Free Republic

Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the public’s understanding of climate change. The rising alarm is one of the poll’s most dramatic findings. In just five years, the percentage of people calling climate change a “crisis” has jumped from 23 percent to 38 percent. More than 3 in 4 U.S. adults and teenagers alike agree that humans are influencing the climate. The overwhelming majority of them said...

The Washington Post says it has suspended reporter Joel Achenbach for “inappropriate workplace conduct” involving women at the newspaper. The Post says Achenbach will be suspended for 90 days without pay. Achenbach has released a statement saying, “I’ve said and done things that were unprofessional, and I apologize to the women affected by this and acknowledge their courage in speaking out.” …

Astra Taylor's iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade. Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She's also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She's not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer - because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds. Taylor...

The paper ... noted that a number of large, very remote objects share a similar orbital angle. That's suspicious if you're an astronomer expecting to see a random distribution of objects. The key orbital feature is known, rather obtusely, as the “argument of perihelion.” We're not shy of complicated orbital concepts (we try to toss around the phrase "obliquity of the ecliptic" whenever possible), but this one is not very easy to explain. "The argument of perihelion is the angle at which an object comes to perihelion with respect to the ecliptic plane," Sheppard said in an e-mail. Mike Brown,...

I was there for the “peasants with pitchforks” speech. Pat Buchanan was holding forth in a crowded room at the Sheraton Hotel in Nashua, N.H., a couple of days before the 1996 GOP primary. The Republican Establishment’s favorite for the nomination was Bob Dole, but Dole, for all his solid credentials and admirable history as a war hero and congressional leader, was never someone to incite a political fever, never one to tap the more visceral emotions of the rowdy electorate. So here came Buchanan, the TV pundit and unapologetic nativist, and in the icy environs of the New Hampshire...

The other night Jimmy Carter popped up on the Larry King show, live via satellite, standing in a ski lodge and wearing a fur-lined outdoorsman jacket as though he'd just come in from felling a spruce. He was publicizing an upcoming auction in which he would sell the furniture he'd been making. Also his wine. This may have come to many viewers as a surprise: There is Jimmy Carter Wine. The former president didn't say how he made it, but you know what it's probably called: peanut noir. Also he plans to sell his paintings. "My paintings," he told King,...