A View Inside Iran

A View Inside Iran:

Iran has appeared in numerous headlines around the world in recent months, usually attached to stories about military exercises and other saber-rattlings, economic sanctions, a suspected nuclear program, and varied political struggles. Iran is a country of more than 75 million people with a diverse history stretching back many thousands of years. While over 90 percent of Iranians belong to the Shia branch of Islam -- the official state religion -- Iran is also home to nearly 300,000 Christians, and the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel. At a time when military and political images seem to dominate the news about Iran, I thought it would be interesting to take a recent look inside the country, to see its people through the lenses of agency photographers. Keep in mind that foreign media are still subject to Iranian restrictions on reporting. [42 photos]

Iranian grooms, Javad Jafari, left, and his brother, Mehdi, right, pose for photographs with their brides, Maryam Sadeghi, second left, and Zahra Abolghasemi, who wear their formal wedding dresses prior to their wedding in Ghalehsar village, about 220 mi (360 km) northeast of the capital Tehran, Iran, on July 15, 2011. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

A conservative economic critique

Does stimulus cure recession? | Adam Smith Institute: Any economy is always in transition and this means, inevitably, some attendant additional idleness. Usually this “unnecessary idleness” is relatively small; sometimes, like now, it is not. But it too is transitionary. The problem with all talk about “getting the economy going” is that it means getting yesterday’s economy going, which is of course a futile quest. Yesterday was a Government- induced unsustainable boom and we must not forget that in the UK pretty well any period since the last World War has featured some form of stimulation by credit expansion and thus pretty well any period features transitions which would be described more accurately as “corrections”. These corrections are merely delayed and hampered by further stimulation or even the possibility of it.

Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair, Feb 2012)

Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair, Feb 2012): On June 8th, 2010, I was “in conversation” with Christopher Hitchens at the 92nd Street Y in New York in front of his customary sellout audience, to launch his memoir, Hitch-22. Christopher turned in a bravura performance that night, never sharper, never funnier, and afterwards at a small, celebratory dinner the brilliance continued. A few days later he told me that it was on the morning of the Y event that he had been given the news about his cancer. It was hard to believe that he had been so publicly magnificent on such a privately dreadful day. He had shown more than stoicism. He had flung laughter and intelligence into the face of death.

Bet it was Romney or Newt

The Manchurian Candidate Mystery:

CONCORD, N.H. -- YouTube's been with us for 5 years, and yet no one's figured out how to verify what comes out of it. The current test case: NHLiberty4Paul. On January 4, that username was taken by a new YouTube user, who uploaded one video, and nothing else. The video is a remarkably offensive piece of crap about whether or not Jon Huntsman is a "Manchurian candidate." Huntsman is caricatured as Chairman Mao. His adopted daughters are pictured, without commentary, to imply... I don't know, but they're meant to imply something.

Spiritual Economics of Communion Wafers

Buying the Body of Christ < Killing the Buddha: Just as important for the world of altar breads, Vatican II got Protestants taking Communion again. For Episcopalians, it rekindled the idea of “recapturing what we held in common” with Catholics, as Tom Miller, a Canon of Arts and Liturgy, put it, sitting in an anteroom at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. “In addition to baptism, the Eucharist is the next closest thing, ” he said. Following Vatican II, not only Episcopalians, but Lutherans and other Protestants began to question their longstanding aversion to taking Communion every week, of steering away from parts of the service that could be seen as “too Catholic.” The Sunday service at St. John the Divine, for instance, now includes the Body and the Blood of Christ. Beginning in the 1960s, without cloistered communities to do their baking, thousands of Protestant churches went looking for wafer suppliers.

Behaviorally targeted ads and the ethical dilemmas behind building consumers into ads. - Slate Magazine

Behaviorally targeted ads and the ethical dilemmas behind building consumers into ads. - Slate Magazine: Let’s play a game—thought experiment. Imagine it’s the near future. You’re walking along a city street crowded with storefronts. As you walk past boutiques, cafes, and the Apple Store, your visage follows you. Thanks to advances in facial recognition and other technologies, behavioral marketers have developed the capacity to take your Facebook profile, transform it into a 3-D image, and insert it into ads. That sweater you’re eyeing? In the display, the mannequin wearing it takes on your face and shape. The screen showing a car commercial depicts you behind the wheel.

Scary

The U.S. and Biblical Israel - Barbara Lerner - National Review Online: By now, most Americans know that the “two-state solution” is no solution to the war that supremacist Muslims have been waging against the state of Israel since its rebirth in 1948. Most Americans in public life know it too, but in public, nearly all of them pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state. To do that plausibly, they have to studiously avoid any public mention of facts about the Palestinians that make it glaringly obvious that a Palestinian state is not in America’s national interest; and glaringly clear that empowering the Palestinians and the forces and ideas they represent is a self-destructive policy — a threat to our national security and a defeat for our values.

Robert Reich (The Decline of the Public Good)

Robert Reich (The Decline of the Public Good): In fact, much of what’s called “public” is increasingly a private good paid for by users — ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.

Much of the rest of what’s considered “public” has become so shoddy that those who can afford to do so find private alternatives. As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, they pay premium rates for private care.

Translation: Men and Women are very different

PLoS ONE: The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality: Personality measures were obtained from a large US sample (N = 10,261) with the 16PF Questionnaire. Multigroup latent variable modeling was used to estimate sex differences on individual personality dimensions, which were then aggregated to yield a multivariate effect size (Mahalanobis D). We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES, the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). These are extremely large differences by psychological standards.

h/t Daily Dish (or blatant copying)

Cool Ad Watch:

Noah Smith is pleased by a new Target ad:

That stylish young man in the orange shirt is Ryan. Ryan just so happened to have been born with Down syndrome, and I’m glad that Target included [him] ... This wasn’t a “Special Clothing For Special People” catalog. There wasn’t a call out somewhere on the page proudly proclaiming that “Target’s proud to feature a model with Down syndrome in this week’s ad!” And they didn’t even ask him to model a shirt with the phrase, “We Aren’t All Angels” printed on the front. In other words, they didn’t make a big deal out of it. I like that.

Putin is Smart, and his success is a sign of his manipulative ability

Putin and the Uses of History | The National Interest: The state, or gosudarstvo, has a very specific meaning for Russians. In Russia, as in France, Germany and other great European powers, the state is personified—Mother Russia, the motherland, Mat’ Rossiya or Rodina. The twist in Russia is that while Mother Russia must be protected, she does not necessarily protect you. In the United States, the state exists to protect the rights of the individual. In Russia, the state is primary. The state stands above the individual, who is subordinate to the state and its interests. The fact that Putin is a gosudarstvennik, a person who believes that Russia must be and must have a strong state—and thus a strong state apparatus—seems to be the most obvious thing to say about a former KGB operative.

Lives of crime

Encounters with the Calabrian Mafia: Inside the World of the 'Ndrangheta - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International: Antonio is one of these middlemen. He runs a seafood restaurant with a view of the ocean on the Tyrrhenian coast. Pictures in gold frames hang on the walls of his restaurant. "All of this," he says, waving his arm in a semi-circle, "I owe to the 'Ndrangheta."

Antonio says that he is a friend of Vincenzo. The rules for doing business with the South Americans are clear, he says: "We always pay in advance, and if they don't deliver, we kill them."

In such an unfortunate case, says Antonio, a couple of nice Italian families go to South America on vacation. During the trip, the men disappear for a while and take care of the job. Investigators whose work involves mafia drug deals believe that such talk is not bravado, but is in fact deadly serious.

Salt and pepper: Why are they always together? - Slate Magazine

Salt and pepper: Why are they always together? - Slate Magazine: But if black pepper lost its position as salt’s consort, what, if anything could replace it? Which qualities must a “second seasoning” have? Should it provide a taste as elemental as salt? Perhaps we should use monosodium glutamate powder—a rocket of meaty umami flavor—as a way to make our meals more savory. But MSG’s lack of nuance and its association with allergies (be they real or imagined) make it a pariah for the contemporary dinner table. Along the same lines, the second spice might not be a spice at all, but a condiment like the ones found on Asian tables. Soy sauce, for example, gives both salt and umami in one fell swoop. But soy sauce is still too specific a flavor for someone, like me, who cooks Mediterranean-inspired food about two-thirds of the time.

But by who?

The future of theater in a digital age, ranging from nonprofits to Broadway | Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2012: “In order to maintain its ideal form, theater needs to be subsidized,” says Robert Brustein, senior research fellow and founding director of the American Repertory Theater (ART). In the 1930s, a tiny sliver of the New Deal Works Progress Administration budget supported the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which funded a flourishing American stage culture from 1935 until 1939, when Congress canceled funding in reaction to the left-wing character of many FTP productions. Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, and John Houseman were among those who launched their careers under the FTP.

A Colbert Profile

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? - NYTimes.com: But those forays into public life were spoofs, more or less. The new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.

Man vs machine

The best American wall map: David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” - Slate Magazine: By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

When Currencies Collapse | Foreign Affairs

When Currencies Collapse | Foreign Affairs: Consider first the dollar. Faith in its reliability was seriously undermined last summer when the debt-ceiling imbroglio in the United States revealed a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the political parties and raised concerns about the capacity of U.S. policymakers to put the country's financial house in order. Foreign investors, who hold slightly less than half of all marketable U.S. Treasury debt, saw the crisis as proof that members of Congress would rather let the country default on its obligations than compromise on their own partisan objectives. And foreign governments were spooked. As the debate reached a peak, Chinese officials lectured Washington on the need to act responsibly, China's state-run news agency disparaged the negotiations as a "madcap farce of brinkmanship," and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin characterized Americans as "living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar."

Free Will is a silly topic. No one on earth can know or predict your choices.

Column: Why you don't really have free will – USATODAY.com: But there are two important ways that we must face the absence of free will. One is in religion. Many faiths make claims that depend on free choice: Evangelical Christians, for instance, believe that those who don't freely choose Jesus as their savior will go to hell. If we have no free choice, then such religious tenets — and the existence of a disembodied "soul" — are undermined, and any post-mortem fates of the faithful are determined, Calvinistically, by circumstances over which they have no control.

But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can't really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren't freely chosen?

Think Again: Intelligence - By Paul R. Pillar | Foreign Policy

Think Again: Intelligence - By Paul R. Pillar | Foreign Policy: Had Bush read the intelligence community's report, he would have seen his administration's case for invasion stood on its head. The intelligence officials concluded that Saddam was unlikely to use any weapons of mass destruction against the United States or give them to terrorists -- unless the United States invaded Iraq and tried to overthrow his regime. The intelligence community did not believe, as the president claimed, that the Iraqi regime was an ally of al Qaeda, and it correctly foresaw any attempt to establish democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq as a hard, messy slog.

In a separate prewar assessment, the intelligence community judged that trying to build a new political system in Iraq would be "long, difficult and probably turbulent," adding that any post-Saddam authority would face a "deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."

Twitter / @eugenephoto: Too true. RT @rachelsklar: ...

Twitter: Too true. RT @rachelsklar: Ha RT @cschweitz: 500 RT @jpodhoretz: More people are tweeting this caucus than are voting in it. Literally.

The GOP's Allegations of Appeasement Against Obama | The National Interest Blog

The GOP's Allegations of Appeasement Against Obama | The National Interest Blog: If the GOP candidates believe that it is improper even to talk to hostile foreign regimes, diplomacy largely ceases to exist as a meaningful foreign-policy tool. It is no challenge at all to negotiate with friendly, democratic governments. But we don’t have the luxury of dealing only with the New Zealands, Chiles and Estonias of the world. The real challenge for diplomacy is negotiating with, and getting desirable results from, prickly or odious regimes. Making demands for a laundry list of concessions from such adversaries, backed up by either unenforceable or ill-advised threats, is not a practical—much less a sensible—foreign policy. Yet that is where Romney, Gingrich and most of the party’s other presidential candidates apparently would take the United States if any of them entered the White House.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson -

CarlZimmer.com: Articles: Tyson spreads himself so wide for two reasons. One is that there’s so much in the sky to talk about. The other reason is down here on earth. For all the spectacular advances American science has made over the past century--not just in astrophysics but in biology, engineering, and other disciplines--the best days of American science may be behind us. And as American science declines, so does America. So here, in the dark, under the stars, Tyson is going to try to save the future, one neck cramp at a time.

wait wat?

Trade between belligerents — Marginal Revolution: nk

I have been enjoying Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, which covers the British role in World War I. My favorite section details how the British responded when it turned out they had a drastic shortage of binoculars, which at that time were very important for fighting the war. They turned to the world’s leading manufacturer of “precision optics,” namely Germany. The German War Office immediately supplied 8,000 to 10,000 binoculars to Britain, directly intended and designed for military use. Further orders consisted of many thousands more and the Germans told the British to examine the equipment they had been capturing, to figure out which orders they wished to place.

Are we on information overload? - Salon.com

Are we on information overload? - Salon.com: m.

Do you think all of these changes are good or bad?

It’s both good and bad. It’s both impossible and unhelpful to ask if it’s making us smarter or stupider. But I am actually very hopeful. Ask anybody who is in any of the traditional knowledge fields, and she or he will very likely tell you that the Internet has made them smarter. They couldn’t do their work without it; they’re doing it better than ever before, they know more; they can find more; they can run down dead ends faster than ever before. In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody who claims the Internet is making him or her stupid, even among those who claim the Internet is making us stupid. And I believe this is the greatest time in human history.

The History Of Our Planet

The History Of Our Planet:

Quick study: Alastair Smith on political tyranny: How to be a dictator | The Economist

Quick study: Alastair Smith on political tyranny: How to be a dictator | The Economist: Do they actually have to support me, or can I just terrify them into supporting me by threatening them with death?

No, they absolutely have to support you on some level. You can’t personally go around and terrorise everyone. Our poor old struggling Syrian president is not personally killing people on the streets. He needs the support of his family, senior generals who are willing to go out and kill people on his behalf. The common misconception is that you need support from the vast majority of the population, but that’s typically not true. There is all this protest on Wall Street, but CEOs are keeping the people they need to keep happy happy—the members of the board, senior management and a few key investors—because they are the people who can replace them. Protesters on Wall Street have no ability to remove the CEOs. So in a lot of countries the masses are terrified but the supporters are not.

Nicholas Carr on E-Books - WSJ.com

Nicholas Carr on E-Books - WSJ.com: The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They'll be able to edit textbooks that don't fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today. Movable text makes a lousy preservative.

Such abuses can be prevented through laws and software protocols. What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, publishers may soon be awash in market research. They'll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book.

2012

2012:

6 candidates in double digits. My goodness.

FiveThirtyEight: 2012 Iowa Republican Caucus Projections - Election 2012 - NYTimes.com: These forecasts are formulated from an average of recent surveys, with adjustments made to account for a polling firm's accuracy, freshness of a poll and each candidate's momentum. Although this improves accuracy, there is still considerable uncertainty in the forecast as is reflected in the range of possible vote totals for each candidate. Read more about the methodology.

PS 22

This should be a good series.

Dan Kimball: Vintage Faith: Wednesday-Weird-Bible-Verses and being careful of how we use single Bible verses: A classic and well known almost cliche example of a strange story from the BIble I will start with today is from 2 Kings 2:23-25. The story goes:

"From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys."

So basically, Elisha gets made fun of by some youth for being bald. Elisha then calls a curse on them and two bears kill all 42 boys.

From the Dish

From the series "Matchheads" by David Mach.

Egyptian army officer's diary of military life in a revolution | World news | guardian.co.uk

Egyptian army officer's diary of military life in a revolution | World news | guardian.co.uk: After Mubarak fell and the rule of Scaf (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) began, the top brass moved quickly to secure the loyalty of all mid-level and junior officers. Whenever a big Friday street demonstration or rally in Tahrir Square took place we would all receive a bonus of between 250 and 500 Egyptian pounds (�26-52), whether or not we had anything to do with policing the protests.

It's ridiculous; at the height of the unrest reserve officer salaries doubled and everyone was getting huge bonuses all the time (an average of 2,400 pounds – �254 – for me in January and February). Most full-time officers didn't really care what was happening politically on the streets, they were just happy with the extra money. Occasionally though you'd hear guilty jokes about how we were the only people who were benefiting from the revolution and the Egyptian people had been screwed over.

Still the Governors

Still the Governors:

Our brand suffered a lot of damage in the years from 2004-2008, and if the people of the United States actually give us another chance and we elect a Republican who screws things up, we might not elect another Republican for another 20 years. Therefore, I consider it to be especially important this year of all years that we nominate someone who can actually do the job of being President well, as opposed to merely someone who can beat Barack Obama.

The job of being President is sui generis, so it is impossible to predict with 100% certainty who will perform well at it. Just because someone has been a successful governor does not necessarily mean they will be a successful President. However, I can say with some degree of certainty that without some experience that at least approximates the job of being President, a person is almost certainly guaranteed to fail. And the job of being a Congressman/Senator is so far removed in terms of responsibilities and scope from that of being Governor – and certainly from being President – that their experience essentially counts for nothing.

Apocalypse City by Colin Thubron | The New York Review of Books

Apocalypse City by Colin Thubron | The New York Review of Books: No city is harder to chronicle than Jerusalem. Its symbolic reach so far exceeds the limits of its temporal power in any age that the city demands a particular understanding and knowledge. The sensitivities that surround its formidable tangle of archaeology, faith, and history can tempt the scholar into either partisanship or pallid tact. Above all, the author’s attitude toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict tingles like an electric current through every account. Even the most emollient history will cause offense to somebody.

If it's true....cool!

Ruins in Georgia mountains show evidence of Maya connection - National Architecture & Design | Examiner.com: Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.

Is finance placebo?

interfluidity � Why is finance so complex?: This is the business of banking. Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks’ economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn’t bear the risk. Societies that lack opaque, faintly fraudulent, financial systems fail to develop and prosper. Insufficient economic risks are taken to sustain growth and development. You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats.

A lamentable side effect of opacity, of course, is that it enables a great deal of theft by those placed at the center of the shell game. But surely that is a small price to pay for civilization itself. No?

How squeaky clean is Mitt Romney?

How squeaky clean is Mitt Romney?:
A reader notes:

If you Google "mitt romney sex scandal", the first result is about Herman Cain.

Tweet Of The Day

Tweet Of The Day:

(Hat tip: Andrew Exum)

Japan's nuclear exclusion zone

Japan's nuclear exclusion zone:

What does a sudden evacuation look like? After everyone is gone, what happens to the places they've abandoned? National Geographic Magazine sent Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder to the nuclear exclusion zone around Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant to find out. Evacuated shortly after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami led to a nuclear radiation crisis, the area has been largely untouched, with food rotting on store shelves and children's backpacks waiting in classrooms. The area may face the same fate as the town of Pripyat, Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. This isn't the first time Guttenfelder has gotten a rare glimpse of a place few see, as The Big Picture featured his photographs of North Korea in an earlier post. Collected here are Guttenfelder's haunting images just released of a place abandoned, and of people dealing with the loss. -- Lane Turner (39 photos total)

In this April 7, 2011 photo, local police wearing white suits to protect them from radiation, search for bodies along a river inside Odaka, Japan. Weeks after authorities had searched for victims and started recovery in other tsunami-hit regions, cleanup crews hadn't yet been dispatched around the crippled reactors because of high radiation levels. (AP Photographer David Guttenfelder on assignment for National Geographic Magazine)

Tackled by a Neurologist: Redefining Male Touch by @bkassoy — The Good Men Project

Tackled by a Neurologist: Redefining Male Touch by @bkassoy — The Good Men Project: At birth, from a doctor’s hands into our mother’s, all people are welcomed into a world of touch. But despite its universality, touch carries varying implications depending on culture, geography, and circumstance. Studies have shown the French touching each other 110 times in on hour. Meanwhile, in the same period of time, their British counterparts managed zero physical contact. Parents and chaperones practically encouraged cross-gender canoodling at my Jewish youth group conventions. Strictly observant Jews, on the other hand, won’t lay a pinky on the opposite gender until marriage.

Touch also serves a wide array of purposes for each of us every day, whether functional, friendly, or romantic. And yet, for men, much of our touch—or lack thereof—is often misinterpreted or misunderstood, resulting from and reinforcing stereotypes towards our gender.

The Oligarchy We Live In, Ctd

The Oligarchy We Live In, Ctd:

I wonder how Levinger would respond.

How I became a 'terrorist' - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News: The first time I was attacked by an Israeli settler, I was 14 years old. I was walking to school when an armed man wearing a skullcap, standing near some Israeli soldiers, pulled my pack off my back and threw it in the mud. That wasn't last month, nor was it near a new outpost in Nablus. Rather, this happened 30 years ago, on the main road running through Bethlehem, near Deheisheh refugee camp, where I lived. The settler was not just any alienated, disaffected man. He was, I learned later, the father of the national religious settlement project - Rabbi Moshe Levinger.

The Xinjiang Procedure | The Weekly Standard

The Xinjiang Procedure | The Weekly Standard: “Maybe it feels a little weird at night,” Nijat answered. “Why do you think that?”

“Because too many people have been killed here. And for all the wrong reasons.”

Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive “execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground. The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to sign statements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical director was confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t take account of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they were cut up.

“Nijat, we really are going to hell.”

Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capitol Hill - NYTimes.com

Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capitol Hill - NYTimes.com: In an effort to gauge how directly the country’s economic problems affected lawmakers, The New York Times contacted the offices of the 534 current members (one seat is vacant) for an informal survey. It asked if they had close friends or family members who had lost jobs or homes since the 2008 downturn.

Only 18 members responded.

Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed - Yahoo! News

Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed - Yahoo! News: DANBURY, Conn. (AP) — For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of "the customer" they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

Biased but....?

The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell | The New York Review of Books: Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative. Overall, placebos were 82 percent as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), a widely used score of symptoms of depression. The average difference between drug and placebo was only 1.8 points on the HAM-D, a difference that, while statistically significant, was clinically meaningless. The results were much the same for all six drugs: they were all equally unimpressive. Yet because the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants.

A conservative vision

Beyond the Welfare State > Publications > National Affairs: It is becoming increasingly clear that we in America are living through a period of transition. One chapter of our national life is closing, and another is about to begin. We can sense this in the tense volatility of our electoral politics, as dramatic "change elections" follow closely upon one another. We can feel it in the unseemly mood of decline that has infected our public life — leaving our usually cheerful nation fretful about global competition and unsure if the next generation will be able to live as well as the present one. Perhaps above all, we can discern it in an overwhelming sense of exhaustion emanating from many of our public institutions — our creaking mid-century transportation infrastructure, our overburdened regulatory agencies struggling to keep pace with a dynamic economy, our massive entitlement system edging toward insolvency.

Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration -- Stewart and Fleming 49 (569): 203 -- Postgraduate Medical Journal

Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration -- Stewart and Fleming 49 (569): 203 -- Postgraduate Medical Journal: A 27-year-old male patient fasted under supervision for 382 days and has subsequently maintained his normal weight. Blood glucose concentrations around 30 mg/100 ml were recorded consistently during the last 8 months, although the patient was ambulant and attending as an out-patient. Responses to glucose and tolbutamide tolerance tests remained normal. The hyperglycaemic response to glucagon was reduced and latterly absent, but promptly returned to normal during carbohydrate refeeding. After an initial decrease was corrected, plasma potassium levels remained normal without supplementation. A temporary period of hypercalcaemia occurred towards the end of the fast. Decreased plasma magnesium concentrations were a consistent feature from the first month onwards. After 100 days of fasting there was a marked and persistent increase in the excretion of urinary cations and inorganic phosphate, which until then had been minimal. These increases may be due to dissolution of excessive soft tissue and skeletal mass. Prolonged fasting in this patient had no ill-effects

The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine

The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine: First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.

The Broken Contract | Foreign Affairs

The Broken Contract | Foreign Affairs: Inequality hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people in the circumstances of their birth -- a rebuke to the very idea of the American dream. Inequality divides us from one another in schools, in neighborhoods, at work, on airplanes, in hospitals, in what we eat, in the condition of our bodies, in what we think, in our children's futures, in how we die. Inequality makes it harder to imagine the lives of others -- which is one reason why the fate of over 14 million more or less permanently unemployed Americans leaves so little impression in the country's political and media capitals. Inequality corrodes trust among fellow citizens, making it seem as if the game is rigged. Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can -- immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms -- and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers. Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy.

#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You | Magazine

#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You | Magazine: And it’s not too far a stretch to extend this same idea into the realm of protests. This is, at root, the way that Occupy Wall Street defied expectations to become a genuine political force. The media harped on how these protests grew through Twitter, but it was really the movement’s Tumblr—wearethe99percent.tumblr.com—that made it work. Those photos of struggling Americans essentially virtualized the occupation; the street protesters were merely the visible symbol of the giant, subterranean mob of Americans struggling to get by. What’s really revolutionary about all these gatherings—what remains both dangerous and magnificent about them—is the way they represent a disconnected group getting connected, a mega-underground casting off its invisibility to embody itself, formidably, in physical space.

n 1: Outsourcing Jobs

n 1: Outsourcing Jobs: Yet few people needed or wanted Apple products in 2003, when Apple had been around for twenty-six years. Starting in 2003, Apple was able to grow revenue exponentially not due to a mass craze for its computers but by being the first company to build self-contained, smartly designed products that leveraged three technological advances well beyond Apple’s invention: the easy digitization of artistic content, the mass availability of the internet, and the spread of wireless broadband. One of the ironies of the present Age of Apple is that the company, a product developer, finally reached the pinnacle of global industry in an era of dematerialization, when the giddy-up in the technology sector has moved towards the internet, ways to communicate, and content itself.

Well this is creepy

Amazon Patents Deducing Religion From Gift Wrap:

"If you're the giver or recipient of presents gift-wrapped by Amazon, you may want to take a gander at U.S. Patent No. 8,060,463, granted to Amazon last month for Mining of User Event Data to Identify Users with Common Interests. Among other things, Amazon explains the invention can be used to identify recipients of gifts as Christian or Jewish based on wrapping paper. From the patent: 'The gift wrap used by such other users when purchasing gifts for this user, such as when the gift wrap evidences the user's religion (in the case of Christmas or Hanukkah gift wrap, for example.)'"

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas:

The Gospel of Luke 2:1-20

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas:

The Gospel of Luke 2:1-20

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? | Culture | Vanity Fair

Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? | Culture | Vanity Fair: From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9/11 flights didn’t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been “a week in Havana.” When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. “No big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,” Schneier said. Events have borne him out. The instigators of the two most serious post-9/11 incidents involving airplanes— the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009, both of whom managed to get onto an airplane with explosives—were subdued by angry passengers.

From Politico

STOCKING STUFFER: When the big Amazon boxes arrived this week, the Playbooker’s wife ribbed him for ordering $256 worth of Legos for their 4-year-old son. He's a smart kid, but the 8 Legos were just too complex. Dad protested: "I didn't order it!" So they checked with grandparents and aunts and uncles, but no one 'fessed up. Then when Dad was going through online receipts, he realized that the 4-year-old had discovered Amazon Prime “1-Click Ordering” -- and bought the Legos himself.

GOP Primary Candidate Venn Diagram #3: Willard Mitt Romney | Matt Glassman

GOP Primary Candidate Venn Diagram #3: Willard Mitt Romney | Matt Glassman

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town:

With only three days left until Christmas, Santa Claus appears to be just about everywhere - assisted by armies of Santa's Helpers. Photographers have captured images of people dressed as jolly old Saint Nick in the United Kingdom, Japan, India, Australia, the United States, and other countries throughout the world. People everywhere are observing the season of giving not only by donning red and white apparel but by participating in charitable events, passing out gifts, listening to Christmas wishes, and simply having fun. Collected below are recent images of Santa Claus and his many helpers around the world. (Disclaimer: At least one of them may not be the Real Santa Claus.) [28 photos]

Olivia Ruch, a seven-month-old with a look of concern on her face, sits on Santa's lap in Santa's Grotto in Selfridges department store in London, England, on December 7, 2011. Santa is portrayed by actor David Warren, who has been playing the role for the past ten years. (Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett)

Newt Gingrich to gay Iowan: Vote for Obama | Iowa Caucuses

Newt Gingrich to gay Iowan: Vote for Obama | Iowa Caucuses: Newt Gingrich told a gay man and longtime resident of Oskaloosa here today that he should vote for President Obama.

“I asked him if he’s elected, how does he plan to engage gay Americans. How are we to support him? And he told me to support Obama,” said Scott Arnold, an adjunct professor of writing at William Penn University

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Equality Is Efficient

Equality Is Efficient: Conversely, you could look at the case of Greg Mankiw who agrees with Lane that redistributive taxation is a bad idea. Mankiw, however, is too familiar with my argument about the inefficiency of inequality and instead argues on ethical grounds that redistributive taxation is morally wrong even though it can improve social welfare. This rather than old arguments about whether the United States should abandon the mixed economy in favor of socialism seems like the real question to grapple with.

Don't Break the Internet - Stanford Law Review

Don't Break the Internet - Stanford Law Review: It would be not just ironic, but tragic, were the United States to join the ranks of these repressive and restrictive regimes, erecting our own “virtual walls” to prevent people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. Passage of these bills will compromise our ability to defend the principle of the single global Internet—the Internet that looks the same to, and allows free and unfettered communication between, users located in Boston, Bucharest, and Buenos Aires, free of locally imposed censorship regimes. As such, it may represent the biggest threat to the Internet in its history.

What the nanny saw: Housekeeper's stunning images of 1950s Chicago show working class America in a new light | Mail Online

What the nanny saw: Housekeeper's stunning images of 1950s Chicago show working class America in a new light | Mail Online: After spending decades collecting dust the work of an unlikely artist has finally been uncovered.

To the outside world Vivian Maier was just a nanny and housekeeper working in Chicago. But she also had a hidden talent was not recognised until after her death in 2009.

Maier spent her life wandering the streets of Chicago with a Rolleflex camera strapped to her neck taking remarkable black and white pictures of a different side of the city, and a different side of life in America.

Armed Forces Humor

PffIO.jpg (JPEG Image, 960x720 pixels) - Scaled (88%)

The Worst Man | The New Republic

The Worst Man | The New Republic: The world may not lack for oppressive regimes and mass murderers—from Bashir in Sudan to Mugabe in Zimbabwe to Ahmadinejad in Iran to the leaders of China’s Communist Party—but there can be little doubt that the suffering of North Koreans is “sui generis,” in the words of the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights. Because North Korea is less open than any other society, we hear comparatively little about conditions on the ground there. But what information we have about life in the country is horrifying. The massive labor camps in which political prisoners and their offspring toil (the sickening details can be found in this Washington Post profile of an inmate who escaped); the radios installed in people’s homes that play government propaganda and cannot be turned off; the widespread reports of malnutrition and starvation even as Kim and his family hoarded luxury items: All of it paints a picture of a reality so horrifying that it is probably beyond our comprehension to fully understand.

Prettty cute

Cat mom hugs baby kitten - YouTube

Winners of the National Geographic Photo Contest 2011

Winners of the National Geographic Photo Contest 2011:

[See also this earlier collection of 45 entries from this year's contest.] [15 photos]

"Splashing", Grand Prize Winner and winner of the Nature category. This photo was taken when I was taking photos of other insects, as I normally did during macro photo hunting. I wasn't actually aware of this dragonfly since I was occupied with other objects. When I was about to take a picture of it, it suddenly rained, but the lighting was just superb. I decided to take the shot regardless of the rain. The result caused me to be overjoyed, and I hope it pleases viewers. Location: Batam, Riau Islands, Indonesia. (© Shikhei Goh)

Marines’ Haditha Interviews Found in Iraqi Junkyard - NYTimes.com

Marines’ Haditha Interviews Found in Iraqi Junkyard - NYTimes.com: “So, you know, maybe — I guess maybe if I was sitting here at Quantico and heard that 15 civilians were killed I would have been surprised and shocked and gone — done more to look into it,” he testified, referring to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “But at that point in time, I felt that was — had been, for whatever reason, part of that engagement and felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement.”

Target Gets Robbed via Facebook Promotion | b/c

Target Gets Robbed via Facebook Promotion | b/c: As you can see via this 37 page thread with almost 1500 posts, people found that they could effectively rob Target legally (At least I think its legal. I’m not an attorney.) What they found they could do was this:

They would buy a $50 Target gift card, use the coupon and get a $10 Target gift card free. They would then purchase another $50 Target gift card using the FIRST $50 Target gift card to pay for the SECOND Target gift card, use another coupon and get another $10 Target gift card. (Initial purchase: $50. Profit: $20. etc.) Rinse and repeat.

How to Get Dumped by a Hollywood Starlet by @Markradcliffe — The Good Men Project

How to Get Dumped by a Hollywood Starlet by @Markradcliffe — The Good Men Project: When she asks about it, mention your brief stint in acting. When she asks why you quit, be honest and say the uncertainty was driving you mad, that you realized you cared more about the writing than the performance. Then realize you haven’t asked her what she does yet. When she tells you she’s an actor, turn an appropriate shade of red.

Ask her if there’s anything you’ve seen her in. She’ll like that you have no idea who she is—because frankly, you’ll later realize, you should have. She’ll cop to a few small roles, but completely hide the fact that she’s been the lead in major motion pictures, one of which was number one at the box office.

The real definition of Terrorism - Salon.com

The real definition of Terrorism - Salon.com: The FBI yesterday announced it has secured an indictment against Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, a 38-year-old citizen of Iraq currently in Canada, from which the U.S. is seeking his extradition. The headline on the FBI’s Press Release tells the basic story: “Alleged Terrorist Indicted in New York for the Murder of Five American Soldiers.” The criminal complaint previously filed under seal provides the details: ‘Isa is charged with “providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy” because he allegedly supported a 2008 attack on a U.S. military base in Mosul that killed 5 American soldiers. In other words, if the U.S. invades and occupies your country, and you respond by fighting back against the invading army — the ultimate definition of a “military, not civilian target” — then you are a . . . Terrorist.

HSIjI.gif (GIF Image, 469x555 pixels)

HSIjI.gif (GIF Image, 469x555 pixels)

HSIjI.gif (GIF Image, 469x555 pixels)

HSIjI.gif (GIF Image, 469x555 pixels)

BBC News - Top economists reveal their graphs of 2011

BBC News - Top economists reveal their graphs of 2011

China's Abandoned Wonderland

China's Abandoned Wonderland:

In Chenzhuang Village, China, about 20 miles northwest of central Beijing, the ruins of a partially built amusement park called Wonderland sit near a highway, surrounded by houses and fields of corn. Construction work at the park, which developers had promised would be "the largest amusement park in Asia," stopped around 1998 after disagreements with the local government and farmers over property prices. Developers briefly tried to restart construction in 2008, but without success. The abandoned structures are now a draw for local children and a few photographers, who encounter signs telling them to proceed at their own risk. Reuters photographer David Gray visited the site on a chilly morning earlier this month and returned with these haunting images of a would-be Wonderland. [21 photos]

A farmer carries a shovel over his shoulder as he walks to tend his crops in a field that includes an abandoned castle-like building that was to be part of an amusement park called "Wonderland", on the outskirts of Beijing, China, on December 5, 2011. (Reuters/David Gray)

I hope such exchanges can happen everywhere

Vietnam Vet Challenges Romney On Gay Marriage : NPR: Even in New Hampshire, old-fashioned retail campaigning is somewhat rare this election season. And an exchange Monday between GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and a Vietnam veteran may only reinforce the pattern. While shaking hands in a Manchester diner this morning, the former Massachusetts governor asked the vet if he could sit down to talk for a few minutes. What Romney couldn't have predicted is that the veteran is gay — and had a simple question on gay marriage.

Oh good Lord, this isn't fair

Santorum And Sandusky:

This I didn't know:

Another audience member questioned the candidate about Santorum awarding former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with the Angels in Adoption Award. Santorum explained that he lacked knowledge of the situation at the time and noted that the award has since been withdrawn.

In response to his explanation, the audience member asked, "So we shouldn't trust Obama with our kids, but we can trust you?"

How Doctors Die

How Doctors Die � Z�calo Public Square: Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

I don't see how anyone can see trans people as anything but natural with stories like this.

Led by the child who simply knew - The Boston Globe: Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality.

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.

Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.

Once, when Wyatt appeared in a sequin shirt and his mother’s heels, his father said: “You don’t want to wear that.’’

“Yes, I do,’’ Wyatt replied.

“Dad, you might as well face it,’’ Wayne recalls Jonas saying. “You have a son and a daughter.’’

Awesome. If true.

BBC News - Republicans Gingrich and Huntsman to hold epic debate: Republican presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman plan to hold a debate styled on the historic 1858 tussles between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas.

Their campaigns say the debate, to be held on Monday 12 December at St Anselm College in New Hampshire, will provide a detailed exploration of their positions and views for the country.

The Physics of Great White Sharks Leaping Out of the Water to Catch Seals

Correction Of The Day

Correction Of The Day:

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

CMU professor Kiron Skinner, recently named to GOP presidential candidate and former House speaker Newt Gingrich's national security team, says she was misquoted in a story Monday about her appointment. She said her quote was: "I've been a supporter of Speaker Gingrich for a long time because I've seen him in numerous professional circumstances..." The published quote was "... numerous unprofessional circumstances ..."

War Games - The Rumpus.net

War Games - The Rumpus.net: Perhaps the most famous moment of war and sports converging occurred in the winter of 1914, on the Western Front. “The Christmas Truce,” between British and German soldiers, led to a spontaneous game of soccer in No man’s land, while their brothers in arms cheered them on and swapped gifts with one another. By all accounts, it was a fleeting moment of peace and compassion in the midst of one of the darkest times in world history. Men put down their rifles, picked up a soccer ball, and tried to find themselves again, if only for a day. And there’s the rub. For all the similarities between war and sports, the latter enriches our humanity, while the former attempts to destroy it. Sometimes, too many times really, the world goes entirely mad. And when that happens, playing a kid’s game to wait it out doesn’t seem childish at all.

A woman recants when the gov't does something for her....

Breast cancer, health insurance and an apology to President Obama - latimes.com: Fortunately for me, I've been saved by the federal government's Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, something I had never heard of before needing it. It's part of President Obama's healthcare plan, one of the things that has already kicked in, and it guarantees access to insurance for U.S. citizens with preexisting conditions who have been uninsured for at least six months. The application was short, the premiums are affordable, and I have found the people who work in the administration office to be quite compassionate (nothing like the people I have dealt with over the years at other insurance companies.) It's not perfect, of course, and it still leaves many people in need out in the cold. But it's a start, and for me it's been a lifesaver — perhaps literally.

Christopher Hitchens Takes on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger? | Culture | Vanity Fair

Christopher Hitchens Takes on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger? | Culture | Vanity Fair: Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive.

Agreed.

People Who Criticize the City of South Fulton, TN are History’s Greatest Monster | RedState: The political and PR pressure being exerted on city officials (who, as politicians, are as averse to these things as gremlins are to sunlight) is enormous. A sizeable number of people are apparently of the belief that the City of South Fulton simply must continue to provide fire protection services to people who are beyond its power to tax and who refuse to pay for them voluntarily. This despite the fact that the people who have chosen to live in unincorporated areas are surely saving well over a paltry $75 a year by not having to pay city property taxes.

Huge Japan quake cracked open seafloor - Technology & science - Science - OurAmazingPlanet - msnbc.com

Huge Japan quake cracked open seafloor - Technology & science - Science - OurAmazingPlanet - msnbc.com: SAN FRANCISCO — The March 2011 megaquake off the coast of Japan opened up fissures as wide as 6 feet (3 meters) in the seafloor, a new study finds.

The fissures now scar the seafloor where peaceful clam beds once lay, according to Takeshi Tsuji, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan. Along with seismic studies, the fissures, revealed by manned submersible vehicles that investigated the seafloor after the quake, show how the crust around the quake's epicenter expanded and cracked

Blagojevich handed 14-year jail term as judge ignores pleas for leniency | World news | guardian.co.uk

Blagojevich handed 14-year jail term as judge ignores pleas for leniency | World news | guardian.co.uk: A district judge ignored pleas for leniency as he sent the former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, to prison for 14 years for trying to sell a vacant seat to the US Senate.

Under federal rules Blagojevich must serve just under 12 years at the very least – almost twice as much as his predecessor, George Ryan, who was imprisoned for six years for his corrupt activities as governor.

The judge said a harsh penalty was necessary because Blagojevich had "torn at the fabric" of the state and left it disfigured by trying to secure a high-paying job or campaign funds through his power to appoint someone to Barack Obama's vacant senate seat. Blagojevich does not have to report to federal prison until 16 February.

This would be cool. But.....

Michael Kazin: Why A Gingrich Vs. Obama Matchup Would Be Good For The Country | The New Republic: But if Newt somehow manages to surmount these obstacles, imagine what a refreshing campaign he and Obama could wage. Gingrich has already vowed to challenge the president to hold lengthy debates—absent the usual moderators, with their tired Q & A format. Obama would have to agree, lest he seem cowardly. And this could set up the kind of campaign Americans have never witnessed before: a serious debate between articulate exponents of liberalism and conservatism—the ideological conflict that has shaped American politics since the emergence of a mass movement on the right in the 1950s.

2011: The Year in Photos, Part 2 of 3 - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic

2011: The Year in Photos, Part 2 of 3 - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic

Number 5

The Fitness of Physical Models - Miller-McCune

The Fitness of Physical Models - Miller-McCune: The four main bays that make up the San Francisco Bay estuary can all be seen from here: San Pablo, Suisun, Central and South Bay. The entire San Francisco Bay, including its famous bridges, is visible, and the whale is spectacular.

This view is possible from only one vantage point on Earth: inside a WWII-era warehouse.

That warehouse holds the Bay Model, the largest working hydraulic model in the United States; its 1.5 acres replicate a 1,600-square-mile area that runs from the Pacific Ocean to the Sacramento Delta. It is not an exact replica: the delta has been shifted 45 degrees so that it fits into the building, and the whale and the Pacific Ocean are painted on a wall.

Our World: An ally no more - JPost - Opinion - Columnists

Our World: An ally no more - JPost - Opinion - Columnists: Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed.

The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy.

Due to Mubarak’s commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.

GIVEN EGYPT’S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration’s response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for “democracy.”

The Muppets and moi | Television & radio | The Guardian

The Muppets and moi | Television & radio | The Guardian: Some of us, for the record, have always played the music. And some of us, also just to clarify, never stopped lighting the lights. That's because, for us in the cultural elite, we are always ready to meet the Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight.

When it was announced on Tuesday that US TV broadcaster NBC has commissioned a script for a new series of the Muppets, the reaction among critics, commentators and tweeters was, frankly, remarkable. It is rare that a four-decades old franchise can announce a return to TV and prompt such unabashed enthusiasm as well as a total lack of cynicism about quality control. Everyone loves the Muppets – that goes without saying. More surprising is how many people want them back, creating, satirising, karate chopping.

LOLOLOLZ

Steven Spielberg | Spielberg Still Cashing In Star Wars Bet | Contactmusic: STEVEN SPIELBERG still makes money from STAR WARS thirty years after coming out on top in a bet with movie mogul pal GEORGE LUCAS. Lucas was so convinced his first Star Wars film would be a flop in 1977, he bet Spielberg a percentage of the take his sci-fi epic, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind would be a bigger film.

Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault | Bleeding Heart Libertarians

Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault | Bleeding Heart Libertarians: You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault | Bleeding Heart Libertarians

Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault | Bleeding Heart Libertarians: You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

Good point

Andy Stern’s Peculiar Idea - By Reihan Salam - The Agenda - National Review Online: To really learn from the Chinese, and to enjoy such staggering growth rates, we should go about things differently: let’s have a Maoist insurrection followed by a civil war that lasts for several years. Then let’s destroy most of the wealth in the country, and drive out millions of our most enterprising and educated citizens by launching systematic terror campaigns during which millions of others will die in violence or of starvation. Next, let’s have a modest economic opening in coastal regions: impoverished citizens will be allowed to launch small-scale township and village enterprises and components will be assembled in a handful of cities by our stunted descendants. Then...

The saddest statistic in Iowa

The saddest statistic in Iowa:

The Des Moines Register poll asked:



"Which of the candidates have you seen in person before the caucuses?"



Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum got 12%. Santorum has run a traditional, all-in Iowa campaign, practically moving to the state and visiting each of its counties.



Romney has been there four times this year.



This may be `08 hangover, or it may be the extent to which the national media primary has confused voters about even their own experience.