While other states find creative ways to perhaps lessen abortions, notably by requiring a waiting period, it is no surprise that California wants to find ways to do more of them. That’s not a shock and it isn’t bad. Yes, California is kooky and anti-business and overwhelmingly progressive but in a diverse country, someone is going to be the most at those things so it might as well be California.But if you know anything about medicine, you have to wonder why a midwife is somehow qualified to perform abortions when the whole point of making abortions a federal right was that botched abortions risked live.  

From Science Codex we get word of a new instruction manual for the coming apocalypse. They write:Yes, the world is coming to an end! At least that's what we should believe based on what we hear from the History Channel during sweeps week. But it's worse than that! Now it is the History Channel, The Learning Channel, and you'll not be surprised, every channel because it's popular. We are suffering from an overflow of doom and gloom from everywhere we go

What is a guaranteed way to make organ donation, the chance to help someone who needs a transplant, into a dirty idea?Deny you and your family any rights at all on what happens to you, that's what. 

Harold Camping has apologized to his followers for being wrong on the Rapture - twice - and essentially costing them a lot of money. "Come now, let us reason together," said the Lord in Isaiah 1:18 and so we cannot be too harsh on him for doing the flawed, worldview-focused math I dissected in So The Rapture Is Saturday - Luckily The Grey's Anatomy Season Finale Was Last Night.  Paul Krugman does the same thing every week in the New York Times and still hasn't repented and he bilks Americans out of a lot more money than Camping did.

If you are sitting on giant oil fields, it seems like a bad idea to have villagers carrying around giant plastic bags full of natural gas.  Welcome to rural China, where the distance between poor and rich is so dramatic they would rather have old people carrying around bombs than let them use some fuel to heat their homes.Anybody along the Keystone XL pipeline want to complain now?

Some old people don't understand why you would pay $10 to 'license' a book rather than $10 to own one. E-Book readers are certainly convenient, you can have a lot of books in your carry-on bag instead of one, and people are happy to pay for convenience. In my case, it is practical. I have a lot of old books so if I want to read them, I risk damaging them or I have to buy 'reader' copies and then take up twice as much space for the same book. And books in the public domain are often free.Kindles, iPads, Nooks, they are all successful for their corporate sales departments so clearly people like the convenience, even if the price for a book with no media seems rather high. The U.S. Justice Department thinks there is something more sinister; collusion.

With the tantalizing possibility of guaranteed, unlimited student loans the past 20 years, colleges have gotten silly about some of the options they offer - Columbia'a $89,000, two-year Environmental Journalism program comes to mind - but MIT at least has one that sounds cool: piracy.Unofficially, for at least 20 years any MIT student who completes courses in pistol, archery, sailing, and fencing is considered a pirate. More recently it became official. 

Did you know there is a war on women?  If so, it isn't just a few on the right, it seems. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher and others have been waging it for years with their misogynist outbursts, argues Kirsten Powers in the Daily Beast. There have even been boycotts by people on the left who are outraged that these guys still have jobs. Oh, wait, that last part never happened.

It isn't like Hollywood changed "The Lorax" story all that much in order to indict capitalism or Republicans or materialism or whatever all Hollywood movies have to address in an election year.  Dr. Seuss went after racism and every other topic and both the left and the right assumed he was on their side. He was that clever.  The movie, not so much.

Mobile euthanasia units in Holland will travel around the country to help people end their lives when their own doctors subscribe to that old-fashioned Hippocratic Oath and refuse to accept 21st century postmodern values.Levenseinde, "Life End", is the biggest Dutch advancement in helping kill people since turning Anne Frank over to the Nazis. They legalized euthanasia in 2002 as one of their post-World War II liberal values but some doctors violate the law and refuse to kill people, instead persisting in the archaic notion that doctors should try and save lives.What about the euthanizers?  Their psychological health is important, too. They will only be allowed to kill one person per week.  We don't want anyone getting weird.