Briggs

Appeals Court Confirms TSA X-Ray Strip Search Validity

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has confirmed that criminals and suspected criminals have more rights and more protections under the Fourth Amendment than do citizens who…

Philosophy Statistics

Some Common Global Warming Fallacies

The level of debate on global warming is shriekingly poor. Not that I have any hope of convincing the world to reject bad logic, but here are some of the…

Culture Statistics

The Horrible Dangers Of Third-Hand Smoke

All countries have been known to periodically lose their minds. France in 1789 banned religion by the point of a blade, Russia in 1917 banned freedom by the barrel of…

Culture

California Requires LGBT History In Textbooks; The Disabled, Too

The rulers of the State of California are very unhappy with their subjects and their backward and old fashioned ideas; and, darn it, the rulers are just not going to…

Philosophy

The Economic Fallacy, Greenpeace, David Suzuki, And Global Warming

"You can't believe what that guy says. He research was funded by Greenpeace!" The person uttering this sentence has committed the economic fallacy, which is the belief that the truth…

Book review

Earth Has A Fever: How Can We Cool It?

Earth Fever: Living Consciously with Climate Change by Judy McAllister, Erik van Praag, and Jan Paul van Soest With Foreword by Hazel Henderson and Preface, by Jacqueline Cramer, Minister for…

Philosophy Statistics

Bathroom Stage Fright A “Real Condition” : Scientists Again Prove What Was Already Known

In standard science-report prose, MSNBC begins: Given the choice, you probably prefer your home porcelain throne to using a public toilet. But for more than 20 million people in North…

Fun Statistics

Does Second To Fourth Digit Ratio Predict You-Know-What Length?

From the storied Halls of Science comes an important new study, here abstracted from the Asian Journal of Andrology1. I apologize for the length of this excerpt, but it is…

Uncle Mike on Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Causes Mass SquealingNovember 3, 2025
Vox clamantis in deserto
NLR on Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Causes Mass SquealingNovember 3, 2025
The universities have serious problems and the criticism of them is justly warranted. But from these excerpts this compact is…
Hagfish Bagpipe on Changes Are Coming: Our Return to 1970sOctober 31, 2025
To follow up, on screaming -- in 1986 I fell off a turnip wagon, blond and blue, in New York…
Hagfish Bagpipe on Changes Are Coming: Our Return to 1970sOctober 31, 2025
Briggs, you are the master of hard-boiled, surreal, precise, colorful, expansive poetry masquerading as cultural commentary. You are our age's…
Briggs on Stay The Course: Have Some ClassOctober 30, 2025
Nate, Now how in the world did that happen. I fixed it and it didn't take. Fixed again, and this…