If you ask the Obama administration, economists are virtually united in thinking the 2009 stimulus package worked. ‘I’m absolutely convinced, and the vast majority of economists are convinced, that the steps we took in the Recovery Act saved millions of people their jobs or created a whole bunch of jobs,
A stocky onetime mortgage broker is speeding through Costa Mesa in an old pickup with two pounds of weed in a paper bag. He wears gray cargo shorts and flip-flops and a faded cap with the image of a marijuana leaf stitched on the front. He just smoked a joint thick as a knuckle.
Cypress Hill thumps through the cab.
I’ll hit that bong and break ya off somethin’ soon
I got ta get my props,
Cops, come and try to snatch my crops
These pigs wanna blow my house down
For a man whose apartment was raided recently and now faces felony drug possession and cultivation charges, he doesn’t seem particularly worried about the mission at hand. Ricky rants about a federal and local crackdown on medical marijuana that closed various dispensaries that he ran and forced him back to the streets, where he began as a teenager in the 1970s. (Except then, he was a dealer. Now he is a ‘mobile dispensary.’)
‘It’s too late!’ he bellows. ‘The genie is out of the bottle. A huge demand has been created. It’s back to the underground. Anyone who is smart is just going to take it back to the streets.’
He says he knows lots of people […]
A study suggesting climate change deniers also tend to hold general beliefs in conspiracy theories has sparked accusations of a conspiracy on climate change-denial blogs.
The research, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, surveyed more than 1,000 readers of science blogs regarding their beliefs regarding global warming. The results revealed that people who tend to believe in a wide array of conspiracy theories are more likely to reject the scientific consensus that the Earth is heating up.
University of Western Australia psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky based the findings on responses from an online survey posted on eight science blogs. According to the paper, Lewandowsky approached five climate-skeptic blogs and asked them to post the survey link, but none did.
Now, climate-skeptic bloggers are striking back with a new conspiracy theory: that the researchers deliberately failed to contact ‘real skeptics’ for the study and then lied about it.
‘[F]or some reason, Dr. Lewandowsky refuses to divulge which skeptical blogs he contacted,’ wrote Anthony Watts, who blogs on the popular climate skepticism website Watts Up With That?
Climate change conspiracy
Though about 97 percent of working scientists agree that the evidence shows a warming trend caused by humans, public understanding of climate […]
Global tuna stocks are fast reaching the limits of fishing sustainability, decimated by an absence of comprehensive, science-based catch limits, conservation experts warned Saturday.
Five of the world’s eight tuna species are already classified as threatened or nearly threatened with extinction, according to the Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
At the IUCN’s World Conservation Congress currently underway in South Korea’s southern Jeju Island, experts said partial quotas currently in place were inadequate and uninformed.
‘The problem is, there is lack of science-based catch limits to ensure effective management and conservation,
