Our Better Angels | RedState

Our Better Angels | RedState: Society is out to get them. Instead of judging them individually, police and others judge young black men collectively. In a group? Probably up to no good, whether it is true or not.



Conservatives have a tendency to say young black men need to rise so far about the stereotyped behavior they cannot be blamed. Liberals say that is unfair. And the truth is that in some cases they could rise as close to the standard of Jesus as possible and some policeman somewhere still might pull them over.



 If only we could all rely on our better angels. But I am a pessimist on this issue. Too many people on both sides have too much of an incentive to keep tensions going. It is a TV ratings bonanza for cable news and reality shows. Too many profit off it.

Fire Chief suspended after publishing book calling homosexuality ‘unclean,’ ‘vulgar’ - Atlanta Business Chronicle

Fire Chief suspended after publishing book calling homosexuality ‘unclean,’ ‘vulgar’ - Atlanta Business Chronicle: Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran is suspended for one month without pay after publishing a book that says homosexuality and having multiple sexual partners is "vile," "vulgar", and "inappropriate".

The Truth | RedState

The Truth | RedState: Republicans will not stop Barack Obama’s executive overreach. In fact, while you were enjoying your Thanksgiving there were a number of stories out that the Republican leadership wants to give its members an opportunity to express their outrage and opposition.

Expression is not action.

A eulogy for RadioShack, the panicked and half-dead retail empire - SBNation.com

A eulogy for RadioShack, the panicked and half-dead retail empire - SBNation.com: I bet RadioShack was great once. I can't look through their decades-old catalogs and come away with any other impression. They sold giant walnut-wood speakers I'd kill to have today. They sold computers back when people were trying to understand what they were.



When I was a little kid, going to RadioShack was better than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall people.

By the time I got tall and worked there, RadioShack had already begun to die, I think. It failed exotically, with great flourishes, on canvases large and small, and in ways previously unimagined, taking pause only to kick around the souls who kept it alive. It doesn't have me to kick around anymore, and soon, it won't have anyone.

Oil prices keep plummeting as OPEC starts a price war with the US - Vox

Oil prices keep plummeting as OPEC starts a price war with the US - Vox: This marks a big shift in global oil politics. Essentially, OPEC is now engaged in a price war with oil producers in the United States. The cartel will let prices keep falling in the hopes that many of the newest drilling projects in the US will prove unprofitable and shut down.

This is a risky stand-off for OPEC, as many of its member countries require high oil prices to balance their budgets. Iran, for one, is facing a real pinch. It's also a sign that OPEC's influence over global oil markets may be waning.

The Astonishing Rise of Angela Merkel

The Astonishing Rise of Angela Merkel: Merkel can be tough to the point of unpleasantness, while offering Putin ways out of his own mess. Above all, she tries to understand how he thinks. “With Russia now, when one feels very angry I force myself to talk regardless of my feelings,” she said at the German Historical Museum. “And every time I do this I am surprised at how many other views you can have on a matter which I find totally clear. Then I have to deal with those views, and this can also trigger something new.” Soon after the annexation of Crimea, Merkel reportedly told Obama that Putin was living “in another world.” She set about bringing him back to reality.

Senator Paul’s War Resolution - NYTimes.com

Senator Paul’s War Resolution - NYTimes.com: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has asked Congress to declare war — something it has not done since World War II — on the Islamic State. The resolution would limit military action to one year and restrict the use of ground forces.

Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ � The Spectator

Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ � The Spectator:

This is what those censorious Cambridgers meant when they kept saying
they have the ‘right to be comfortable’. They weren’t talking about the
freedom to lay down on a chaise longue — they meant the right never to
be challenged by disturbing ideas or mind-battered by offensiveness. At
precisely the time they should be leaping brain-first into the rough and
tumble of grown-up, testy discussion, students are cushioning
themselves from anything that has the whiff of controversy. We’re
witnessing the victory of political correctness by stealth. As the
annoying ‘PC gone mad!’ brigade banged on and on about extreme instances
of PC — schools banning ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, etc. — nobody seems to
have noticed that the key tenets of PC, from the desire to destroy
offensive lingo to the urge to re-educate apparently corrupted minds,
have been swallowed whole by a new generation. This is a disaster, for
it means our universities are becoming breeding grounds of dogmatism. As
John Stuart Mill said, if we don’t allow our opinion to be ‘fully,
frequently, and fearlessly discussed’, then that opinion will be ‘held
as a dead dogma, not a living truth’.

Bogus Journal Accepts Profanity-Laced Anti-Spam Paper | Scholarly Open Access

Bogus Journal Accepts Profanity-Laced Anti-Spam Paper | Scholarly Open Access: After receiving a spam email from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, Dr. Peter Vamplew of Federation University Australia’s School of Engineering and Information Technology sent the anti-spam article as a reply to the spam email without any other message, expecting that they might open it and read it, but not that it would be considered for publication.



To his surprise, the journal accepted the paper and sent him an acceptance email that had two PDF attachments. One was a formal statement of acceptance and the second was the reviewer report.

I’m an evangelical minister. I now support the LGBT community — and the church should, too. - The Washington Post

I’m an evangelical minister. I now support the LGBT community — and the church should, too. - The Washington Post: For me, the answer to this debate has become simple: There is a sexual-minority population of about 5 percent of the human family that has received contempt and discrimination for centuries. In Christendom, the sexual ethics based in those biblical passages metastasized into a hardened attitude against sexual- and gender-identity minorities, bristling with bullying and violence. This contempt is in the name of God, the most powerful kind there is in the world. I now believe that the traditional interpretation of the most cited passages is questionable and that all that parsing of Greek verbs has distracted attention from the primary moral obligation taught by Jesus — to love our neighbors as ourselves, especially our most vulnerable neighbors. I also now believe that while any progress toward more humane treatment of LGBT people is good progress, we need to reconsider the entire body of biblical interpretation and tradition related to this issue.

Chris Christie’s Moral Dilemma | National Review Online

Chris Christie’s Moral Dilemma | National Review Online: All of their whining to Governor Christie about how misunderstood they are, how little the average American knows about what goes on at factory farms, would be more convincing if these very same people had not sought to make it a crime in Iowa, as of 2012, to produce, possess, or distribute any record of a “visual or audio experience occurring at [an] animal facility.” How are we supposed to “step foot on a pig farm,” as Mr. Tentinger puts it, when there are criminal penalties and barbed-wire fences to stop us?

The Endlessly Examined Life - The Baffler

The Endlessly Examined Life - The Baffler: My mental health file whirs to life in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d recently left Opus Dei, the Catholic religious order to which I’d committed my young soul, and a major depression had followed. The records printed below are out of the mouths of my many caretakers; they chronicle my treatment at various medical offices and psychiatric clinics in the Boston area, from then until 2012.

The press is responsible for ignoring Bill Cosby rape allegations : Columbia Journalism Review

The press is responsible for ignoring Bill Cosby rape allegations : Columbia Journalism Review: The odd thing about Cosby’s downfall is that nothing had changed in the last decade; there was no suggestion that any of the events described by his new accusers had happened since the first allegations and an accompanying civil case, which was settled. The initial lack of followup by influential outlets created a sort of reverse pack mentality—a reinforcing silence. No one mentioned it, because no one else had.

This was helped along by the feel-good nature of much arts writing: If the point of the story is to promote a comedy appearance, or a new book or other product, a digression into allegations of drugging and sexual assault was buzzkill.

The decade-long silence should be fodder for students of the press and of public relations. Cosby’s lawyers and publicists had always given furious and dismissive denials to the allegations. For a decade, helped along by an unquestioning media, the strategy worked.

Iranian nuclear talks will likely miss their deadline: Both sides should keep talking.

:

Article 4 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(which Iran has signed, like every country in the world except India,
Pakistan, Israel, and South Sudan), states: “Nothing in this Treaty
shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the
Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production, and use of
nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.”

This was the essential selling-point of the treaty: that in exchange
for foregoing nuclear weapons, a country would be granted “the
inalienable right” to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. In
fact, Article 5 requires the big five countries—those which already had
nuclear weapons at the time of its drafting in 1969 (the United States,
Great Britain, France, Russia, and China: the same P5 countries
negotiating with Iran)—to provide nuclear materials, at a low price, to
any country that signs the treaty.

Obama’s Immigration Order Isn’t a Power Grab | Brookings Institution

Obama’s Immigration Order Isn’t a Power Grab | Brookings Institution: Let’s get serious. Republicans used their majority foothold in the House to guarantee that Congress would be the graveyard of serious policymaking, a far cry from the deliberative first branch of government designed by the framers. They have reduced the legislative process to nothing more than a tool in a partisan war to control the levers of public power. The cost of such unrelenting opposition and gridlock is that policymaking initiative and power inevitably will flow elsewhere -- to the executive and the courts.

Obama’s advantage is that he has an immigration policy. Republicans don’t. - Vox

Obama’s advantage is that he has an immigration policy. Republicans don’t. - Vox: But one way or another, Republicans need to decide what to do with the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country now. They need to take away Obama's single strongest argument — that this is a crisis, and that congressional Republicans don't have an answer and won't let anyone else come up with one.

“For Decades, I Have Cringed Whenever Someone Called Me ‘Illegal’” - Jose Antonio Vargas - POLITICO Magazine

“For Decades, I Have Cringed Whenever Someone Called Me ‘Illegal’” - Jose Antonio Vargas - POLITICO Magazine: Of all the questions I get asked as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, there are two—asked in various permutations via email, social media or in person—that chill me to the bone: “Why don't you just make yourself legal?”

And: “Why don’t you get in the back of the line?”

The questions underscore the depth of misunderstanding about how the immigration process works, and doesn’t work. They imply that, short of self-deportation, there is a process for undocumented people like me to follow, a way to rectify the situation and adjust our status. Just show up at an office, fill out a form, and get in the back of a line. Somewhere. Anywhere.

Reflections on the Arab uprisings - The Washington Post

Reflections on the Arab uprisings - The Washington Post:

One point that emerged in the workshop discussions is the
extent to which we became too emotionally attached to particular actors
or policies. Caught up in the rush of events, and often deeply
identifying with our networks of friends and colleagues involved in
these politics, we may have allowed hope or passion to cloud our better
comparative judgment. That’s a fine quality in activists, but not so
helpful for academic rigor.



Libya: The Libya intervention is one of the very few
military actions in the region that I have ever supported – and the
results overwhelmingly suggest that I was wrong. I do not in any way
regret my support for that intervention, which saved many thousands of
lives and helped to bring an end to a brutal regime. Still, it is
impossible to look at Libya’s failed state and civil war, its proxy
conflict and regional destabilization, and not conclude that the
intervention’s negative effects over the long term outweigh the
short-term benefits. Moammar Gaddafi’s fall, combined with the
prominence of armed militias, left Libya without a functioning state and
little solid ground upon which to build a new political order. The
likelihood of such an outcome should have weighed more heavily in my
analysis.

jeffp12 comments on "Innocent young man" Michael Brown shown on security footage attacking shopkeeper- this is who people are defending

jeffp12 comments on "Innocent young man" Michael Brown shown on security footage attacking shopkeeper- this is who people are defending: So think about the tension of living in that town with a police force that you know is not going to hesitate to kill you if they feel at all threatened. They're supposed to be protecting and serving you, not getting trigger happy the moment they feel at all threatened.

So imagine living in that kind of poor community, with all these single-mothers and fathers in jail, many of them on non-violent drug charges. And even if they are in jail for violent crime, why did they become criminals? What kind of environment were they raised in?

So when they hear that a policeman killed an unarmed teenager, they already know that there won't be justice. That's why they protest. Because they have no other recourse.

Writing their congressman won't do any good. They can't lean on the mayor (who used to be a Ferguson cop). They can't wait for justice to run its course fairly. They already know the white cop will get away with it. That's why they protested even before the investigation was over. Because they already knew that the white cop would get away with it, regardless of the details of the crime.

What do the newly released witness statements tell us about the Michael Brown shooting? | PBS NewsHour

What do the newly released witness statements tell us about the Michael Brown shooting? | PBS NewsHour: In the grand jury case against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the prosecution revealed that physical evidence weighed in Wilson’s favor and that he had not unlawfully shot 18-year-old Michael Brown to death.

Over the course of the investigation, federal agents interviewed dozens of witnesses—some compelled to come forward by subpoena—to piece together what happened on that August 9 afternoon. Shortly after the press conference announcing the jury’s decision, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch released the transcripts of interviews with witnesses and Wilson.



We read and analyzed more than 500 pages of witness testimony and compared each statement to those given by Wilson. Below is a chart comparing several key details of the officer’s report to the witness statements. Was Brown facing Wilson when he was shot, or was his back turned to him? Did Brown have his hands in the air, or were they reaching toward his waist?

Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism? by Elizabeth Kolbert | The New York Review of Books

Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism? by Elizabeth Kolbert | The New York Review of Books: What’s going to determine how much the planet on average warms is how much CO2 gets added to the atmosphere in total. To have a reasonable shot at limiting warming to two degrees, the general consensus among scientists is that aggregate emissions since industrialization began in the mid-eighteenth century must be held to a trillion metric tons. Almost 600 billion of those tons have already been emitted, meaning that humanity has already blown through more than half of its “carbon budget.” If current trends continue, it will burn through the rest in the next twenty-five years. Thus, what is essential to preserving the possibility of 2 degrees is reversing these trends, and doing so immediately.

Har Nof Synagogue Attack in Israel Was Anti-Semitic, Not Political | New Republic

Har Nof Synagogue Attack in Israel Was Anti-Semitic, Not Political | New Republic: This is not to say that, for instance, last week’s murder of 26-year-old Dalia Lemkus was less obscene because it happened near a West Bank settlement. But the senselessness and brutality of the synagogue assault, and the otherworldliness of the victims, lays bare the inadequacy of rational political explanations for terror. No doubt the murderers had their grievances (and some perhaps were reasonable), but the butchery in Har Nof shows that any sense of strategy has been overwhelmed by hate. The murder of non-Zionist Torah scholars is an attack on Jews more than Israel, and explaining it requires an understanding of hatred, not of politics. Perhaps the current celebrations throughout the West Bank and Gaza—replete with songs of praise on mosque loudspeakers and the festival-like delivery of sweets to children—goes at least part of the way to providing that.

Canada's Former Liberal Party Leader Offers Advice to Young Liberals | New Republic

Canada's Former Liberal Party Leader Offers Advice to Young Liberals | New Republic: I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them—the careerists and predators—you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy. They knew the difference between an adversary and an enemy, knew when to take half a loaf and when to insist on the whole bakery, knew when to trust their own judgment and when to listen to the people.

Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my Bill Cosby allegations? - Chicago Tribune

Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my Bill Cosby allegations? - Chicago Tribune: I have never received any money from Bill Cosby and have not asked for it. I have nothing to gain by continuing to speak out. He can no longer be charged for his crimes against me because the statute of limitations is long past. That is also wrong. There should be no time limits on reporting these crimes, and one of my goals is to call for legislation to that end. Famous and wealthy perpetrators use their power to shame and silence their victims. It often takes years for young women to overcome those feeling and gain the confidence to come forward (by which point physical evidence is long gone). Our legal system shouldn't silence them a second time.

Zero to Three issues common-sense advice on toddler screen time.

Zero to Three issues common-sense advice on toddler screen time.: Worse, the “no screens” dictates have led to confusion. As a journalist who has spent a decade reviewing research on screentime and young children, I have spoken with families across the country about how they use technology with their children. Parents have told me about exhausting maneuvers they have attempted to keep their baby’s head turned away from screens when their older children are watching. One mother in Portland, Ore., was visibly upset when she approached me after a public forum on the subject. She and her 1-year-old had been Skyping with her mother in China, and she desperately wanted to keep doing so because they all loved the interactions, but she worried that something emanating from the screen would harm her baby. In fact, a 2013 study in the research journal Child Development shows the opposite: Webcam-like interactions with loved ones can help young children form bonds and learn new words.

Automation Makes Us Dumb - WSJ

Automation Makes Us Dumb - WSJ: Bright concluded that the overriding effect of automation was (in the jargon of labor economists) to “de-skill” workers rather than to “up-skill” them. “The lesson should be increasingly clear,” he wrote in 1966. “Highly complex equipment” did not require “skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be built into the machine.”



We are learning that lesson again today on a much broader scale. As software has become capable of analysis and decision-making, automation has leapt out of the factory and into the white-collar world. Computers are taking over the kinds of knowledge work long considered the preserve of well-educated, well-trained professionals: Pilots rely on computers to fly planes; doctors consult them in diagnosing ailments; architects use them to design buildings. Automation’s new wave is hitting just about everyone.

IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 16, No. 3 (Fall 2014) - Falling -

IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 16, No. 3 (Fall 2014) - Falling -: Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

House intel panel debunks many Benghazi theories

House intel panel debunks many Benghazi theories: Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found.



The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.

Standards, Fallen - Peggy Noonan's Blog - WSJ

Standards, Fallen - Peggy Noonan's Blog - WSJ: “The West Wing” was so groundbreaking, and had in so many ways such a benign impact. But I wonder if it didn’t give an entire generation the impression that how you do it on a TV drama is how you do it in real life.



 And so the president calls the senator and the aide listens in and cuts the president off. And things in Washington are more like a novel than life, but a cheap novel, and more like a TV show than life, but a poor and increasingly dark one.

BigBennP comments on "The justices, she argues, are no longer equipped to understand how their decisions affect average Americans. This decline in judicial empathy is a function of the increasing insularity of the men and women in black."

BigBennP comments on "The justices, she argues, are no longer equipped to understand how their decisions affect average Americans. This decline in judicial empathy is a function of the increasing insularity of the men and women in black.": When it comes to lawyers and judges there are basically three levels. Mechanics, engineers and physicists.



Most lawyers and many judges are mechanics. Their job is to rely on
established precedent and written law, take the facts, and fit the facts
to the law. SOmetimes there's some creative problem solving, but they
don't usualyl change the law.





Some lawyers and many judges are engineers. (Some law professors
too) Their job is to take new facts, and develop new solutions to meet
those facts, and make new law in the process. They create new law, but
it's usually limited to the specific application.





A select few judges and law professors are physicists. They study the
system as a whole, and convert guiding principles of ideology into
concrete rules that become broad new points of law, and guide everyone
else in their work.

9 Rules For Emailing From Google Exec Eric Schmidt | TIME

9 Rules For Emailing From Google Exec Eric Schmidt | TIME: In a new book out this week chock full of Google-flavored business wisdom, How Google Works, Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt and former Senior Vice President of Products Jonathan Rosenberg share nine insightful rules for emailing (or gmailing!) like a professional

Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo

Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo: Plural marriage was difficult for all involved. For Joseph Smith’s wife Emma, it was an excruciating ordeal. Records of Emma’s reactions to plural marriage are sparse; she left no firsthand accounts, making it impossible to reconstruct her thoughts. Joseph and Emma loved and respected each other deeply. After he had entered into plural marriage, he poured out his feelings in his journal for his “beloved Emma,” whom he described as “undaunted, firm and unwavering, unchangeable, affectionate Emma.” After Joseph’s death, Emma kept a lock of his hair in a locket she wore around her neck.



Emma approved, at least for a time, of four of Joseph Smith’s plural marriages in Nauvoo, and she accepted all four of those wives into her household. She may have approved of other marriages as well.39 But Emma likely did not know about all of Joseph’s sealings.40 She vacillated in her view of plural marriage, at some points supporting it and at other times denouncing it.

'Billionaires' Book Review: Money Can't Buy Happiness | New Republic

'Billionaires' Book Review: Money Can't Buy Happiness | New Republic: He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. “All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,” says Norton. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. “While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness,” says Norton, “spending it on others increases happiness.”

My hero: Jim Shepard by Joshua Ferris | Books | The Guardian

My hero: Jim Shepard by Joshua Ferris | Books | The Guardian: If you haven’t read Shepard, you should, because he’s also one of the US’s finest writers, full of wit, humanity and fearless curiosity. These are the same qualities that mark his teaching and define his character. It’s a hell of a thing to walk the earth with Jim Shepard.

John Oliver Is Outdoing The Daily Show -- Vulture

John Oliver Is Outdoing The Daily Show -- Vulture: Oliver's show threw a wrench into that possible outcome by taking core bits that once were the sole province of The Daily Show (the punny/smart-assed headlines, the "gotcha" deconstructions of political chicanery, the "Does this person I am interviewing know I am putting them on?" segments, the occasionally surreal imagery) and putting them at the service of education. I've watched every installment of Last Week since its debut. Every time, I've come away feeling that I've truly learned something. In an increasingly degraded journalistic landscape, that's an astonishing achievement.

ObamaCare architect: 'Stupidity' of voters helped bill pass | TheHill

ObamaCare architect: 'Stupidity' of voters helped bill pass | TheHill: "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. "And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."

Ten bad assumptions about 2014. | RedState

Ten bad assumptions about 2014. | RedState: Dice have a memory. This applies to both sides, including the Republicans: because let me tell you something. A day will come when the incumbent President’s party will clean up in the sixth-year midterm election, whether or not the President is popular. Or that incumbent Senators will be able to distance themselves from an disliked President. Or any of the other rules of thumb that haven’t been tossed in the wastepaper basket yet. And I absolutely assure you that the GOP winning big this year does not give them some sort of mystical protection from future failures. Especially if the Republicans try to rest on their laurels: complacency kills electoral careers faster than almost anything else I can think of**.

Republicans May Finally Get Their Wish to Watch the Affordable Care Act Destroyed

Republicans May Finally Get Their Wish to Watch the Affordable Care Act Destroyed: This is a country where people shake their fists at their members of Congress and say, "Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare!", where people like their state Obamacare exchange but hate Obamacare, where people approve of almost everything this law does but disapprove of the law itself. You think the public as a whole is going to understand this lawsuit and know who to blame? Don't bet on it. They'll only know that now they can't get insurance anymore. "Obamacare took away my subsidy!" they'll cry. And Republicans will laugh and laugh.

Supreme Court's Next Chance to Kill Obamacare - Bloomberg View

Supreme Court's Next Chance to Kill Obamacare - Bloomberg View: What seems almost certain is that the other conservative justices have decided to put Roberts to the test. They will not let him get away without standing up and being counted on Obamacare once again. They have nothing to lose in any case by taking the gamble. For better or worse, the rest of us will be along for the ride. Stand by for a long six months of speculation while this case gets briefed and argued. A decision will come by the end of June. Its d�j�vu all over again.

The Rise of Invisible Unemployment - The Atlantic

The Rise of Invisible Unemployment - The Atlantic: We're adding lots of jobs in industries with stagnant wages, and a few jobs in industries with rising wages, according to new research out of the Cleveland Fed. "It may seem counterintuitive that wages and salaries are growing the slowest in industries where jobs are growing the fastest, but it actually is not," writes LaVaughn M. Henry, vice president of the bank's Cincinnati branch. We're adding few jobs in goods-producing industries like manufacturing, which have the highest overall post-recession wage growth, and lots of jobs in service-producing industries (e.g. health care, leisure and hospitality, and education), which have the lowest real wage growth.

The Next Technology Revolution Will Drive Abundance And Income Disparity

The Next Technology Revolution Will Drive Abundance And Income Disparity: As Karl Marx said, “when the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off”. Extrapolation of our past experiences, a favorite technique of economists, may not be a valid predictor of the future—the historical correlation may be broken by a new causality. Efforts at estimating the number of jobs that are susceptible to computerization underestimate how technology may evolve and make assumptions that seem very likely to be false, similar to past “truths” (like the waning correlation between productivity and income growth for labor). Even with this underestimate, researchers concluded that of the 702 job functions studied, 47-percent are at risk of being automated.

Mr. Miller Doesn’t Go to Washington - Matt Miller - POLITICO Magazine

Mr. Miller Doesn’t Go to Washington - Matt Miller - POLITICO Magazine: Campaign fundraising is a bizarre, soul-warping endeavor. You spend your time endlessly adding to lists of people who might be in a position to help. You enter them on a spreadsheet (dubbed “The Tracker”) and sort the names from high to low in terms of their giving potential. You start to think of every human being in your orbit as having a number attached to them. You book breakfasts, lunches, coffees and drinks at which you make the case for your candidacy … and ask for money. Always money. You call dozens of people a day … and ask for money. When people ask how they can help, you mostly ask them for the names of folks you can … ask for money.

The Real Meaning of Ich Bin ein Berliner - The Atlantic

The Real Meaning of Ich Bin ein Berliner - The Atlantic: So he fashioned a new speech on his own. Previously, Kennedy had said that in Roman times, no claim was grander than “I am a citizen of Rome.” For his Berlin speech, he had considered using the German equivalent, “I am a Berliner.”



Moments before taking the stage, during a respite in West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt’s office, JFK jotted down a few words in Latin and—with a translator’s help—the German version, written phonetically: Ish bin ein Bearleener.

Afterward it would be suggested that Kennedy had got the translation wrong—that by using the article ein before the word Berliner, he had mistakenly called himself a jelly doughnut. In fact, Kennedy was correct.



To state Ich bin Berliner would have suggested being born in Berlin, whereas adding the word ein implied being a Berliner in spirit. His audience understood that he meant to show his solidarity.

How the Fall of the Berlin Wall Radicalized Putin - The Daily Beast

How the Fall of the Berlin Wall Radicalized Putin - The Daily Beast: His country, which he had served as well as he could, patiently accepting whatever role it saw fit to assign him, had abandoned Putin. He had been scared and powerless to protect himself, and Moscow had been silent. He spent the several hours before the military arrived inside the besieged building, shoving papers into a wood-burning stove until the stove split from the excessive heat. He destroyed everything he and his colleagues had worked to collect: all the contacts, personnel files, surveillance reports, and, probably, endless press clippings.

The Man Who Disobeyed His Boss And Opened The Berlin Wall : Parallels : NPR

The Man Who Disobeyed His Boss And Opened The Berlin Wall : Parallels : NPR: To many Germans, Harald Jaeger is the man who opened the Berlin Wall.

It's a legacy that still makes the former East German border officer uncomfortable 25 years after he defied his superiors' orders and let thousands of East Berliners pour across his checkpoint into the West.

"I didn't open the wall. The people who stood here, they did it," says the 71-year-old with a booming voice who was an East German lieutenant colonel in charge of passport control at Bornholmer Street. "Their will was so great, there was no other alternative but to open the border."

Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds — The Message — Medium

Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds — The Message — Medium: In the last week many people have asked me: Is Tilde.Club a social network? Is it a company? Is this a product? A minimum viable product? What did you do to build it? People have asked to talk with me about it, to interview me about it, and asked for my plans and goals. The site has been listed on Product Hunt, which is a website that itself just received $6.1 million in venture funding, so that it can fully carry out its mission of making a list of other websites that receive venture funding. And to that all I can say is —



Tilde.club is one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet.



That’s it. That’s all it is. It is no more than that.

The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism - WSJ

The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism - WSJ: As the U.S. moves into a new theater of the war on terror, it will miss its best chance to beat back Islamic State and other radical groups in the Middle East if it doesn’t deploy a crucial but little-used weapon: an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment. Right now, all we hear about are airstrikes and military maneuvers—which is to be expected when facing down thugs bent on mayhem and destruction.

But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.

Justices to Hear New Challenge to Health Law - NYTimes.com

Justices to Hear New Challenge to Health Law - NYTimes.com: The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a new challenge to the Affordable Care Act, potentially imperiling President Obama’s signature legislative achievement two years after it survived a different Supreme Court challenge by a single vote.

The case concerns tax subsidies that currently help millions of people afford health insurance under the law. According to the challengers, those subsidies are being provided unlawfully in three dozen states that have decided not to run the marketplaces, known as exchanges, for insurance coverage.

If the challengers are right, people receiving subsidies in those states would become ineligible for them, destabilizing and perhaps dooming the law.

Chuck Todd's 'The Stranger,' About Barack Obama - NYTimes.com

Chuck Todd's 'The Stranger,' About Barack Obama - NYTimes.com: Mr. Todd acknowledges the challenges the president faced entering office: a tottering economy, two wars inherited from the Bush administration, and an obstructionist Republican opposition. But he suggests that Mr. Obama was frequently his own worst enemy, allowing his temperamental inclinations (his detachment, his caution, his impatience with the often-irrational aspects of politics) to hobble the implementation of his vision of transformative change. Mr. Todd goes so far as to write that “Obama’s arrogance got the better of him,” and chides him for an unwillingness to apply the necessary elbow grease to make progress on difficult issues like gun control and immigration.



The overall picture that emerges here is that of a highly insular and centralized White House that is reluctant to listen to outside experts, prone to cutting cabinet members out of the loop and unable or unwilling to learn from its mistakes.

Review of ‘National Security and Double Government’ by Michael J. Glennon - Books - The Boston Globe

Review of ‘National Security and Double Government’ by Michael J. Glennon - Books - The Boston Globe: This is no secret conspiracy nor a plot to deprive Americans of their civil liberties. It is the unintended consequence of a thoughtful attempt to head off the very threats that those attempts have inadvertently created. But if Glennon’s book is enlightening it is also scary. And it’s not fiction.

The Art of Not Working at Work - The Atlantic

The Art of Not Working at Work - The Atlantic: What's more, the jobs that are created often come up short on providing fulfillment. Involuntary slacking may first be conceived of as real bliss: “Hey, I don’t have to work!” one of my interviewees recalls. But as the years pass by, most of us will crave some type of meaningful activity. I interviewed an archivist who wrote his master’s thesis while at work and a subway-ticket collector who composed music in his little booth. If you're lucky, these activities may be pursued within the frame of wage labor—but that's very hard to come by. Our economy produces inequalities in income and job security, but also, we should acknowledge, in stimulation and substance.

The Price of Failure and Rise of Extremism: How Democrats Blew It�|�Jeff Schweitzer

The Price of Failure and Rise of Extremism: How Democrats Blew It�|�Jeff Schweitzer:

McConnell's Republican army in the Senate has led more filibusters
than any previous Congress in our nation's history, attempting to
thwart any progress on a gleeful spree of "no." This is the McConnell
who made obstruction his publicly announced number one goal
when Obama was elected to his first term. But now McConnell wants to
say yes, to have you vote for him because he is the one to rid us of the
scourge of the gridlock he created. Give him a majority and voila he
will make sure gridlock is a distant memory. This means of course that
he expects the newly-made minority to simply go along with his agenda;
you know, like he went along with the Democrats when they had the
majority. Sigh. It is enough to make one's head explode.

Tom Magliozzi, Popular Co-Host Of NPR's 'Car Talk,' Dies At 77 : NPR

Tom Magliozzi, Popular Co-Host Of NPR's 'Car Talk,' Dies At 77 : NPR: Tom Magliozzi, one of public radio's most popular personalities, died on Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77 years old.

Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers" on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles.

If there was one thing that defined Tom Magliozzi, it was his laugh. It was loud, it was constant, it was infectious.

Boom! Bombshell poll annihilates Labour in Scotland � Spectator Blogs

Boom! Bombshell poll annihilates Labour in Scotland � Spectator Blogs: The SNP will argue that only the Nationalists can truly stand up for Scotland. Only the SNP will put Scotland first. The only way to advance Scotland’s interests is to send a large delegation of SNP MPs to Westminster. There they will hold Westminster’s feet to the fire. There they will hold the balance of power and wield their influence for Scotland’s advantage. You need not believe in independence to vote for the SNP. To vote, in effect, for Scotland. Labour’s difficulty, you see, is Scotland’s opportunity. (And a Tory government is better for the SNP than a Labour one.)

The thing about it – the thing that makes this election interesting and also dizzyingly unpredictable - is that both of these stories, both of these arguments, are true. The question then becomes which of them the electorate considers more important. At present that tide is not running in Labour’s favour.

Jerusalem is teetering on the brink of disaster - Vox

Jerusalem is teetering on the brink of disaster - Vox: Jerusalem's Temple Mount — home to the holiest site in Judaism and one of the holiest in Islam — is closed for the first time in at least 14 years, and possibly since Israel took over east Jerusalem in 1967. The reason is that fears of large-scale political violence are rising in the city. After months of clashes between Arab residents and Israeli police, an operative allegedly with Islamic Jihad attempted to assassinate a far-right Jewish activist on Wednesday, raising tensions to critical levels. Some analysts are already calling this the start of a third intifada, though others say it's far too early to tell.