The Myth of Islamophobia | The American Conservative

The Myth of Islamophobia | The American Conservative: Are there people who hate Muslims simply for being Muslim? Sure. Are there people who respond to Islamic terrorism through acts of bigotry, even violence, against mosques and Islamic institutions? Yes. And shame on them all. Hunt them down, arrest them, throw them in jail.

But there are no anti-Muslim mobs massing in the streets. The mob that massed in the streets of Paris and other European cities on Sunday to protest jihad did not disperse and burn down mosques on their way home (unlike mobs in Muslim countries that torched embassies to protest Muhammad cartoons a few years back). We are not them. We once were, and are capable of becoming them again, as the history of the West shows, but we are not them now.



The more interesting question is what the intense, genuine, but unjustified fear of the phantom Islamophobic mob says about the mindset of media elites and others who hold it.

Media coverage of Charlie Hebdo and the Baga massacre: a study in contrasts

Media coverage of Charlie Hebdo and the Baga massacre: a study in contrasts:

There are many reasons why the attacks on targets in Paris have received vastly more media attention than the attacks in Baga.



Paris is a highly connected global city with thousands of working
journalists, while Baga is isolated, difficult and dangerous to reach.
The attacks on Charlie Hebdo targeted journalists, and it’s
understandable that journalists would cover the death of their comrades.
The attacks in Paris were a shock and a surprise, while deaths at the
hands of Boko Haram have become distressingly common in an insurgency
that has claimed over 10,000 lives since 2009.



The details of the Baga attacks, where civilians fled a marauding army into the swamps of Lake Chad, where they faced attacks from hippos, are almost impossible for audiences in developed nations to empathize with.





By contrast it’s tragically easy for most North Americans and Europeans to imagine terrorists striking in their cities.



The net effect: the attacks in Baga and Maiduguri seem impossibly
distant, while the attacks in Paris seem local, relevant and pressing
even to people equidistant from the two situations.



In part, it’s hard to imagine events in Nigeria because we encounter so little African news in general.

Everything Is Broken — The Message — Medium

Everything Is Broken — The Message — Medium: Besides being riddled with annoying bugs and impossible dialogs, programs often have a special kind of hackable flaw called 0days by the security scene. No one can protect themselves from 0days. It’s their defining feature — 0 is the number of days you’ve had to deal with this form of attack. There are meh, not-so-terrible 0days, there are very bad 0days, and there are catastrophic 0days that hand the keys to the house to whomever strolls by. I promise that right now you are reading this on a device with all three types of 0days. “But, Quinn,” I can hear you say, “If no one knows about them how do you know I have them?” Because even okay software has to work with terrible software. The number of people whose job it is to make software secure can practically fit in a large bar, and I’ve watched them drink. It’s not comforting.

France Cracks Down On Free Speech � The Dish

France Cracks Down On Free Speech � The Dish: And particularly religion, which should be open to the most merciless attacks and denunciations and mockery precisely because of the grandeur of its claims and the power of its social authority. A true believer is relieved to see the all-too human institutions of church or mosque or synagogue ridiculed, precisely because those institutions are prone to corruption on a vast scale. And faith should easily survive mockery. Jesus himself encouraged his followers not to be dismayed when they are maligned or disparaged because of their faith. It is not something Christians should avenge; it is something that at times Christians should even seek. But even a spiritual figure like Jesus was ignored for millennia once Christianity got worldly power.

University of Virginia Reinstates Phi Kappa Psi After Rolling Stone Rape Story Crumbles - The Atlantic

University of Virginia Reinstates Phi Kappa Psi After Rolling Stone Rape Story Crumbles - The Atlantic: Prior to these allegations, the collegians were living in their frat house. After the publication of the Rolling Stone story, the young men began to receive hate emails, voicemails, and threats of violence. Angry protestors massed outside their house and shouted as if at gang-rapists. That alone must've seemed surreal and difficult to face, especially for a group of 18-to-22-year-olds. Then in the wee hours of one morning, vandals broke several frat house windows with chunks of cinder block and bottles and tagged the outside of the house. "This situation is just beginning," the perpetrators soon threatened in an anonymous letter. "We will escalate and we will provoke until justice is achieved for the countless victims of rampant sexual violence at this University and around the nation." Needless to say, the vandals achieved no justice for rape victims by victimizing these young men.

Donna's last days | www.myajc.com

Donna's last days | www.myajc.com:

Black women with breast cancer in the United States
are, on average, 40 percent more likely to die from the disease than
white women, according to a recent study by the Sinai Urban Health
Institute. In some cities, the gap is even greater. On the surface it
may appear the gap is about race, but income is the culprit.

“What we offer is first-class and coach fare, and
coach doesn’t get you to the same place that first-class does,” says Dr.
Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society and
an expert on racial and economic gaps in cancer treatment.

The chance of getting cancer is increased by as much
as 80 percent for people with three or more social risk factors, such
as being a minority, being poor and being single, according to another
study.

“Poverty is a carcinogen,” says Harold Freeman,
founding director of the National Cancer Institute Center to Reduce
Health Disparities. [...]

I prepared to look up, knowing the coffin containing Donna — the patient from Winship, the mother of six, the person who became my friend — would be right in front of me. But when I raised my head, I saw there was no coffin.

Instead, there was a brown cardboard box sealed with duct tape.

I felt like throwing up and prayed Ashley would keep her eyes sealed tight.

A chaplain said a prayer and the workers rolled the box away to the yawning red earth a few feet away. Ashley was holding the roses.

“Can I put these with her?” she asked.

“No,” one of the men said. He pointed to a stretch of caution tape, indicating she couldn’t cross it.

Within minutes, the brown box containing Donna’s remains was lying in the rusty Georgia dirt.

I ran across the tape toward the grave. One of the guys stopped me.

“Can you at least put these roses with her?”

He tossed them on top of the box.

We were so stunned and shocked we could not move. Finally someone wearing a baseball cap told us our turn was up and that we needed to move on.

The First High Profile Ebola Case

“I Don’t Know if I’m Already Infected.” The Controversial Death of Ebola’s Unsung Hero — Matter — Medium: Doctors Without Borders also denied that it played any role in the “management” of the plan to evacuate Khan, or the final decision to abort the flight. This contradicted what C. Ray Khan had been told by the minister of health. “Things aren’t adding up,” he said in a phone conversation from Mahera. “Somebody isn’t telling us the truth.” Khan’s brother Alhajie remains angry that an African was denied treatment with the experimental drug while two white Americans became the first to be given ZMapp, and distrusts Doctors Without Borders’s account of what happened. The decision, he says, “looks political.” One medical professional who was involved in the conference calls told me that Doctors Without Borders “was being very paternalistic,” entirely cutting Khan out of the decision-making process. “It’s not that they didn’t want to do what was best for Khan,” the medical professional says, but the organization allowed the perception to take root that “it was about color.”

The View from the Glass Cage | Books and Culture

The View from the Glass Cage | Books and Culture: Moreover, when pilots do choose to take control—or are forced to do so by the failure of their systems—they often make bad decisions because they are out of practice. This is the third consequence of reliance on automation: highly trained experts whose skills atrophy because they have few or no opportunities to keep them sharp—until a crisis hits, which is of course the worst possible situation in which to try to recapture one's old abilities. [...]

Perhaps here we will have a measurable—and terrifying—cost to
automation. But more generally, Carr wants us to ask what value we place
on the loss of opportunities to experience flow—the loss even of
opportunities to develop and exercise skills that challenge and reward
us. Carr readily admits that these are extraordinarily difficult
questions. "How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and
engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle
deterioration of skill? You can't. Those are the kinds of shadowy,
intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they're gone,
and even then we may have trouble expressing the losses in concrete
terms. But the costs are real." They are real for the Inuit, they are
real for pilots, and they are real for us.

Nicholas Carr is asking us to count those costs, as a prelude to figuring out whether we can minimize them.

The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government by John J. Dilulio Jr. | The Washington Monthly

The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government by John J. Dilulio Jr. | The Washington Monthly: Now, in the second installment of this two-volume treatise, Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama picks up where the French Revolution left off and proceeds to the present. While he stresses that liberal democracy is not “humanly universal,” he still believes that there is “a clear directionality to the process of political development” that favors liberal democracy. But, in stark contrast to The End of History and his concern over hypothetical last men and their possible discontents, in his latest book he is worried about liberal democracies not sustaining themselves and not reliably delivering peace, prosperity, and personal security to their peoples. As he writes, if “there has been a single problem facing contemporary democracies, whether aspiring or well established, it has been centered in their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth, and quality of basic public services like education, health, and infrastructure that are needed to achieve individual opportunity.”

What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Career as a Software Developer

What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Career as a Software Developer:

Never ask for permission unless it would be reckless not to. Want to spend a week investigating something on your own initiative? Don't ask for permission. You won't get it. You might not actually be doing your boss a favor when you ask for permission; from their perspective, you're asking for the right to pass the buck if your project doesn't pan out. Since he can deny you and your buck-passing after-the-fact, in any case, because he outranks you, you don't really gain anything from such a promise you might extract in the first place. So there's no upside in asking for that permission. Of course, if you're going to do something that presents a real risk to the business or where his permission would be reasonably expected, then go ahead and ask for permission. If the loss is small and the risk is appropriate to your level in the company (and any programming job where you're not trusted with days to weeks of your own time is not worth having) then don't ask for permission. Just do it, and do it well.

The emotions of this piece are relevant

How it feels to me. *NSFW:Language* : Military

I failed my Marine.





To hell and back for a wounded Marine. That's how the saying goes.
Most of us Doc's take that as more than a saying. We use it as a fucking
code to live by. Shit's popping off? Time to go to work!
Fucking mortar's are landing? "Why you bitches running away Marines?"
we yell as we head in to treat the wounded.





I failed my Marine.





The morning started fine and we all were in a good mood.....

Can You Copyright a Dream? - Jonathan Band - POLITICO Magazine

Can You Copyright a Dream? - Jonathan Band - POLITICO Magazine: Selma director Ava DuVernay may well have taken more license than artistically necessary in the confrontational scenes between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Johnson. But inaccuracies in other significant parts of the film were forced upon DuVernay by copyright law. The film’s numerous scenes of King delivering powerful speeches regarding civil rights all had to be paraphrased, because the MLK estate has already licensed the film rights in those speeches to DreamWorks and Warner Bros., for an MLK biopic Steven Spielberg is slated to produce.



The litigious MLK estate, controlled now by King’s descendants, has a long history of employing copyright to restrict the use of King’s speeches. The estate appears to have two objectives: maximize revenue and control King’s image.

John and Bonnie Raines: The Edward Snowdens of 1971 | Philadelphia Magazine

John and Bonnie Raines: The Edward Snowdens of 1971 | Philadelphia Magazine: What Medsger describes, what the Raineses have lived, is total transformation. They are a couple who spent 40 years in hiding from the U.S. government, only to emerge as the sort of people we might aspire to be. In this context, the ovations the Raineses receive seem not just appreciative, or admiring, but prescient. John and Bonnie Raines appear as heralds — of an inevitable American future, when another whistle-blower, perhaps gray by then, and ordinary, will find that his enemies are gone, and that stages and crowds await him in every city and town.

No Matter How Your Heart Is Grieving: Disney for the Sad

No Matter How Your Heart Is Grieving: Disney for the Sad:

The Disney World project, briefly, is to convince you—yes, you—that,
within the space of what employees call The Property, the apathy of a
hideously unfair world is suspended. Believe, the company instructs, and
you will be rewarded, irrespective of physical infirmity, age, size, or
gender. Few negative emotions are permitted in Disney World, and yet
the possibility of sadness is admitted in order for the company to
undertake the pitiless annihilation thereof. It’s one that many people
here want to stop feeling. In what feels like every line, we hear pairs
of women (accompanied by kids) discussing some bastard or other who left
or won’t leave, rarely in tones of blame, usually in terms of simple,
grim logistics. Wishing, dreaming—these are for people with less to
worry about. Kids, probably. Squash your own dreams quick, before
someone else tortures them to death. Disney’s prosaic response is best
expressed in a couple of lines in the theme from the studio’s 1950
cartoon “Cinderella,” which plays over and over again in various
arrangements pretty much everywhere in the Magic Kingdom:




“No matter how your heart is grieving,” it promises, “if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.”

Obama uses SOTU to announce surrender to Iran | RedState

Obama uses SOTU to announce surrender to Iran | RedState: The facts are that we have not halted Iran’s nuclear program or reduced its stockpile. Iran’s nuclear program continues at full speed and their nuclear material stockpile has increased. Thanks to Obama relying on the good offices of Vladimir Putin and the ChiComs to negotiate an end to a nuclear program that is no threat to either of them, Iran has succeeded in evading most of the flaccid sanctions regime that has been imposed.

John Boehner's outrageous plan to help a foreign leader undermine Obama - Vox

John Boehner's outrageous plan to help a foreign leader undermine Obama - Vox: But there's more than meets the eye here. Netanyahu is playing a game with US domestic politics to try to undermine and pressure Obama — and thus steer US foreign policy. Boehner wants to help him out. By reaching out to Netanyahu directly and setting up a visit without the knowledge of the White House, he is undermining not just Obama's policies but his very leadership of US foreign policy. The fact that Netanyahu is once again meddling in American politics, and that a US political party is siding with a foreign country over their own president, is extremely unusual, and a major break with the way that foreign relations usually work.

Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says - NYTimes.com

Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says - NYTimes.com:

A
team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds
of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing
unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We
may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said
Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

An Uneven But Auspicious 'Nightly' Opener : Monkey See : NPR

An Uneven But Auspicious 'Nightly' Opener : Monkey See : NPR:

Yes, shows like this are always trying to generate conversation with
sometimes outrageous prompts, but it seemed particularly unfortunate for
the very first question to essentially equate any recognition of nuance
— the understanding that the question is flawed — with a failure of
realness.



Stuff like that is important, because this show is designed to be really smart as
well as really funny, and smart comedy doesn't really need traps like
that. My hope would be that they'll either come up with a different
recurring segment or keep it to the more personal questions that worked a
little better, like asking Treasury which side of the street she would
walk on if a white person were walking on one side and a black person on
the other. (She sidestepped the question by saying it would be based on
which person was hotter, which somehow earned her an "I Kept It 100"
badge even though it neatly evaded the obvious point of the question.)



The panel stuff needs a little work, on the whole, but that's entirely to be expected. Panel discussions are really hard, and they take time to settle into.

It’s official: 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history - The Washington Post

It’s official: 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history - The Washington Post: It is official: According to both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the year 2014 was the hottest ever measured, based on records going back to the year 1880.

It now surpasses all past scorchers, including 1998, 2005, and 2010. Indeed, except for 1998, says NASA, the 10 hottest years recorded have all occurred since the year 2000.

You'll Never Guess Who's Trying to Hack Your iPhone : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

You'll Never Guess Who's Trying to Hack Your iPhone : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education:

But under the limits of the Fourth Amendment, nothing it finds can be
used to prosecute its targets. Now the FBI is taking steps to carry out
broad searches and data collection under the color of authority, making
all of us more vulnerable to “fishing expeditions.”




The investigative arm of the Department of Justice is attempting to
short-circuit the legal checks of the Fourth Amendment by requesting a
change in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. These procedural
rules dictate how law enforcement agencies must conduct criminal
prosecutions, from investigation to trial. Any deviations from the rules
can have serious consequences, including dismissal of a case. The
specific rule the FBI is targeting outlines the terms for obtaining a
search warrant.





It’s called Federal Rule 41(b), and the requested change would allow
law enforcement to obtain a warrant to search electronic data without
providing any specific details as long as the target computer location
has been hidden through a technical tool like Tor or a virtual private network.

What We Give Up When We Become Entrepreneurs -- Science of Us

What We Give Up When We Become Entrepreneurs -- Science of Us: Even if co-workers aren’t supporting or inspiring or engaging you—even if they’re outright antagonizing you, in fact—they often serve a hidden function: They make you strive, make you expect more from yourself, make you realize more is possible professionally. Twenty-seven percent of millennials say that workplace friendships make them more competitive, according to a �LinkedIn survey released this past summer. And the transformative effects of co-workers are nothing compared to those of mentors, who by definition expect the most from you and make it their business to show you the ropes. “Most successful people will tell you they’ve been mentored,” says Stybel, the Boston-based consultant and organizational psychologist, “and that mentor is often found at work. One of the things I tell young professionals as they’re starting out is to manage themselves well enough to be worthy of being mentored, and that can only be done through physical proximity.”

In this art project, a man secretly fixed California's road signage and no one noticed

freeway signs: A North panel and 5 shield were fabricated
and attached to the existing overhead sign because the information was missing.

It was done as an art project, without permission, called Guerrilla Public Service.

The signs were manufactured and installed to the same specifications used by Caltrans (California Transportation Authority) with the intent on safety and aesthetics.

The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking" - Vox

The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking" - Vox:

In some cities — Los Angeles, for instance — police ticket tens of thousands of pedestrians annually for jaywalking, with fines of up to $250.



To most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. But
it's actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led
by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city
street.


"In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. "But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."




One of the keys to this shift was the creation of the crime of jaywalking. Here's a history of how that happened.

Cheerleaders For Christ - Adult Mag

Cheerleaders For Christ - Adult Mag: It’s hard to turn off a mode of being that leads people who won’t take you seriously to nevertheless treat you pretty well. In the South the line between sexualized condescension, good manners, and honest charm is blurry⎯⎯if it exists at all. Those blurred lines, I’ll admit, made me comfortable. In college I wore short skirts when I waitressed and walked up to tables with a big game-day smile. This past summer I went to a wedding where there was a doll-like array of women and none of the guys knew what any of them did. A drawling groomsman approved of the bride: “She gets along with the wives real well.” The boys agreed and took tequila shots. The girls blinked, sipped their clear cocktails, put their sparkling hands on the backs of their rough and sweaty guys.

A PDF on good spy tradecraft

2010-01-02 Dulles on Tradecraft via Srodes.pdf

Romney And The GOP’s Five-Ring Circus | FiveThirtyEight

Romney And The GOP’s Five-Ring Circus | FiveThirtyEight:

In the past, we’ve sometimes conceived of the GOP field
with a Venn diagram that we call the “five-ring circus.” It portrays
the major constituencies within the party — the establishment wing, the
moderate wing, the tea party, libertarians and Christian conservatives —
and how they overlap.

Blogs of War - Hacker OPSEC with The Grugq

Blogs of War - Hacker OPSEC with The Grugq: My thinking these days is that an operative must minimize the time that they are engaged in a clandestine operation. Something like the theory of special operations, the period of vulnerability only grows the longer the operation goes on. Clandestine operational activity must be compartmented, it must be planned, it must be short in duration, and it must be rehearsed (or at least, composed of habitual actions). It is possible to do, and I believe that even non-experts can pull it off, but it must be limited in scope and duration. Prolonged exposure to underground living is caustic to the soul.

The Packers of Catan: Green Bay’s Board-Game Obsession - WSJ

The Packers of Catan: Green Bay’s Board-Game Obsession - WSJ:

Packers center Garth Gerhart was intrigued by the game, because
teammates were “talking about it all the time, all the different
strategies.” He wasn’t expecting such cutthroat competition until he sat
down with them two weeks ago and, he said, longtime players ensured his
failure. “Everyone is super competitive, so when you first start
playing they don’t tell you all the rules. So you start your moves and
they say ‘well, actually you can’t do that’ and it sort of screws you in
the game,” Gerhart said. “They get very salty.”

Perillo said
each player has very specific strategies down by this point. “I
obviously try to build as many cities as I can, that’s two points,” he
said. “You just try to strategically place an emphasis on whatever the
cards give you.”

The game’s popularity among the Packers is due
in part to the lack of other things to do in town. Green Bay is the
smallest town in the NFL. “We’re always looking for something to do,
it’s cold. No one wants to go outside, better find something,” Flynn
said. “And this is a great game.”

One Tweet Shows the Hypocrisy of America's Reaction to White People Rioting at Ohio State - Mic

One Tweet Shows the Hypocrisy of America's Reaction to White People Rioting at Ohio State - Mic: The difference is partly rooted in racial stereotypes, which frame black people as naturally threatening. Columbus is 62% white, while Ohio State University has an 82% white student body. Police officers used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse last night's crowds, but only 6-7 arrests were reported (which is remarkable, considering the number of arsons).



 If this had been a black majority, can we honestly say the rampant fires, stadium break-in and goal post destruction would be have been treated as celebratory revelry? It's unlikely, based on what we've seen this past year. Welcome to post-racial America.

Enemy Aliens | Lapham’s Quarterly

Enemy Aliens | Lapham’s Quarterly: The attempt to standardize and humanize internment conditions had also rehabilitated the idea of concentration camps and eroded memories of the brutality of the colonial camps. Indeed, once the public had adjusted to the idea of imprisoning innocent foreigners preemptively, governments learned how to harness anxiety of a foreign danger—with the underlying fear of crime, degeneracy, and disease—and assign it to other target groups, often domestic enemies. The identification of a pariah class, the registration and rules limiting conduct, followed by mass arrests and civilian detentions; the roll calls and prisoner numbers, the barracks, the watchtowers, the armed guards…civilians everywhere had experienced it all before as a seemingly necessary tragedy in the service of a national cause. Camps had become part of a formal process of dehumanization.

Obama and Cameron’s ‘solutions’ for cybersecurity will make the internet worse | Trevor Timm | Comment is free | The Guardian

Obama and Cameron’s ‘solutions’ for cybersecurity will make the internet worse | Trevor Timm | Comment is free | The Guardian:



The UK’s Cameron suggested earlier in the week he wants to outlaw certain forms of encryption, which could potentially lead to some of the world’s most popular messaging apps
(like iMessage and WhatsApp) being banned in the UK. That speech had
been ridiculed from all angles for the past few days, with various
experts labeling it a nightmare for Internet security – on par with authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China – and economically devastating for the British information technology industry.




Meanwhile, the White House has proposed a huge expansion of penalties under the highly-controversial law that was used to prosecute Reddit co-founder and privacy rights advocate Aaron Swartz. If passed, the administration’s proposal could further criminalize mundane Internet activity – for example, potentially allowing for a ten-year jail sentence for sharing your HBO GO password – all to supposedly target foreign hackers that the law would likely never reach.

BlakeClass comments on You just won a 656 Million Dollar Lottery. What do you do now?

BlakeClass comments on You just won a 656 Million Dollar Lottery. What do you do now?: Jack Whittaker, a Johnny Cash attired, West Virginia native, is the poster boy for the dangers of a lump sum award. In 2002 Mr. Whittaker (55 years old at the time) won what was, also at the time, the largest single award jackpot in U.S. history. $315 million. At the time, he planned to live as if nothing had changed, or so he said. He was remarkably modest and decent before the jackpot, and his ship sure came in, right? Wrong.

Mr. Whittaker became the subject of a number of personal challenges, escalating into personal tragedies, complicated by a number of legal troubles.



Whittaker wasn't a typical lottery winner either. His net worth at the time of his winnings was in excess of $15 million, owing to his ownership of a successful contracting firm in West Virginia. His claim to want to live "as if nothing had changed" actually seemed plausible. He should have been well equipped for wealth. He was already quite wealthy, after all. By all accounts he was somewhat modest, low profile, generous and good natured. He should have coasted off into the sunset. Yeah. Not exactly.

Whittaker took the all-cash option, $170 million, instead of the annuity option, and took possession of $114 million in cash after $56 million in taxes.



After that, things went south.

Whittaker quickly became the subject of a number of financial stalkers, who would lurk at his regular breakfast hideout and accost him with suggestions for how to spend his money. They were unemployed. No, an interview tomorrow morning wasn't good enough. They needed cash NOW. Perhaps they had a sure-fire business plan. Their daughter had cancer. A niece needed dialysis.



Needless to say, Whittaker stopped going to his breakfast haunt. Eventually, they began ringing his doorbell. Sometimes in the early morning. Before long he was paying off-duty deputies to protect his family. He was accused of being heartless. Cold. Stingy.

Roberto Saviano: My life under armed guard | World news | The Guardian

Roberto Saviano: My life under armed guard | World news | The Guardian: To me, the fact that two mafia bosses were acquitted while their lawyer was convicted for mafia-related crime seemed absurd. I was disappointed but nothing surprises me anymore. There were foreign journalists in court but I’m not sure they understood the verdict. I can’t blame them. Santonastaso has since been given 11 years for mafia association, aiding and abetting and perjury but that got barely any coverage at all. The bosses got away with yet another attempt to intimidate journalists into silence, so I felt ambivalent at best. Nonetheless, this was the first conviction of its kind, so it was a historical moment of sorts. I hope this sentence may be the first step towards freedom for myself and other writers, currently living under armed guard, who may eventually be able to reclaim our lives.

My Hometown – Selma | Thoughts from the Journey

My Hometown – Selma | Thoughts from the Journey: Momma and daddy didn’t talk much about what happened in Selma, except when the news reported something about that black man from Atlanta. Their words were never positive. They certainly did not welcome the world to their sleepy town. For them, everything just seemed fine the way it was. Momma would say, “Don’t get me wrong, I believed in equal rights, but I just didn’t like what was going on.” Momma would remind me how she always welcomed Florence at her kitchen table and bought her children dresses for Easter. My parents wanted the turbulence to go away. They chose to go inside their house and batten down the hatches.

wisequote comments on This is Charlie Hebdo's first cover since the attack

wisequote comments on This is Charlie Hebdo's first cover since the attack: Islam today carries this extremely strong "honor" overtone because it was born in one of the most tribal societies on Earth, and although it was a marvelous rebellion against many horrid tribal virtues once prevalent, it still inherited from the culture and like most pagan-to-Abrahamic conversions, it still had to cater to local tastes and thus punishments were often extreme: cutting hand of the thief made much more sense than the once common "kill him and rape his family and take his daughter as a slave", and to stone a woman and a man to their death for adultery was a way to defuse the "honor" anger and avoid the once extremely savage and common tribal wars. When Islam first arrived, it was a systematic solution to many of the huge issues back then, but it is evident today that even backward Muslims view such punishments as extremes let alone the moderates. Just like we will view capital punishment as extreme one day when we will have brain-reset solutions, humanity advances but religion makes it damn hard to let go and Islam is very good at that.

What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? : AskReddit

What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? : AskReddit: At this point, you start playing with the big boys. You can fly private (though you normally charter a flight or own a jet fractionally through Net Jets or the like), You stay at 5 star hotels, you have multiple residences, you vacation in prime time (you rent a ski-in, ski-out villa in Aspen for Christmas week or go to Monaco for the grand Prix, or Canne for the Film Festival--for what its worth, rent on these places can run $5k-20k per NIGHT.), you run or have a ontrolling interest in a big company, you socialize with Conressmen, Senators and community leaders, and you are an extremely well respected member in any community outside the world's great cities. (In Beverly Hills, you are a minor player at $80 million. Unless you really throw your weight around and pay out the nose, you might not get a table at the city's hottest restaurant). You can buy any car you want. You have personal assistants and are starting to have 'people' that others have to talk to to get to you. You can travel ANYWHERE in any style. You can buy pretty much anything that normal people think of as 'rich people stuff'

Spies should be able to monitor all online messaging, says David Cameron - Telegraph

Spies should be able to monitor all online messaging, says David Cameron - Telegraph:


He added: “I have a very simple principle which will be the heart of the new
legislation that will be necessary. In our country, do we want to allow a
means of communication between people which even in extremis, with a
signed warrant from the home secretary personally, that we cannot read? “Up
until now, governments have said: ‘No, we must not’.





“That is why in extremis it has been possible to read someone’s letter, to
listen to someone's telephone, to mobile communications.





“But the question remains: are we going to allow a means of communications
which it simply isn’t possible to read. My answer to that question is: ‘No
we must not’.





“The first duty of any government is to keep our country and people safe. The
attacks in Paris demonstrated the scale of the threat that we face and the
need to have robust powers through our intelligence and security agencies in
order to keep our people safe.

Ahmed Merabet's eulogy is the most important thing you'll read on Charlie Hebdo - Vox

Ahmed Merabet's eulogy is the most important thing you'll read on Charlie Hebdo - Vox: My brother was French, Algerian, and of the Muslim religion. He was very proud of the name Ahmed Merabet, proud to represent the French police, and to defend the values of the [French] Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity.



Through his determination, he had just received his judicial police diploma and was shortly due to leave for work in the field. His colleagues describe him as a man of action who was passionate about his job.



[....]



I address myself now to all the racists, Islamophobes, and anti-Semites:




One must not confuse extremists with Muslims. Madness has neither
color nor religion. I want to make another point: stop painting
everybody with the same brush, stop burning mosques or synagogues. You
are attacking people. It won't bring back our dead, and it won't appease
our families.

This map shows every attack on French Muslims since Charlie Hebdo - Vox

This map shows every attack on French Muslims since Charlie Hebdo - Vox:

Further, such attacks play directly into
al-Qaeda's own logic and agenda, treating the act of few fringe
extremists as representative of the non-extremist whole, and fomenting
the idea of existential conflict between non-Muslims and Muslims where
none actually exists.




It's important to understand, though, that these attacks and the
sentiment behind them did not come from nowhere. French attitudes toward
Islam are, to say the least, complex — something evidenced at every
stage of this story.

The Green Monster - Garrett M. Graff - POLITICO Magazine

The Green Monster - Garrett M. Graff - POLITICO Magazine: As use-of-force questions began to surface in 2010 and 2011, Congress pressured the agency to review its procedures, resulting in the Border Patrol asking the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington law enforcement think tank, to study its policies. PERF’s secret internal report—made public a year later by the Los Angeles Times—examined 67 recent instances of the Border Patrol’s use of deadly force. Its conclusion was unambiguous: “Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force.” It determined that agents were actively stepping into the path of oncoming vehicles, “creating justification for the use of deadly force.” PERF said the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policies were far outside the mainstream of U.S. law enforcement. “It is clear that agents are unnecessarily putting themselves in positions that expose them to higher risk,” the report stated.

NYPD Work Slowdown Is Being Celebrated by New Yorkers of Color | The New Republic

NYPD Work Slowdown Is Being Celebrated by New Yorkers of Color | The New Republic: Sometimes when I watch the video of Eric Garner being choked to death by a swarm of officers who suspected him of selling loose cigarettes, I juxtapose that with my friends’ mischievous giggling as they retreated into the park to smoke an illegal drug in public. I wish we could all have that giddy thrill at little transgressions. But to do that one has to feel that he is free.

Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris | Informed Comment

Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris | Informed Comment: Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the Rights of Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful minority will take advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity to push their own agenda. Europe’s future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to become mainstream. Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.

Teenager with cancer fighting to stop medical treatment - The Week

Teenager with cancer fighting to stop medical treatment - The Week: Known as "Cassandra C." in court papers, the teenager has Hodgkin lymphoma. Doctors say her survival rate is 80-85 percent with chemotherapy, and she will die without it. Cassandra says she believes chemo is "poison," and wants to discontinue treatment. Her mother, Jackie Fortin, supports her decision, telling NBC News: "My daughter does not want to poison her body. This is her constitutional right as a human being."

Yes, You're Rich, and It's Time You Admit It - Bloomberg View

Yes, You're Rich, and It's Time You Admit It - Bloomberg View: The cutoff for the global 1 percent starts quite a bit lower than the parochial American version preferred by pundits. I'm on it. So is David Sirota. And if your personal income is higher than $32,500, so are you. The global elite to which you and I belong enjoys fantastic wealth compared to the rest of the world: We have more food, clothes, comfortable housing, electronic gadgets, health care, travel and leisure than almost every other living person, not to mention virtually every human being who has ever lived. We are also mostly privileged to live in societies that offer quite a lot in the way of public amenities, from well-policed streets and clean water, to museums and libraries, to public officials who do their jobs without requiring a hefty bribe. And I haven't even mentioned the social safety nets our governments provide.

Photo by banksy

Photo by banksy

RIP

A photo posted by Banksy (@banksy) on Jan 1, 2015 at 3:02pm PST

Military service is America's great equalizer - LA Times

Military service is America's great equalizer - LA Times:

With decreased exposure to opposing political views, tolerance
shrinks. A once fluid and freewheeling American society is petrifying as
opportunity evaporates and people exist in political echo chambers of
their own creation. While the government searches for policies to
staunch the middle class' decline and to rebuild trust among Americans,
the solution may be simpler: foster and incentivize increased military
service.



The
military is perhaps America's last bastion of social and economic
equality. The salaries of those at the top are much closer to those at
the bottom, relative to the corporate world. Senior officers live on the
same bases — in the same communities — as junior enlisted personnel,
and their children go to school together.

Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris | Informed Comment

Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris | Informed Comment: “Sharpening the contradictions” is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.



The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals.

BigAfghanKabob comments on [Severely Confronting] French Officer killed, execution style by two suspects with Assault Rifles.

BigAfghanKabob comments on [Severely Confronting] French Officer killed, execution style by two suspects with Assault Rifles.: (long list of links of Muslims condemning violence)

Former 'Onion' editor: Freedom of speech cannot be killed | MSNBC

Former 'Onion' editor: Freedom of speech cannot be killed | MSNBC:

Our society is possibly the freest that humankind has yet produced
and that freedom is predicated on one central idea: the right to speech.
That right is understood as a natural extension of our very existence.
In America, free speech is so important that the men who wrote our Bill
of Rights put it first, but followed it up with our right to bear arms.
To me, that’s always been a pretty strong message: Say what you want
and, here, take some guns to make sure no one tries to stop you. But in
this state of widespread social change – probably the most profound in
centuries – we need to make sure that the ideal of the second amendment
never, ever trumps the power of the first. That brute force never
negates ideas.




This is a loss for all of humanity. The victims, people who believed
with passion and intellect that humankind can be better, were struck
down in the birthplace of the Enlightenment, the movement from which the
modern world emanates.

In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech Does Not Mean Freedom From Criticism � The Hooded Utilitarian

In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech Does Not Mean Freedom From Criticism � The Hooded Utilitarian: The fact that twelve people are dead over cartoons is hateful, and I can only pray that their attackers are brought to justice. Free speech is an important part of our society, but, it should always go without saying, free speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Criticism IS speech – to honor “free speech martyrs” by shouting down any criticism of their work is both ironic and depressing.



In summary:

Nobody should have been killed over those cartoons.



Fuck those cartoons.

"You Have Thousands of Angels Around You" - Atlanta Magazine

"You Have Thousands of Angels Around You" - Atlanta Magazine: The first person to save Cynthia’s life was Paul Siyomvo, her father. The second person to save Cynthia was Marie Siyomvo, her mother. The third: Franck Siyomvo, her brother. The fourth person to save Cynthia was her uncle, through rejection and cash. The fifth: the mysterious Eddie, with a plane ticket and passport. The sixth? Irene Holth, of the INS, who made that critical phone call. The seventh was Sister Lucy—Sue Colussy. The eighth person to save Cynthia was Reid Mizell, by paying attention to what could have been just another e-mail. The ninth: Grace, by giving Cynthia another kind of home.



 The tenth and perhaps most important person who saved Cynthia was Cynthia herself, by running when she needed to run, hiding when she had to hide, and by trusting when her instincts told her to trust.

The U.S. must open the book on the use of torture to move forward - The Washington Post

The U.S. must open the book on the use of torture to move forward - The Washington Post: The detainees in Fallujah were the hardest set of men I’ve ever come upon. Many killed with a sickening enthusiasm. They often butchered what remained of their victims. It is easy to argue that they deserved far worse than what we delivered.



Still, those tactics stained my soul in an irrevocable way, maybe justifiably so. But as members of our government and its agencies continue to defend our use of torture, and as the American people continue to ignore their obligation to uncover this sordid chapter, the stain isn’t mine alone.

The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the | The New Republic

The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the | The New Republic: But Rose’s most intriguing argument for freedom of expression is the idea that censorship isn’t just a political crime, a violation of fundamental civil rights, but also a crime against human nature. It reduces people to passive objects; it denies the innate human instinct to language, expression, and narrative. There is an existential, not merely political, quality to Rose’s argument here, and this is perhaps what has sustained his nearly decade-long defense of a few cartoons.



 And if censorship is a violation of human nature, it begs the question: Is the push to be culturally “sensitive” forging a different kind of political subject in the West? What are we becoming? We’ll end, Rose responds, “in the title of my book, in a tyranny of silence. That’s what I fear.”

North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims - The Intercept

North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims - The Intercept:

But - especially after that first NYT article, and even more
so after Obama’s press conference - the overwhelming narrative
disseminated by the U.S. media was clear: North Korea was responsible
for the hack, because the government said it was.




That kind of reflexive embrace of government claims is
journalistically inexcusable in all cases, for reasons that should be
self-evident. But in this case, it’s truly dangerous.

Israel's suspension of tax transfer is perverse revenge for Palestinians' ICC bid - Opinion Israel News | Haaretz

Israel's suspension of tax transfer is perverse revenge for Palestinians' ICC bid - Opinion Israel News | Haaretz: The Palestinian application to the ICC is uncomfortable for Israel. But those who fear it now should have considered the implications before they pushed Abbas into a corner. In any case, despite the embarrassment Israel is liable to suffer in The Hague, the application is still a nonviolent, political move, whose impact Israel can mitigate greatly if it conducts its own investigation into suspected war crimes.

But over all this hovers the question of where the punishments imposed by Israel will lead. Does Israel want to see the PA collapse? Has it taken into account the impact its action will have on the PA’s faltering economy?

Dear parents: you are being lied to about vaccines

Dear parents: you are being lied to about vaccines:

They say that vaccines haven't been rigorously tested for safety.
But vaccines are subjected to a higher level of scrutiny than any other medicine. For example, this 

 study tested the safety and effectiveness of the pneumococcal vaccine in more than 37,868 children.





They will say that doctors won't admit there are any side effects to vaccines.
But the side effects are well known, and except in very rare cases, quite mild.





They say that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
It doesn't. The question of whether vaccines cause autism has been investigated in study after study, and they all show overwhelming evidence that they don't.)





They say that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism.
It doesn't, and it hasn't been used in most vaccines since 2001 anyway.

The Minister Who Went to Jail for Financial-Aid Fraud - The Atlantic

The Minister Who Went to Jail for Financial-Aid Fraud - The Atlantic:

America has a long history of using legal codes and elaborate
paperwork to keep the black middle-class from rising. In the mid-20th
century, as Ta-Nehisi Coates elaborated in his Atlantic story “The Case for Reparations,”
hundreds of black Chicago residents were forced to buy their homes on
contract, paying far more than the market value and often losing their
homes altogether. To upwardly mobile black families, today’s college
admissions and student loan process often feels like another version of
the same story. For Brazil, getting his students on a path to success
meant working around a series of obstacles that often seemed
intentionally designed to hold them back.





This context might not have been enough to earn Brazil a not-guilty
verdict. After all, he’d been caught on tape committing a crime. But
from Rodney King to Eric Garner, history has proven that a tape doesn’t
always lead to a conviction. And context certainly matters; a skilled
attorney and a sympathetic judge might have brought about a very
different outcome. After all, the judge in Latasha Harlins’s case saw
footage of Soon Ja Du shooting the 15-year-old in the back of the head,
yet he was moved enough by the grocer’s defense to give her probation
instead of jail time.

Isis: the inside story | Martin Chulov | World news | The Guardian

Isis: the inside story | Martin Chulov | World news | The Guardian: “He was respected very much by the US army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”



As Isis has rampaged through the region, it has been led by men who spent time in US detention centres during the American occupation of Iraq – in addition to Bucca, the US also ran Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport, and, for an ill-fated 18 months early in the war, Abu Ghraib prison on the capital’s western outskirts. Many of those released from these prisons – and indeed, several senior American officers who ran detention operations – have admitted that the prisons had an incendiary effect on the insurgency.

Giving away ‘Anatoly Z.’ - Yahoo News

Giving away ‘Anatoly Z.’ - Yahoo News: The twin landmines of adoption are fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and reactive attachment disorder. The first, FASD, is rooted in a birth mother’s use of alcohol during pregnancy, affecting the physical map of the brain; on a PET scan this presents as smooth surface where the folds that regulate impulsivity, reason and learning should be. The second, RAD, is a result of early neglect, withering a child’s ability to form attachments. It is most often seen in foreign adoptions from countries where orphanage life means spending most of the day in a spare crib with little to no human interaction, but it is also found in domestic adoptions of older children from American foster care.

When experts talk about attachment issues, they stress three things. First, the worst symptoms affect a very small percentage of adoptees, and second, that is still a lot of children.

The One Night | Sondry

The One Night | Sondry: We fought off wave after wave of Viet Cong who wanted to skin us alive. It got quite, and next thing I know, a grenade had landed in between the two us. He shoved me out of the foxhole and laid down.



The ringing in my ears was deafening. I crawled back into the pit to find Norman, he wasn't there anymore. Not only that, but our squad had bounded forward, and I was alone, in a dense jungle thousands miles from home. I looked over to my right, and Norman's decapitated head lay in the grass, hardly recognizable. I grabbed it and put it into my lap and sobbed. I was alone in that hole for the next 15 hours. Norman's head soaked my pants in his blood. The next patrol found me the day after. I hadn't
2/4
The One Night -
War
horrors
Reflection
moved, I didn't want to.

CONFESSIONS OF A FUNERAL DIRECTOR � Helping Humanity Befriend Mortality

CONFESSIONS OF A FUNERAL DIRECTOR � Helping Humanity Befriend Mortality: There are losses in our society that — for one reason or another — aren’t recognized. This kind of grief is a disenfranchised grief.

Here are a couple forms of grief that often aren’t validated by society:



1. Grief from miscarriages. This is a silent grief. A grief that few people share; and when they do share, few people show compassion. This is a grief for one who had no connections in life. No schoolmates, no friends, no co-workers … all of which translates to no funeral. A grief that can’t be shared. A grief to be borne solely by the ones who conceived. A grief that is carried by the one who may now feel guilt upon silent grief because she miscarried.

This is a grief that is often carried alone. A grief that is too often complicated by guilt. A grief that is private and difficult to share. A grief for a nameless soul.

Why doctors fail | Atul Gawande | News | The Guardian

Why doctors fail | Atul Gawande | News | The Guardian:

But Forssmann just had to give it a try. So he stole into the x-ray
room, took a urinary catheter, made a slit in his own arm, threaded it
up his vein and into his own heart and convinced a nurse to help him
take a series of nine x-rays showing the tube inside his own heart.




He published the evidence – and was fired. Then in 1956, he was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine with André Cournand and Dickinson Richards
who, some 20 years later at Columbia University, had taken Forssmann’s
findings and recognised that you could not only put a catheter into the
human heart but also shoot dye through the catheter. That enabled them
to take pictures and see from the inside how the heart actually worked.
Together the three had founded the field of cardiology.

Why doctors fail | Atul Gawande | News | The Guardian

Why doctors fail | Atul Gawande | News | The Guardian:

But Forssmann just had to give it a try. So he stole into the x-ray
room, took a urinary catheter, made a slit in his own arm, threaded it
up his vein and into his own heart and convinced a nurse to help him
take a series of nine x-rays showing the tube inside his own heart.




He published the evidence – and was fired. Then in 1956, he was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine with André Cournand and Dickinson Richards
who, some 20 years later at Columbia University, had taken Forssmann’s
findings and recognised that you could not only put a catheter into the
human heart but also shoot dye through the catheter. That enabled them
to take pictures and see from the inside how the heart actually worked.
Together the three had founded the field of cardiology.

Good Kids, Bad City: After 39 Years of Wrongful Incarceration, Ricky Jackson and the Bridgeman Brothers Walk Free | Scene and Heard: Scene's News Blog | Cleveland Scene

Good Kids, Bad City: After 39 Years of Wrongful Incarceration, Ricky Jackson and the Bridgeman Brothers Walk Free | Scene and Heard: Scene's News Blog | Cleveland Scene:

Ricky, along with Bitzie and Buddy — brothers Ronnie and Wiley Bridgeman
— were sentenced to death for murder. A white money-order salesman had
been robbed and shot at their neighborhood corner store. The police said
Ronnie and Ricky beat the man before Ricky pulled the trigger. Wiley
was the getaway driver. No physical evidence linked the defendants to
the crime. But police had a witness — a 13-year-old boy named Edward
Vernon who claimed to have seen it all. All at once, Ricky, Ronnie and
Wiley became strings of digits on a jailer's list: 144061, 143953 and
143810, respectively. They were 18, 17 and 20 years old.



The catch was that they were innocent. It would take nearly 40 years to prove that fact.

How an eBay bookseller defeated a publishing giant at the Supreme Court | Ars Technica

How an eBay bookseller defeated a publishing giant at the Supreme Court | Ars Technica: With embedded software now found in countless products ranging from cars to clocks, the question becomes whether rights in these products will be controlled by the owners or by copyright holders. Cisco’s “Internet of Everything” initiative makes the point that the physical world is increasingly blending into the digital world, but Shore sees peril in this trend. "We have to ask ourselves: do we want to be an ownership society or a licensing society?”

My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her. - NYTimes.com

My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her. - NYTimes.com: We should celebrate scientists not solely for their accomplishments but also for their courage and the tenacity required to discover anything at all. There are brave people out there working right now. They are brave not because they are killing themselves slowly or leaping from airplanes or catching rare tropical diseases, although scientists have done all those things. They are brave because of the intense emotional risks of trying to do something no one has done before by following your own lead. Radiation is a potent allegory for human life. Everything is always, inevitably falling apart; we are all in arrested decay. Our greatest achievements may become at best footnotes; few people remember us; we can’t know what will eventually come of our work.

grown up | Fredrik deBoer

grown up | Fredrik deBoer: “We only pirate because it’s so inconvenient to get these legally!” You could literally download thousands of movies, books, games, and albums from a moving plane. “It’s so expensive legally!” There’s thousands of movies to rent, albums to buy, and games to play for $5 or less, all delivered, in seconds, to objects you hold in your hands, in your own home, or anywhere else you prefer to be. “People only pirate things that aren’t available to pay for!” Torrents for movies and albums you can instantly download for less than $10 get downloaded by the millions. “It’s only taking money from millionaires!” In fact many of the people hurt most by piracy are independent and experimental artists who have are already just scraping by, or the creative middle classes that perform essential services for artists. “VHS and the 8-track went away too!” Those are mediums, not art forms. VHS giving way to DVD didn’t mean there were no more movies being sold. People refusing to pay for movies and music makes it less likely that some movies and albums will get made. “Piracy is a triumph for the little guy!” Literally the opposite.

the truth is good enough | Fredrik deBoer

the truth is good enough | Fredrik deBoer: When Cathy Young writes a piece pointing out that we know for a fact of rare but real incidents where women made false accusations of rape, and people excoriate her despite the fact that she explicitly calls those false accusations rare, it demonstrates that those people think our moral case against rape is so weak it cannot withstand exposure to the facts. When people react to the phrase “due process” as though it in and of itself amounts to rape denial, they don’t send the message that the case for arresting and prosecuting rapists is strong. They act as though it is so terribly weak it cannot survive in a world of basic liberal values and fairness.

Possible math of HIV and blood

Will The FDA Ever Get Over Its Hemo-phobia? Ctd � The Dish: However, as is pointed out, all blood is tested for HIV. Even if we put in place controls that would increase the chance of catching new infections, no test is perfect. Most modern HIV tests are weighted more towards false positives than false negatives (for obvious reasons), but still about 3 out of 10,000 tests of HIV-positive individuals will turn out negative. That means, in the absence of a ban, an additional 0.0000375% of donated blood that reaches patients will be HIV-positive. Put in other terms, an additional 1 in every 2.5 million blood transfusions would involve transmitting HIV contaminated blood.



That number might seem acceptably small, until you consider that in the US alone, there are about 5 million blood transfusions each year. That means the absence of a ban could result in an additional two Americans every year being given HIV accidentally simply for going to the hospital. That seems unacceptably high to me.

'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' by Thomas Piketty, reviewed | The New Republic

'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' by Thomas Piketty, reviewed | The New Republic: If already existing agglomerations of wealth tend to grow faster than incomes from work, it is likely that the role of inherited wealth in society will increase relative to that of recently earned and therefore more merit-based fortunes. Needless to say, the fact that the aggregate of wage incomes grows only at a relatively slow rate does not exclude the possibility that outstandingly successful innovators, managers, entrepreneurs, entertainers, and others can accumulate large amounts of wealth in a lifetime and join the ranks of the rentiers. But a slower rate of growth certainly makes such success stories less likely. There will be more to say about this. Yet the arithmetic suggests that the concentration of wealth and its ability to grow will favor an increasing weight of inheritance as compared with talent.

Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it -- Fusion

Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it -- Fusion: The Random Darknet Shopper, an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich, Switzerland titled The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which runs through January 11.



The concept would be all gravy if not for one thing: the programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport– developments which have left some observers of the bot’s blog a little uneasy.

Texas Is Throwing People In Jail For Failing To Pay Back Predatory Loans

Texas Is Throwing People In Jail For Failing To Pay Back Predatory :

Baddour said one DA told her that of the hot check complaints he had
received, none had led to criminal charges or prosecutions. Instead, he
said, his office sent letters threatening criminal charges unless the
initial loan amounts plus fees were repaid.



The DA, who seemed to
think he was showing evidence of his proper conduct, was instead
admitting that his office functioned as a debt collector.

Putin and the Art of Political Fantasy | Standpoint

Putin and the Art of Political Fantasy | Standpoint:

The Stalinist system came to Russia 90 years ago and with it the
frequent belief in manifestly untrue assertions. This practice has been
more pronounced in some periods than in others. It has been denounced on
various occasions by experts, but it has by no means been rejected. If
in recent years there has been increased sympathy, even a certain
longing, for the Stalin period in Russian history, it should not be
surprising that this includes the readiness to believe manifestly untrue
assertions. President Putin himself argued not long ago that Stalin was
no worse than Oliver Cromwell.

race “science” and shoulds | Fredrik deBoer

race “science” and shoulds | Fredrik deBoer:

The response that I both respect the most, and which discourages me
the most, is this one: black people should not have to debate their
intellectual equality. And indeed, it’s true. They shouldn’t have to.
But I don’t know what that “should” means. I don’t know what it refers
to. I don’t know what valence it has. What does should have to do with
anything? Eric Garner should be alive. Chelsea Manning should be free.
The poor should be clothed and fed. Racism should be over. Of course
black people shouldn’t have to debate their intellectual equality, and
it’s nice that in progressive environs, they largely don’t have to. But
America writ large does not operate by the social norms of lefty
Twitter, and the effects of the presumption of black stupidity are
pernicious and destructive, and so that should has no meaning, to me.
Lots of things should be, and aren’t, and so you are forced to deal with
the world as it is.




The word “should” is the worst thing that ever happened to the left.
“Should” has become a virus in the contemporary left, a word that is
more effective at defeating left-wing resistance than any right-wing
argument ever could be. It seems like every day I read fellow leftists
telling me what they should and shouldn’t have to do, rather than what
they are compelled by injustice to do.

Harvard Law School Found in Violation of Title IX, Agrees to Remedy Sexual Harassment, including Sexual Assault of Students | U.S. Department of Education

Harvard Law School Found in Violation of Title IX, Agrees to Remedy Sexual Harassment, including Sexual Assault of Students | U.S. Department of Education: The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced today that it has entered into a resolution agreement with Harvard University and its Law School after finding the Law School in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 for its response to sexual harassment, including sexual assault.

How Gary Hart Tried to Change Military History - The Atlantic

How Gary Hart Tried to Change Military History - The Atlantic: Late 20th century and early 21st century conflicts have been irregular and unconventional with less Congressional involvement and oversight, much less involvement of civil society and without an official beginning and end. Victory is increasingly elusive and difficult to define.



There are three fundamental reasons to pursue military reforms. First, every period of technological change implies the adoption of new, oft-times radically different, military “tools and practices.” Second, our stressed economic situation and consequent fiscal constraints require us to invest in our military with far more circumspection than in the past. Last, the external security environment, filling up with rising regional powers – and ever more potent networks – should spur us, in our straitened economic condition, to pursue innovative approaches that will restore our somewhat blunted “edge.”

APNewsBreak: DC farm site is ecological disaster - Yahoo News

APNewsBreak: DC farm site is ecological disaster - Yahoo News: The property technically belongs to the National Park Service, but it transferred control to the city in 1972. It's not clear how long the illegal dumping has been going on, but it didn't stop once BrightFarms showed up — someone cut a lock on the fence the company installed and continued dumping, Lightfoot said.

The greenhouse project could have provided a lift to struggling Ward 8, an impoverished, mostly black section of the city east of the Anacostia River. Both Gray and Bowser have said development east of the river is a top priority.

Absent a commitment from the incoming Bowser administration by Dec. 31, Lightfoot said he'll leave the District and build his next greenhouse in rural Virginia instead.

"We want to build here. We can build here. We have the money to build here," Lightfoot said. "But without the city supporting us, a messy site that's festering is never going to get better."

James Fallows on the draft

James Fallows on the draft: It was, initially, a generalized shame at having gotten away with my deception, but it came into sharper focus later in the day. Even as the last of the Cambridge contingent was throwing its urine and deliberately failing its color-blindness tests, buses from the next board began to arrive. These bore the boys from Chelsea, thick, dark-haired young men, the white proles of Boston. Most of them were younger than us, since they had just left high school, and it had clearly never occurred to them that there might be a way around the draft. They walked through the examination lines like so many cattle off to slaughter. I tried to avoid noticing, but the results were inescapable. While perhaps four out of five of my friends from Harvard were being deferred, just the opposite was happening to the Chelsea boys.



We returned to Cambridge that afternoon, not in government buses but as free individuals, liberated and victorious. The talk was high-spirited, but there was something close to the surface that none of us wanted to mention. We knew now who would be killed.

Sharing one more quote

The Tragedy of the American Military - The Atlantic: In clear contrast to the A-10, the F-35 is an ill-starred undertaking that would have been on the front pages as often as other botched federal projects, from the Obamacare rollout to the FEMA response after Hurricane Katrina, if, like those others, it either seemed to affect a broad class of people or could easily be shown on TV—or if so many politicians didn’t have a stake in protecting it. One measure of the gap in coverage: Total taxpayer losses in the failed Solyndra solar-energy program might come, at their most dire estimate, to some $800 million. Total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the F-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “Solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the F-35. Here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War.

The Tragedy of the American Military - The Atlantic

The Tragedy of the American Military - The Atlantic: Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.

The Necessity of Stress | Heads and Tales at Marin Academy

The Necessity of Stress | Heads and Tales at Marin Academy: The Biosphere 2 project was created as a research tool for scientists to study Earth’s living systems, and it allowed scientists to play with farming and innovation in a way that didn’t harm the planet. One of the most profound discoveries made by the scientists had nothing to do with a cure for some new disease or a new way of farming land. Rather, the discovery had to do with the wind’s role in a tree’s life. The trees inside Biosphere 2 grew rapidly, more rapidly than they did outside of the dome, but they also fell over before reaching maturation. After looking at the root systems and outer layers of bark, the scientists came to realize that a lack of wind in Biosphere 2 caused a deficiency of stress wood. Stress wood helps a tree position itself for optimal sun absorption and it also helps trees grow more solidly. Without stress wood, a tree can grow quickly, but it cannot support itself fully. It cannot withstand normal wear and tear, and survive. In other words, the trees needed some stress in order to thrive in the long run.

ISIL 'killed foreign fighters in its ranks' - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

ISIL 'killed foreign fighters in its ranks' - Middle East - Al Jazeera English: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has killed 120 of its own members, most of them foreign fighters trying to return home, during the past six months, a Syrian monitoring group has said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday that the group also killed 1,175 civilians, including eight women and four children, in the same period.



Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian monitoring group, told Reuters news agency that 930 of the civilians were members of the Sheitaat, a Sunni Muslim tribe from eastern Syria that fought ISIL for control of two oilfields in August.

He said that 116 foreign fighters, who had joined ISIL but later wanted to return home, were executed in the Syrian provinces of Deir Ezzor, Raqqa and Hasakeh since November. Four other ISIL fighters were killed on other charges, Abdulrahman said.

"People say, 'That's not fair. Where's the money going to come from? Who's gonna pay for it?' The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community." -Alan Watts : BasicIncome

"People say, 'That's not fair. Where's the money going to come from? Who's gonna pay for it?' The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community." -Alan Watts : BasicIncome:





Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a
minimum income. Now you see that absolutely horrifies most people. “Say
all these wastrels, these people who are out of a job because they're
really lazy see... ah giving them money?” Yeah, because otherwise the machines can't work.
They come to a blockage.
This was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still,
in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and
farms and mines and factories...everything going. But suddenly because
of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about
the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor -
starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological
hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought
to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering.
It is ingenuity. You see we are psychologically back in the 17th
century and technically in the 20th. And here comes the problem.





So what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological
attitude to money and to wealth and further more to pleasure and further
more to the nature of work. And this is a formidable problem.

James Surowiecki | What the History of Silicon Valley Teaches | Foreign Affairs

James Surowiecki | What the History of Silicon Valley Teaches | Foreign Affairs: Thiel obviously thinks that entrepreneurs should do the latter—if they have genuinely great ideas. (Otherwise, he suggests, they’re better off going to work for someone else who has a great idea.)As he puts it, “better to risk boldness than triviality.” And although he recognizes that luck plays a role in whether or not one succeeds, he contends that entrepreneurs need to “prioritize design over chance.” Even though they may know that the potential outcomes of their actions are uncertain, they need to plan, and not use that uncertainty as a crutch. These are the things that Isaacson’s innovators did. Isaacson’s history suggests that by its very nature, successful innovation requires a leap of faith, a willingness to believe that one can go from zero to one. Or, as the computer scientist Alan Kay has put it, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

'ISLAMIC STATE' - Seven Impressions Of A Difficult Journey - J�rgen Todenh�fer - J�rgen Todenh�fer

'ISLAMIC STATE' - Seven Impressions Of A Difficult Journey - J�rgen Todenh�fer - J�rgen Todenh�fer: 1.) THE WEST IS DRAMATICALLY UNDERESTIMATING THE THREAT EMANATING FROM ISIS, and ISIS’ fighters are much more intelligent and dangerous than our politicians realize. The Islamic State is drenched in almost infectious enthusiasm and confident of victory – something I have never before experienced in a warzone. More importantly, the ISIS fighters are convinced that their totalitarian faith and demonstrative brutality will help them move mountains. In Mosul, less than 400 ISIS fighters routed many as 25,000 Iraqi soldiers and militias despite their ultra-modern equipment. Within months, the ISIS has conquered a territory larger than Great Britain and dwarfed Al Qaeda.

Occasional losses or changes of terrain don’t seem to concern ISIS in any way. While some media outlets tend to exaggerate those events, ISIS considers them as normal in guerilla warfare.

BBC - Future - Can you live a normal life with half a brain?

BBC - Future - Can you live a normal life with half a brain?:

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum,
a distinct structure found at the back of the brain. By some estimates
the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have. This isn't
just brain damage – the whole structure is absent. Yet this woman lives a
normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid
following an uneventful pregnancy and birth. A pretty standard biography
for a 24-year-old.



The woman wasn't completely unaffected – she
had suffered from uncertain, clumsy, movements her whole life. But the
surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so
fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates. The sharks that swam when dinosaurs walked the Earth had cerebellums.

The condensed Bob Woodward.

The condensed Bob Woodward.:

Page 186-87: Bush cites a CIA report that says 71 percent of the
French population sees Saddam as a "threat to world peace." The report
is bogus—the French vigorously oppose the war.

Page 247-49: At a December 2002 briefing, Tenet's deputy makes the
case that Iraq is harboring weapons of mass destruction. Bush says,
"I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the
best we've got?" Tenet raises his arms and says, "Don't worry, it's a
slam-dunk!" To date, no WMD have been found in Iraq.

Page 387-99: On March 19, 2003, Tenet informs Bush of CIA reports
that suggest Saddam and his sons are hiding out on an Iraqi farm. Later,
after an airstrike ordered by the president, Tenet says, "Tell the
president we got the son of a bitch." Saddam and his sons survive the
attack.

Heidi Woodman - Gold Fever | LensCulture

Heidi Woodman - Gold Fever | LensCulture: As such, Ghana’s health and success as a country and as a population is inextricably linked to its environment. So, the relentless pursuit of gold, while profitable in the short-term, is ultimately destroying the things that are most precious to Ghana. As long as the price of gold remains at the mercy of the emotional whims of the international investment community, the situation will remain unstable. Nevertheless, it is important that the Ghanian government try to implement measures that limit the damage and ensure that those who are reaping the rewards are also sharing their spoils.

I Don’t Want to Be Right - The New Yorker

I Don’t Want to Be Right - The New Yorker: A climate-change study from 2012 found a similar effect. Strong partisanship affected how a story about climate change was processed, even if the story was apolitical in nature, such as an article about possible health ramifications from a disease like the West Nile Virus, a potential side effect of change. If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.

It's US currency, and you have to take it! : TalesFromRetail

It's US currency, and you have to take it! : TalesFromRetail:

Fast forward a month and the local news is wall to wall coverage of
an embezzlement scandal. Mr. and Mrs. Chase, two meter maids and the
city accountant all get a televised perp-walk for stealing from the
city. The meter maids were skimming beer money, their boss was skimming a
lot, and the accountant was using what was left like a personal slush
fund to run for county government.





Their downfall? The officer from the auto parts store got curious why a city employee's wife was driving a V12 Mercedes and trying to pay with $500 in quarters.

Why String Theory Still Offers Hope We Can Unify Physics | Science | Smithsonian

Why String Theory Still Offers Hope We Can Unify Physics | Science | Smithsonian:

Many researchers have pinned their hopes on finding a
new class of so-called “supersymmetric” particles that emerge from
string theory’s highly ordered mathematical equations. Other collider
signals could show hints of extra-spatial dimensions, or even evidence
of microscopic black holes, a possibility that arises from string
theory’s exotic treatment of gravity on tiny distance scales.

While none of these predictions can properly be called
a smoking gun—various non-stringy theories have incorporated them too—a
positive identification would be on par with the discovery of the Higgs
particle, and would, to put it mildly, set the world of physics on
fire. The scales would tilt toward string theory.

But what happens in the event—likely, according to some—that the collider yields no remotely stringy signatures?