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With the release of Christine Blasey Ford’s lie detector test record comes the revelation that proprietary (that is, secret) software developed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, called PolyScore, was used to grade her performance as “No Deception Indicated—Probability of Deception is Less Than .02.” The gaping problem behind this sciencey statement, whether you […] News reports that Christine Blasey Ford took a polygraph or “lie-detector” test last month in order to bolster the credibility of her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh breathe new life into one of the oldest zombies in American legal and political culture. The belief that polygraph machines can reliably sort deception from truth lives for eternity […] Somewhere across this mighty land, four human beings are enrolled in a secret Department of Energy experiment code-named Moose Drool. They are numbered among 331 souls in a dozen classified research projects listed by a FOIA release to the Federation of American Scientists. Now secret science is not really science, of course, removed as it […] Vice President Pence’s speech today calling for a new military branch devoted to fighting wars in outer space helps solve at least one big problem at the Pentagon: how to spend all the money that the Trump Administration is sluicing its way. Sounding like Troy McClure, Pence might excite a few kids on summer […] It is a long, long, long road from the Berkeley City Council to the House Armed Services Committee. That Ron Dellums started at the former in 1967 and chaired the latter in 1993 must surely rank as one of the greatest leaps in American political history. The vast majority of prominent anti-war movement voices from […]
I’ve come back again to Bolinas. You might say that the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped. The once famous but massively forgotten Pied Piper trout freak of the Sixties who wrote that phrase blew his brains out in the house next door and lay unmissed for more […] That the Department of Defense will undergo its first financial audit ever is the kind of news few people can probably relate to, like the discovery of a new terrene planet or the evacuation of a housing development built over a Hawaiian volcano. Okay, so now what? With more than $2 trillion in assets, the […] Around the same time that the Pentagon was learning how to control independent battlefield news reporting by “embedding,” i.e. leashing, professional correspondents in deployed units, executive editor Abe Rosenthal hired a general to cover the military for the New York Times. Bernard Trainor stepped directly from 39 years in the Marine Corps into the Times […] When the son of a hardscrabble Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, insurance agent found himself one September morn in the same Princeton dorm room as Donald Rumsfeld, part of a freshman class of ’52 that included James Baker, you might say that stars were ominously aligned. This side of paradise was about to get nastier. None of […] “If activists want to make headway on reining in gun violence, they need to understand gun culture.” So opines the subtitle of a recent article in Texas Monthly about why there will be no grassroots movement coming out of the Lone Star State after the Santa Fe school massacre. It’s a mistake, we learn from […] |