What is music worth?

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album "In Rainbows" as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all. As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical…

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Ethanol lies

This Slate article is from 2005, but the topic is one that desperately needs to be reported accurately. It's about ethanol, and the story is that it takes much more energy to make ethanol than one can get from ethanol. Ethanol won't significantly reduce our oil imports; adding more ethanol…

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The death of investigative journalism and the role of nonprofits in doing serious journalism

The death of investigative journalism is not the title of this paper, but it is the context.  Here's the title:  "The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism," by Charles Lewis (April, 2007).  The statistics will shock and depress you. That the lack of investigative journalism in the corporate media world is a…

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How many lies did the Bush Administration tell in the 2 years prior to the Iraq invasion?

The Center for Public Intergrity has now added them up.  There were 935 lies from high-ranking Bush officials.  All of them designed to convince us to invade Iraq for no good reason.  Here's a summary: The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews…

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