber and overpower.
Are Socially Responsible Businesses Bad for Society? — I am not buying this. Sounds like conservative apologia wrapped in a college degree. I mean, look how well "industry self-regulation" has ever worked out. And for-profit companies don't take a view any longer than the current quarterly results, not if they're publicly traded. If nothing else, the history of climate change denialism, which is essentially the result of a phenomenally effective corporate lobbying campaign, gives the big lie to this thesis.
Rep. Diaz-Balart (R-FL) speaks Spanish at Tea Party rally and is heckled “learn English!” — What else do you expect from a party whose entire political philosophy is based on generating more angry white men?
Bush-Era NSA Whistleblower Makes Most Explosive Allegations Yet About True Extent of Gov’t Surveillance — (Thanks to David Goldman.)
QotD?: Did you shoot? Did you score?
6/21/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (once again my day got eaten by logistics)
Hours slept: 6.0 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 250.8 (!)
Number of FEMA troops on my block installing Islamic footwashing sinks: 0
Currently reading: Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg; I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett