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	<title>Acid Test</title>
	<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test</link>
	<description>Just another soapbox surfer</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Mon, 14 May 2012 20:03:53 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>What is wrong with this picture?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ll admit it. I have an axe to grind with search engines, and there&#8217;s a rant coming about them Real Soon Now. But the following just cries out for immediate carping. Via Groklaw &#8211; Digging for Truth, Volokh and Falk (pdf) on the topic of free speech protections for search engines: &#8230;search engines are speakers. First, they sometimes convey information that the search engine company has itself prepared or compiled &#8230;. Second, they direct users to material created by others, &#8230;. Such reporting about others’ speech is itself constitutionally protected speech. Third, and most valuably, search engines select and sort [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/05/what-is-wrong-with-this-picture/</link>
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		<title>What do they mean, &#8220;trafficked&#8221;?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This phrase set me off: &#8220;a UK initiative established to raise awareness of the plight of workers trafficked into the sex industry.&#8221; (1) Why &#8220;trafficked&#8221;? What&#8217;s with this terminology? You see it all the time. &#8220;Tantamount to slavery.&#8221; &#8220;Conditions indistinguishable from slavery.&#8221; Why &#8220;tantamount&#8221;? Why &#8220;indistinguishable from&#8221;? It IS slavery. It is slavery of the worst and most disgusting sort. Even hard labor does not involve body invasion. It is slavery with every possible revolting humiliation included. It is slavery with physical torture, disease, and early death, just like &#8220;real&#8221; slavery. It is human beings carrying a price tag, bought [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/04/what-do-they-mean-trafficked/</link>
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		<title>Why is Romney the Almost-Human?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Everybody &#8212; well, me, and Charles Pierce, and bostonboomer, and well, everybody &#8212; sees him as a stiff awkward robot with less charm than a Roomba. Yes, that&#8217;s at least partly because he&#8217;s a rich guy who has to mix with the rubes on nothing stronger than caffeine-free Coke. And it&#8217;s partly because he&#8217;s been lying for votes for so long, it takes more and more time to get the right lies out of storage. A Roomba doesn&#8217;t have to do either of those things. But, really, are those issues unusual for a politician? They all have to campaign among [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/04/why-is-romney-the-almost-human/</link>
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		<title>Civil rights aren&#8217;t religious</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Prop. 8 stuff here just goes on and on and on. The anti-gay marriage crowd is using the law to delay civil rights as long as possible, and the courts let them get away with it because due process is more important than the rights the process is supposed to protect. It would take any normal human being outside the law about a quarter of a minute to figure it out: 1. Are all people considered equal before the law? Yes. Go to point 2. 2. Can some people get married? Yes. Go to point 3. 3. Therefore: all [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/04/civil-rights-arent-religious/</link>
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		<title>ObamaRomneyCare</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The boosters, of whom Krugman is a lucid example, have been talking up new health care law, generally called the Affordable Care Act (ACA). They make good points. Some people with pre-existing conditions are covered who weren&#8217;t before. Those under-26 year-olds whose parents are insured are able to retain coverage on their parents&#8217; policies. These are good things. They are also drops in the bucket. After two years of weeping, wailing, and gnashing teeth, the richest country on earth managed to extend a bit of expensive complicated coverage to a fraction of its population. And that&#8217;s the good news. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/03/obamaromneycare/</link>
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		<title>On the Separation of Sex and State</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Seriously. It&#8217;s time. The whole Republican birth control bullshit (and I do mean bull) has brought the issue to levels of absurdity that require action. First, notice one thing about the sex issues of the last few decades. They&#8217;ve been about birth control (1950s), then abortion (1980s onward), now, God help us, birth control again. Supposedly, it&#8217;s all about life, but there are also plenty of outbursts that sex is irresponsible, thoughtless, and no longer &#8220;special&#8221; when there are no &#8220;consequences.&#8221; But sex has always been that way. For men. They&#8217;re famous for it, or at least they try to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/03/on-the-separation-of-sex-and-state/</link>
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		<title>Are Women Human? Take Two</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I wrote on that topic several times, but now it&#8217;s everywhere. Chatblu makes the point that &#8220;this whole &#8216;person&#8217; thing is becoming a wildly overpopulated &#8216;hood.&#8217; &#8230; A person can be as tiny as a sperm or as large as Microsoft.&#8221; However, the membership of women in the category remains unclear, although they are within the size range. The most lucid explanation to date came just recently. Jessica Winter finally answers the question for us. All my adult life, I’ve been pretty sure I’m a sentient, even semi-competent human being. I have a job and an apartment; I know how [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/03/are-women-human-take-two/</link>
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		<title>The Bombs Fall Elsewhere</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There&#8217;s a bit of a flap over Iran, nukes, Israel, the US, etc., etc., etc. Discussion of sanctions, unexpected strikes, war. In other words, no biggie. But, this just in, as they say, from Reuters: But Israel, in weighing military action, faces the risk of a backlash from Congress and the American public if oil prices spike during a still-fragile economic recovery &#8230;. &#8220;It&#8217;s the law of unintended consequences,&#8221; said an outside expert who advises the White House on national security. &#8220;This could lead to the first real reassessment in a generation of how America and Americans feel about Israel.&#8221; [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/02/the-bombs-fall-elsewhere/</link>
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		<title>Why Austerity is Necessary: short version</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Does anyone honestly think austerity is important to the restoration of fiscal balance because discipline and frugality lead to wealth? The people promoting austerity are invited to dinner in places like the room to the right. They&#8217;re doing well and not practicing austerity, so the answer must lie elsewhere. And, really, it&#8217;s not that hard to figure out if you remember not to listen to a word they say. 1) For whatever reason (the crash in this case) there&#8217;s not enough money to go around. 1a) It is necessary to get the money from somewhere. 2) You could get it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/02/why-austerity-is-necessary-short-version/</link>
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		<title>My religion is to kill your religion</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The discussion about the birth control pill fiasco has boggled my mind. I&#8217;ll explain the title toward the end, but let me start with my bogglement. There are whole swathes of blogland who feel that so long as the pills are available, it&#8217;s all good. They don&#8217;t see a problem with the fact that, as Charles Pierce puts it: The Church has claimed — and the president has tacitly accepted — the right to deny even its employees of other faiths the health-care services of which it doesn&#8217;t approve on strictly doctrinal grounds. That is not an issue of &#8220;religious [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/02/my-religion-is-to-kill-your-religion/</link>
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		<title>Charles Murray and the Moral Collapse of the Working Class</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A long time ago an anthropologist named Ruth Benedict pointed out that the people recognized as criminals in a given society cause a tiny fraction of the damage inflicted by the powerful members. This was whether it was measured by financial loss or physical injury. (Think about wars, if it&#8217;s hard to picture tycoons beating people up.) Think about the crash of 2008, if it&#8217;s hard to see the rich picking people&#8217;s pockets. In general, the statement squares with my intuition of what goes on, and it probably squares with yours, too. So why does Murray spend a whole book [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/02/charles-murray-and-the-moral-collapse-of-the-working-class/</link>
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		<title>If you have to ask, you can&#8217;t afford it</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Is there one single solitary action flowing from the Campaigner-in-Chief in the White House, just one, which is a plain old good thing? You know, just good. No gotchas. No gimmes. No ha-ha-fooled-ya. So, one feature of this new health care law which is Obama&#8217;s &#8220;signature issue&#8221; and &#8220;major accomplishment,&#8221; which is grinding toward implementation at the speed of a globally-warmed glacier, one feature was going to be better information. At long last, we have the new improved format. Not the information, yet. But the format has been achieved. Woo-hoo! The rules set the designs for easy-to-understand forms that describe [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/02/if-you-have-to-ask-you-cant-afford-it/</link>
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		<title>Swarm of flying robots: I want</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Continuing my must-have vehicles series &#8230; fleets of tiny drones flying in formation in a lab. I think about fifty or so would be just the right amount to fly around the house while I cackle wildly. (But, wouldn&#8217;t you know, the first thing everyone says is, &#8220;Military applications!&#8221;) Copyright &#169; 2012 Acid Test. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at has taken probably taken my work to try to generate advertising money. Please report them to me! Thanks! Please contact quixote7@gmail.com [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/02/swarm-of-flying-robots-i-want/</link>
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		<title>In the must-have vehicles series</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There is, at long last, a worthy addition to the field of flying cars, ice sailers, alien electric three-wheelers, dune jumpers, and lawn chairs. Behold, the sphere chair. Segway, eat your heart out. Copyright &#169; 2012 Acid Test. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at has taken probably taken my work to try to generate advertising money. Please report them to me! Thanks! Please contact quixote7@gmail.com so we can take legal action.Plugin by Taragana]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/02/in-the-must-have-vehicles-series/</link>
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		<title>It&#8217;s about rights, not helplessness</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There&#8217;s a bit of a flap going on because a famous person named Cynthia Nixon said she&#8217;s gay by choice. (Full disclosure: I&#8217;ve never heard of her. I only visit this planet now and again) Saying it&#8217;s a choice is supposed to be very bad because it falls into a &#8220;right wing trap.&#8221; Everybody must say gays are born that way, that they can&#8217;t help themselves, that it&#8217;s-not-their-fault-they-found-it-that-way. Otherwise wingnuts can insist that re-education could work. Bullshit. Any kind of sex between any kind of people who can freely and knowledgeably consent is nobody&#8217;s business but their own. The point [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/01/its-about-rights-not-helplessness/</link>
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		<title>Iran and nukes</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I agree. Iran should not have nuclear weapons. Neither should China, Russia, North Korea, Britain, France, the US, India, Pakistan, or Israel. Hello? Those things are either bad, or they aren&#8217;t. What kind of quadruple standard are we using here? And don&#8217;t tell me that it&#8217;s different when sensible countries, who would never actually use mass death against civilians, have them. Only one country has used nuclear weapons to mass murder civilians. And it currently has more of the things than anyone else and shows no sign of thinking that&#8217;s a bad idea. Could we just tell the truth? Nobody [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.molvray.com/acid-test/2012/01/iran-and-nukes/</link>
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