choofnagle
Posts by this author
What is this business about the Broadway opening of Green Day's American Idiot? Both the Journal and the Times have reported on it, and in the process, defamed an entire genre by describing Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong as a "punk" rocker.
This musical, which opened at the Berkeley Rep a few…
Shamelessly stolen from Gawker: Brick Fatwa Libertarian Also Gets Fat Government Checks. For what? A preventable disease! Oh, what ever happened to personal responsibility?
Illustration: A typical American male libertarian in its natural habitat
Dear Readers, we've been completely derelict in maintaining Denialism Blog. Please accept our apologies. Mark is training to be a surgeon, and Chris recently had an enormous baby! We hope to get back blogging soon. Please excuse our absence until life is back in order.
Check out this week's New Yorker for a well-put insight into the Rand-infected mind. Nick Paumgarten writes about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and his attitudes towards unions:
...His [Mackey's] disdain for contemporary unionism is ideological, as well as self-serving. Like many who have come…
Chris Anderson's provocative new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, argues that in the digital world, "free" pricing is a realistic and normatively good approach to pricing information products. Unlike the physical world of "free" products, which is plagued with fraud and tricks, the…
Take Pristiq. Warning: side effects include becoming a fat wind up doll.
The Viking and I ventured out early this morning to get the H1N1 vaccine and found long lines in the tony neighborhoods. SF Gate reports that the Marin public vaccination clinic was swamped. (The irony!--Marin is a hotbed of the anti-vaccination movement.) So where can you get the vaccine…
Exhibit 1001, on our great college and university campuses, this wretch can complain of coyote ugly. The nerve. Nice hat, BTW. Do you have a matching jersey? Ladies, imagine waking up with this puffy misogynist! Via Gawker.
Exhibit 1002, Southern Football's Dating Game in Today's WSJ.
The Bitch is Back, by Andrew Corsello: "2009's most influential author is a mirthless Russian-American who loves money, hates God, and swings a gigantic dick. She died in 1982, but her spawn soldier on. And the Great Recession is all their fault..."
All this excitement about Levi Johnston in Playgirl Magazine is pretty interesting. We have the forthcoming tell-all book about Sarah Palin and fam, and the author posing naked.
And who reads Playgirl anyway? It occurred to me this morning that we could get some idea from looking at the…
Consumers who have asked me whether they should give their zip code at the register have been getting bad advice! I was under the misimpression that zip-level data was only being collected for demographic research purposes (to determine where stores should be located, and advertising directed, on…
For some time, I've been trying to better understand Google's worldview on privacy issues. The culture of companies fosters different privacy values and sensitivities, and the signals sent by those at the top shape how the organization itself conceives of and addresses privacy issues. In…
Alex Pareene has given voice to what many longtime Post readers believe: Fred Hiatt needs to be axed.
Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails. They picked up Bill Kristol after the Times dumped him for being not just wrong but boring and lazy. They openly…
Bloggers, under new guidelines issued by the Federal Trade Commission, you must disclose gifts or payments for products that you review! Also your endorsements cannot be false or misleading!
The FTC's release advises:
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing…
I'm a fan of Jason Nelson's I made this. You play this. We are enemies. He's just released his newest game, Evidence of Everything Exploding, described as:
...Using documents, both historical and little-known from B. Gates, NASA, James Joyce, Dadaism, Neil Gaiman, Fidel Castro, the Pizza Box…
The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Dalton reports:
European scientific authorities Thursday rejected dozens of health claims made by food companies, in a sign of how tricky it will be for them to get some of their most popular claims past a European Union drive to bring scientific rigor to the…
I'm delighted to announce the results of our first national telephonic survey of US internet-using adults on consumer privacy! The Times has coverage and the full report (Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It is available here. Here's a summary:
This nationally…
Here's a fun article by the Chronicle's Mark Morford on how to talk with complete idiots. You ignore them, in Denialism blog fashion.
Morford points to this youtube video, which is divine:
Thomas Frank's weekly column in the Journal is one of the few tolerable pieces in the paper's opinion section. This week, Frank writes, sensibly, in my opinion, that the left needs to recapture "freedom."
There are few things in politics more annoying than the right's utter conviction that it owns…
Update: looks like the picture expired from Tumblr. It was a picture of a teabagger in Washington DC holding a sign that said "We Are John Galt," which is pretty much retarded.
Update: LaTFT!!1!
Maybe the teabaggers just need ridicule, Morans-style, says Gawker:
"Check out that fucking teabagger," writes in tipster Stefan, referencing "Look At This Fucking Hipster," the blog chronicling hipsters looking ridiculous. Unfortunately, while hipsters have to be sought out…
My civil libertarian friends are "worried" about the precedent set in the recent Liskula Cohen case. In the case, a formerly anonymous blogger said some nasty things about Cohen. So nasty that Cohen sued to unmask the blogger's identity and was successful in doing so. The blogger is now suing…
Oh noes, some morons are planning to create a Atlas Shrugged miniseries!
Gawker does a nice job summing up the story:
Charlize Theron would like to star as ... Dagny Taggart, the lady who runs her brother's railroad and enjoys violent sex with secretive entrepreneurial geniuses. But there is a…
Wow! In a strange turn of events, Chris Anderson got it all wrong, while Malcolm Gladwell got it right. What's that? Free. Chris Anderson thinks it is the future of price; that companies should give their products away free and find other, magical ways to generate revenue. Gladwell roundly…
Stephanie Rodgers of the Mother Nature Network reports on a recent study of lead content in popular multivitamins by Consumer Labs. According to the news summary (the report is subscription only):
Of the 300-plus children's vitamins and prenatal vitamins tested for lead, only four were found to be…
You've probably heard that California is in trouble financially. No one wants to cut services and at the same time, no one wants to pay taxes. So what do you do? Ticket ticket ticket! And raise the fines for those tickets.
In the years I've lived in California, I've never seen so much traffic…
If you are a resident of California, rejoice, because the Supreme Court let stand a decision in the 9th Circuit finding that SB 1 (California's Financial Information Privacy Act) was not preempted by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In plain English, this means that California residents can opt-out…
In Adam Sandler's 2008 masterpiece, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the actor is offered a job at an electronics store called "Going Out of Business." This is a shady operation that constantly makes false claims about products and rips people off. Sandler was mocking a real phenomenon--the…
Sounds like a more dangerous form of Scientology, according to the Chronicle's Scavenger Blog:
...Lee's yoga focuses on Brain Education, or as one official put it, "using your brain well." Part of this training includes the head-shaking Brain Wave Vibration exercise...Participants take basic yoga…
David Rivkin and Lee Casey consider this question in today's Journal, explaining that the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence limits the government's power to unduly burden choices about healthcare:
It is, of course, difficult to imagine choices more "central to personal dignity and autonomy"…