When TIME recently ranked Darth Vader #3 on their "Top 10 Worst Fictional Fathers" (what we call link bait, since people love numbered lists and you have to scroll through each one and see an ad each time) they did so because he was the ultimate deadbeat dad.   Not only was he never there for a single "Life Day" celebration (1), but when he does finally show up, he expects some kind of relationship and then cuts the kid's hand off.

Jose Antonio Vargas has a good story - he is an educated, literate man with a flair for writing.  But he is also an illegal alien who, despite being 30 years old, could never figure out how to become a legal one.

Is the process that hard?  Well, no, the problem, as you will see if you look at his story objectively, is that his grandfather was trying to take shortcuts, buying him an illegal green card, falsifying data to get him a Social Security number, encouraging him to lie so as not to endanger the chances of other family members - none of that is due to American immigration policy, it is due to wanting to circumvent the process millions of others went through.  In short, it is selfish.

The pacific northwest is becoming ground zero for anti-science hippies who are willing to believe anything if it fits their world view.   Their vaccination rates are shocking for people who claim to be so literate.

Now they have a new reason to go on a bender about nuclear power.   An article at CounterPunch.org by Janette D. Sherman, M. D. and 'epidemiologist' Joseph Mangano claims that more babies are dying due to...the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - 35% more. 

When the National Institutes of Health first opened in 1887,  it was called the " Laboratory of Hygiene" and was staffed by one man, 27-year-old Joseph James Kinyoun.  Mission: collect blood and stool samples from the sick in order to culture pathogens in the lab. 

Here is the entire NIH of that period.  One room at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York.

Abortion is barely a controversy in America these days.  Most people, men and women, are against it for themselves but it has been the law of the land for two generations.   Crazy politicians like Barbara Boxer of California still campaign on abortion by insisting if a Republican beats her in a Senate race they could somehow overturn it but for the most part it is a non-issue outside zealots.   It isn't going anywhere.

Did Pres. Obama sign a questionnaire supporting same-sex marriage or not?  His aides said he didn't.  Until he did.  Basically, even the White House doesn't seem to know.

I am sure gay groups, who likely voted 90% for him, are concerned about being told things like it has been "very clear that his position is evolving."  Well, no, there is nothing clear at all about that sentence, much less his position.

As creators of actual good content, we're pretty critical of content farms like Huffington Post or Answers.com or the rest of them - if HuffPo steals a fair-use snippet from our site it will rank higher in Google than the actual article, though not because their content is better but simply because they learned how to game the Google algorithm.

Well, who can we criticize when HuffPo socked away over $300 million from AOL doing what it does?   But at least a few people have been disgruntled at the content farm mentality - though not because they had the sort-of sense of entitlement journalists get about how media exists to keep them employed.

The Puyehue volcano in Chile was dormant for decades but it recently made its presence known, covering Lake Nahuel Huapi in Argentina with ash.  6-mile high plumes.  And this guy is diving in it.

40% of the California budget goes toward education but it's not enough.   I can confirm that, at least in our schools.  My wife helped my son's Kindergarten teacher move out of her old classroom to go to a new school and the whole truck full of stuff was all things the teacher bought herself.

But where does the money disappear between taxes and teachers?  If you guessed fat salaries for Democratic-voting University of California and California State employees, you would be right; their rolls increased 300% since 1998 and now have to be furloughed.  But there is a lot more waste at all levels yet neither the administration nor the unions nor the government wants to accept any part in the problem.