North Carolina town’s idiocy, news media’s incompetence, blogosphere’s imposture

The shock­er head­line, A US town has reject­ed a pro­pos­al for a solar farm fol­low­ing pub­lic con­cerns that solar pan­els ‘suck up all the ener­gy from the sun’ is such a good illus­tra­tion that the word fol­low­ing is a jour­nal­is­tic weasel word that it has been added to the list of ways which so-called jour­nal­ists (as well as real ones) mis­lead us here on Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look. The head­line from the pri­ma­ry source reads, Wood­land rejects solar farm. The … Read the rest

Oh Scalia, what did you say this time?

Supreme Court Jus­tice Antonin Scali­a’s com­ments dur­ing oral argu­ments1 in Fish­er v Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin gen­er­at­ed con­tro­ver­sy both in news and social media. Some are sug­gest­ing that Scalia is reveal­ing him­self to be a bigot

Scalia has had these sorts of accu­sa­tions point­ed at him sev­er­al times, and I’ve found it instruc­tive to seek out the court opin­ions or argu­ments from which the com­ments come. For the most part, the accu­sa­tions have been com­plete­ly ground­less. For exam­ple, he … Read the rest