What a banking firm decimated on Sept. 11 did for murdered employees' children (OPINION) | OregonLive.com

What a banking firm decimated on Sept. 11 did for murdered employees' children (OPINION) | OregonLive.com: "I called the Sandler O'Neill Foundation the other day to talk about those children, and here are some things you should know: 54 young men and women have had their college tuitions paid so far, with 22 young men and women still eligible. The 54 who are attending or have attended college have gone to every sort of college imaginable — from Stanford to Notre Dame to community colleges and technical institutes. Four students have attended Boston College, the alma mater of Welles Crowther, the 24-year-old Sandler O'Neill employee who saved as many as 12 people from death in the south tower before running back upstairs to save more people and never being seen again.

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V. David Zvenyach's Blog -- 6 months into 18F

V. David Zvenyach's Blog -- 6 months into 18F: "It’s #AspirationalFTW indeed. But, like, we’re also kinda actually doing it. And we’ll keep getting better at doing it. It’s breathtaking to consider that, at its core, the result of our little experiment may be turning “historically awful” into “delightful.” That sort of government alchemy, if we can do it repeatedly, in small ways, might just be most damn exciting thing I can think of.

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DoD 'Force of the Future' includes civilian Digital Service team

DoD 'Force of the Future' includes civilian Digital Service team: "The plan cites a recent consulting project between DoD and 18F — the innovation arm of the General Services Administration — that saved the department some $150 million by taking a "more technically informed approach to procurement."

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The Maximums of Maximums: The Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and Other Disasters That Worry Emergency Planners Most - The Atlantic

The Maximums of Maximums: The Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and Other Disasters That Worry Emergency Planners Most - The Atlantic: "In 2008, she collaborated with a team on the sort of project that many scientists would be nervous to undertake: a fact-based, fictionalized story of what might happen in a 7.8 magnitude quake.



 It’s perhaps even scarier than the movie—if nothing else because it so carefully sticks to a science-based scenario. The initial shaking would go on for almost a minute. Freeways would become impassible, as would rail connections. L.A.’s legendary gridlock would come to a true standstill. Oil and gas pipelines would snap, bursting into flames, as would water and sewage pipes underwater. Hundreds of buildings would collapse, and many more would slide off their foundations. There would be tens of thousands of aftershocks large enough to feel in the coming months. The quake would ignite 1,600 fires, and while most of them would be out within three days, a few would remain: “super-conflagrations,” encompassing hundreds of blocks of the city. After a month, tens of thousands of Angelenos would still be without a job or shelter. The water might not be safe to drink for nearly a year."



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The Maximums of Maximums: The Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and Other Disasters That Worry Emergency Planners Most - The Atlantic

The Maximums of Maximums: The Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and Other Disasters That Worry Emergency Planners Most - The Atlantic:

In a rebuke to a techno-utopian age, natural disasters remain a greater threat than almost anything humans can produce.

“As you look at the scale of things, short of a full-scale nuclear attack, Mother Nature still produces the worst scenarios for response,” Fugate said.

Of course, those natural disasters are often abetted by humans. Construction in floodplains, lax building codes, lack of preparation, the malign effects of climate change, and even underinsurance exacerbate the impact of the disasters. The number of weather-related disasters that cost more than $1 billion has been gradually increasing over the last few decades...

How AIPAC lost the Iran deal fight - The Washington Post

(Note that this article has absolutely nothing about the merits of the deal, which are discussed in much more detail in the writings of people like Cory Booker. This is disappointing journalism, born of a "horse race" mentality.)



How AIPAC lost the Iran deal fight - The Washington Post: "Many say AIPAC’s efforts were doomed to fail in the aftermath of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s combative speech to Congress in March — an appearance brokered by Israel’s ambassador to the United States along with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) without White House consultation. Many of AIPAC’s supporters also blame Obama and what they see as a process he rigged and a debate he polarized.

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How Edward Snowden Inadvertently Helped Vladimir Putin's Internet Crackdown - BuzzFeed News

How Edward Snowden Inadvertently Helped Vladimir Putin's Internet Crackdown - BuzzFeed News: "Snowden may not have known or realized it, but his disclosures emboldened those in Russia who wanted more control over the Internet. Parliament debated Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance in special hearings. Sergei Zheleznyak, deputy speaker of the lower house, suggested that the Snowden disclosures meant citizens should be forbidden from keeping their personal data on foreign servers. “We should provide digital sovereignty for our country,” he said. Ruslan Gattarov, chairman of one of the pro-Kremlin youth organizations and a member of the upper house of parliament, invited Snowden to “investigate” what he described as the surrender of Russian citizens’ data to American intelligence agencies.
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The believer: How an introvert became the leader of the Islamic State | Brookings Institution

The believer: How an introvert became the leader of the Islamic State | Brookings Institution: "Many of the ex-Baathists at Bucca, some of whom Baghdadi befriended, would later rise with him through the ranks of the Islamic State. “If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no [Islamic State] now,” recalled the inmate interviewed by The Guardian. “Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.” The prisoners dubbed the camp “The Academy,” and during his ten months in residence, Baghdadi was one of its faculty members.

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Yousef Al-Otaiba Is The Most Powerful Man in Washington You've Never Heard Of - The Huffington Post

Yousef Al-Otaiba Is The Most Powerful Man in Washington You've Never Heard Of - The Huffington Post: "Otaiba continues to talk frequently to Secretary of State John Kerry, Susan Rice and many commanders at the Pentagon. But his jabs at Obama have frayed relationships. “Here's the piece of the puzzle that he's missing, and that he frequently misses, which is that the American people aren't Washington," says the first senior U.S. official. "At the Four Seasons everybody's for bombing people and no deal with Iran, but Congress ultimately does have to be wary of public opinion." One respected foreign policy expert said he was worried that Otaiba was essentially trying to create “an Arab secular version of AIPAC.” "He's moving too quick, too fast, too hard, with too much money," he added. “He could become someone you don’t want to take to the party.”

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How Social Media Is Ruining Politics

How Social Media Is Ruining Politics: "Emotional appeals can be good for politics. They can spur civic involvement, even among the disenfranchised and disenchanted. And they can galvanize public attention, focusing it on injustices and abuses of power. An immediate emotional connection can, at best, deepen into a sustained engagement with the political process. But there’s a dark side to social media’s emotionalism. Trump’s popularity took off only after he demonized Mexican immigrants, playing to the public’s frustrations and fears. That’s the demagogue’s oldest tactic, and it worked. The Trump campaign may have qualities of farce, but it also suggests that a Snapchat candidate, passionate yet hollow, could be a perfect vessel for a cult of personality.

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We are sacrificing the right to walk – Antonia Malchick – Aeon

We are sacrificing the right to walk – Antonia Malchick – Aeon: "We came to scorn walking, to fear it. Real Americans fold themselves into cars, where they feel safe and in control. For exercise, the better-off mimic walkers, bicyclists, hikers, and farmers on stationary machines in health clubs. They and the middle class drive to parks and wilderness preserves for the privilege of walking outside among trees and birds and clean air, and the poor are left with vast wastelands of road and concrete; the advice to ‘walk three times a week for your health’ easier given than followed when there’s nowhere safe to place your foot.

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Why Teen-Agers Are the Worst - The New Yorker

Why Teen-Agers Are the Worst - The New Yorker: "Teen-agers are, as a rule, extremely healthy—healthier than younger children. But their death rate is much higher. The mortality rate for Americans between fifteen and nineteen years old is nearly twice what it is for those between the ages of one and four, and it’s more than three times as high as for those ages five to fourteen. The leading cause of death among adolescents today is accidents; this is known as the “accident hump.”

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White woman accidentally impregnated with black man’s sperm loses legal battle - The Washington Post

White woman accidentally impregnated with black man’s sperm loses legal battle - The Washington Post: "At the heart of the lawsuit was Cramblett’s claim that she was unprepared to raise an African American child and that her community and her “unconsciously insensitive” family members might not be accepting of a child of a different race.

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how do I get out of this suicide pact | Fredrik deBoer

how do I get out of this suicide pact | Fredrik deBoer: "In fact, many professors are so sensitive to the impression that they’re biased against their conservative students that they bend over backwards to accomodate them. I’m just a limited observer, and absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. But the best evidence available to me suggests that the contemporary American college is not inhospitable to conservative students.



 But, god, we seem desperate to give the opposite impression."



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The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’ - The New York Times

The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’ - The New York Times: "The “Black Lives Matter” movement focuses on the fact that black citizens have long been far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police, and is of a piece with this history. Demonstrators who chant the phrase are making the same declaration that voting rights and civil rights activists made a half-century ago. They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an indisputable fact — that the lives of black citizens in this country historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued. People who are unacquainted with this history are understandably uncomfortable with the language of the movement. But politicians who know better and seek to strip this issue of its racial content and context are acting in bad faith. They are trying to cover up an unpleasant truth and asking the country to collude with them."

Taylor Swift's 'Wildest Dreams' video draws backlash for racism

Taylor Swift's 'Wildest Dreams' video draws backlash for racism: "
The reality is not only were there people of color in the video, but the key creatives who worked on this video are people of color. I am Asian American, the producer Jil Hardin is an African American woman, and the editor Chancler Haynes is an African American man. We cast and edited this video. We collectively decided it would have been historicially inaccurate to load the crew with more black actors as the video would have been accused of rewriting history. This video is set in the past by a crew set in the present and we are all proud of our work."



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The Birds - The New Yorker

The Birds - The New Yorker: "Thoreau, in a mysteriously beautiful passage in his 1862 essay “Walking,” likens the diminishing numbers of passenger pigeons in New England to the dwindling number of thoughts in a man’s head, “for the grove in our minds is laid waste.” Thinking of the birds as missing thoughts is a good way to honor them. Martha and her billions were undone by the complicated, pitiless tangle of our modern industrialized world, but Thoreau’s nineteenth-century protest—“Simplify, simplify”—will not help us in the twenty-first. Indeed, when it comes to our relationship to nature, the wish for simplicity may be the most destructive thing in the world. ♦

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Jimmy Carter’s faith

Jimmy Carter’s faith:



He smiled often. “I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” he said, in such a way that you believed him without question. And it was impossible to feel sorry for him.



 Partially, that’s because we all die and if — still only an if — cancer is what takes James Earl Carter Jr. away, well, there are worse things than to go having reached 90 years of age, having been president of the United States, having been married to the love of your life for almost seven decades, having sired a large and sprawling family and having done significant work toward the eradication of disease and the spreading of democracy in the developing world.



 But here’s the other reason it was impossible to feel sorry for him. Feeling sorry would have felt like an insult, a denial of the virtues he showed and the faith he didn’t need to speak because it was just … there.

Teen Boy Will Be Charged As Adult For Having Naked Pics of a Minor: Himself - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Teen Boy Will Be Charged As Adult For Having Naked Pics of a Minor: Himself - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "The implication is clear: Copening does not own himself, from the standpoint of the law, and is not free to keep sexually-provocative pictures, even if they depict his own body.

But consider this: North Carolina is one of two states in the country (the other is progressive New York) that considers 16 to be the age of adulthood for criminal purposes. This mean, of course, that Copening can be tried as an adult for exploiting a minor—himself.

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The Culture of Shut Up - The Atlantic

The Culture of Shut Up - The Atlantic: "We need to learn to live with the noise and tolerate the noise even when the noise is stupid, even when the noise is offensive, even when the noise is at times dangerous. Because no matter how noble the intent, it’s a demand for conformity that encourages people on all sides of a debate to police each other instead of argue and convince each other. And, ultimately, the cycle of attack and apology, of disagreement and boycott, will leave us with fewer and fewer people talking more and more about less and less.

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