Forty some years ago I recorded this masterpiece on a tape cassette. Driving home from college in my old VW bug, heading up 101 North of the city, I pressed "play" on the cassette player on the seat next to me. It was hot, windows were down, hard to hear.
Fifteen minutes later I found myself again, in the far right lane, driving at 40 mph, lost in the music, straining to hear each note.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSm7iqixbrg
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
"But the truth is, it wasn’t the state, or the cold, or the media. The real problem underneath it all was a deep ambivalence about power. In fact, all of the things that made Occupy Wall Street brilliant had this paradox built into them, this politic of powerlessness woven deep inside, like a bad gene or a self-destruct mechanism."
"But the truth is, it wasn’t the state, or the cold, or the media. The real problem underneath it all was a deep ambivalence about power. In fact, all of the things that made Occupy Wall Street brilliant had this paradox built into them, this politic of powerlessness woven deep inside, like a bad gene or a self-destruct mechanism."
Originally shared by Jordan Peacock
Yotam Marom:
The meetings are closed, and we all feel kind of bad about it, although this is another thing we don’t talk about often. There isn’t much coherence to how we ended up here in the first place — one person invited a few over and the next invited a couple and so on, until the room was full. It was as arbitrary a time to stop inviting people as any, but this is how things often happen in movement moments. We justify the boundary by reminding ourselves that we are certainly not the only collection of people meeting like this — there are many affinity groups and other kinds of formations — and that we are here to plan and strategize, not to make decisions.
But we also know that there are a lot of movers and shakers in the room, and that this affords us a disproportionate ability to move things through the rest of Occupy. We know the age-old pitfalls of people making plans in closed off rooms, and it’s not lost on us that — while this space is also led by some of the most powerful women and folks of color in the movement — most of us are white, middle class, and male. If someone had asked any one of us directly, we’d likely have agreed that, collectively, we have quite a bit of power and aren’t being held accountable to it.
But for the most part, we keep that nagging feeling under wraps, so we can continue the work. There is a confidence we seem to share that we are filling a void, meeting a real need, putting everything we have on the line to keep momentum going. We seem to agree, even if quietly, that movements don’t exist without leadership, that the general assembly has been more performance art than decision-making forum since the first couple of weeks, that leaderlessness is a myth, that we need a place to have sensitive discussions hopefully out of reach of the surveillance state. And in truth we know our jobs aren’t glamorous by any stretch of the imagination; after all, a good deal of the efforts of the folks in the room are aimed at getting occupiers port-o-potties and stopping the incessant drumming.
[...]
Some of the folks in the group got frustrated, and pulled away. They accused the rest of us of being liberals (this was a curse-word), said we were co-opting the movement for the unions, claimed that even meeting like this was a violation of the principles of the movement. Those claims were false, but they were hard to argue with, because most of us were already feeling guilty for being in closed off rooms. So we shrunk. Sort of like when an over-zealous white “ally” trips over other white folks to call out an example of racism; the first to call it out sits back smugly, having taken the moral high ground and pointed a finger at the others, and then the rest clench their jaws and stare at the floor guiltily, hoping the storm passes over them.
We tried to stop the split. We slowed down. We spent time trying to figure out what the right thing to do was. We tried to be honest about how much of this had to do with differences in politics and how much of it was really just ego on all sides. Some of us tried to reach across the aisle, to mend broken relationships. But in the meantime, the folks who had taken the moral high ground had begun building a separate group. That split happened in October in that living room on the Lower East Side, perhaps in other circles in the movement around the same time; by November it was playing out in the movement more broadly, until in December there were distinctly different tendencies offering different directions to the movement as a whole. It would be overly simplistic to trace the overall conflict inside the belly of Occupy Wall Street to the dissolution of this one group or even to in-fighting more broadly, but at the same time, it was a significant factor. All movements develop mechanisms for leadership and coordination, whether formal or informal, and they suffer real setbacks when those systems collapse.
[...]
It wasn’t the state, or the cold, or the media. The real problem underneath it all was a deep ambivalence about power. In fact, all of the things that made Occupy Wall Street brilliant had this paradox built into them, this politic of powerlessness woven deep inside, like a bad gene or a self-destruct mechanism.
For example, the mantra of leaderlessness came from a genuine desire to avoid classic pitfalls into hierarchy, but it was, at the same time, a farce, and divorced from any sense of collective structure or care for group culture. It foreclosed on the possibility of holding emerging leaders accountable, created a situation in which real leaders (whether worthy or not) went to the shadows instead of the square, and made it impossible to really develop one another (how, really, could we train new leaders if there weren’t supposed to be any in the first place?). Similarly, the refusal to articulate demands was brilliant in opening radical possibilities and sparking the popular imagination, but it also meant we didn’t have a shared goal, meant the word winning wasn’t even part of the movement’s lexicon. In many ways, it was an expression of a fear of actually saying something and taking responsibility for it, and it encouraged the often-repeated delusion that we didn’t even want anything our enemy had to give, that Wall Street and the State didn’t have any power over us.
[...]
In those moments, when we refuse to engage in these fights because they feel childish and below the belt, we forget that the majority of people are standing in the middle, wondering what the hell is going on and looking for people they can trust. When those of us who are thinking about power and trying to grow the base don’t step up to that challenge, the folks in the middle assume that the people bringing in toxicity are the leadership, and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They find no other voices providing leadership they can feel a part of. So they go home.
[...]
Our behaviors — even the self-sabotaging ones — are our bodies’ responses to threat. Our instincts are clumsy at times, and they often cut us off from our better options, but credit where credit is due: these instincts, at some points, probably saved our lives. Instead of hating those traits so much, we might be better off tipping our hat to them, thanking them for the safety they have provided us, and letting them know that we don’t need them anymore — that we want to practice something new instead.
[...]
The politics of powerlessness is a defense mechanism, meant to protect us from our worst fears. And as I’ve been learning, it never works to hate one’s defenses, to bang our heads against them, to bend them into submission. No, the way we change is by really getting curious about their source, and trying to address their root causes. Of course we’re afraid. Fear is a totally grounded response to what is happening around us. We need to sit with that. And we need to find new practices for dealing with our fears, because in the end, those hard truths are precisely the reason we need to do awaywith the politic of powerlessness.
http://www.alternet.org/occupy-wall-street/what-really-caused-implosion-occupy-movement-insiders-view
http://www.alternet.org/occupy-wall-street/what-really-caused-implosion-occupy-movement-insiders-view
Originally shared by Jordan Peacock
Yotam Marom:
The meetings are closed, and we all feel kind of bad about it, although this is another thing we don’t talk about often. There isn’t much coherence to how we ended up here in the first place — one person invited a few over and the next invited a couple and so on, until the room was full. It was as arbitrary a time to stop inviting people as any, but this is how things often happen in movement moments. We justify the boundary by reminding ourselves that we are certainly not the only collection of people meeting like this — there are many affinity groups and other kinds of formations — and that we are here to plan and strategize, not to make decisions.
But we also know that there are a lot of movers and shakers in the room, and that this affords us a disproportionate ability to move things through the rest of Occupy. We know the age-old pitfalls of people making plans in closed off rooms, and it’s not lost on us that — while this space is also led by some of the most powerful women and folks of color in the movement — most of us are white, middle class, and male. If someone had asked any one of us directly, we’d likely have agreed that, collectively, we have quite a bit of power and aren’t being held accountable to it.
But for the most part, we keep that nagging feeling under wraps, so we can continue the work. There is a confidence we seem to share that we are filling a void, meeting a real need, putting everything we have on the line to keep momentum going. We seem to agree, even if quietly, that movements don’t exist without leadership, that the general assembly has been more performance art than decision-making forum since the first couple of weeks, that leaderlessness is a myth, that we need a place to have sensitive discussions hopefully out of reach of the surveillance state. And in truth we know our jobs aren’t glamorous by any stretch of the imagination; after all, a good deal of the efforts of the folks in the room are aimed at getting occupiers port-o-potties and stopping the incessant drumming.
[...]
Some of the folks in the group got frustrated, and pulled away. They accused the rest of us of being liberals (this was a curse-word), said we were co-opting the movement for the unions, claimed that even meeting like this was a violation of the principles of the movement. Those claims were false, but they were hard to argue with, because most of us were already feeling guilty for being in closed off rooms. So we shrunk. Sort of like when an over-zealous white “ally” trips over other white folks to call out an example of racism; the first to call it out sits back smugly, having taken the moral high ground and pointed a finger at the others, and then the rest clench their jaws and stare at the floor guiltily, hoping the storm passes over them.
We tried to stop the split. We slowed down. We spent time trying to figure out what the right thing to do was. We tried to be honest about how much of this had to do with differences in politics and how much of it was really just ego on all sides. Some of us tried to reach across the aisle, to mend broken relationships. But in the meantime, the folks who had taken the moral high ground had begun building a separate group. That split happened in October in that living room on the Lower East Side, perhaps in other circles in the movement around the same time; by November it was playing out in the movement more broadly, until in December there were distinctly different tendencies offering different directions to the movement as a whole. It would be overly simplistic to trace the overall conflict inside the belly of Occupy Wall Street to the dissolution of this one group or even to in-fighting more broadly, but at the same time, it was a significant factor. All movements develop mechanisms for leadership and coordination, whether formal or informal, and they suffer real setbacks when those systems collapse.
[...]
It wasn’t the state, or the cold, or the media. The real problem underneath it all was a deep ambivalence about power. In fact, all of the things that made Occupy Wall Street brilliant had this paradox built into them, this politic of powerlessness woven deep inside, like a bad gene or a self-destruct mechanism.
For example, the mantra of leaderlessness came from a genuine desire to avoid classic pitfalls into hierarchy, but it was, at the same time, a farce, and divorced from any sense of collective structure or care for group culture. It foreclosed on the possibility of holding emerging leaders accountable, created a situation in which real leaders (whether worthy or not) went to the shadows instead of the square, and made it impossible to really develop one another (how, really, could we train new leaders if there weren’t supposed to be any in the first place?). Similarly, the refusal to articulate demands was brilliant in opening radical possibilities and sparking the popular imagination, but it also meant we didn’t have a shared goal, meant the word winning wasn’t even part of the movement’s lexicon. In many ways, it was an expression of a fear of actually saying something and taking responsibility for it, and it encouraged the often-repeated delusion that we didn’t even want anything our enemy had to give, that Wall Street and the State didn’t have any power over us.
[...]
In those moments, when we refuse to engage in these fights because they feel childish and below the belt, we forget that the majority of people are standing in the middle, wondering what the hell is going on and looking for people they can trust. When those of us who are thinking about power and trying to grow the base don’t step up to that challenge, the folks in the middle assume that the people bringing in toxicity are the leadership, and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They find no other voices providing leadership they can feel a part of. So they go home.
[...]
Our behaviors — even the self-sabotaging ones — are our bodies’ responses to threat. Our instincts are clumsy at times, and they often cut us off from our better options, but credit where credit is due: these instincts, at some points, probably saved our lives. Instead of hating those traits so much, we might be better off tipping our hat to them, thanking them for the safety they have provided us, and letting them know that we don’t need them anymore — that we want to practice something new instead.
[...]
The politics of powerlessness is a defense mechanism, meant to protect us from our worst fears. And as I’ve been learning, it never works to hate one’s defenses, to bang our heads against them, to bend them into submission. No, the way we change is by really getting curious about their source, and trying to address their root causes. Of course we’re afraid. Fear is a totally grounded response to what is happening around us. We need to sit with that. And we need to find new practices for dealing with our fears, because in the end, those hard truths are precisely the reason we need to do awaywith the politic of powerlessness.
http://www.alternet.org/occupy-wall-street/what-really-caused-implosion-occupy-movement-insiders-view
http://www.alternet.org/occupy-wall-street/what-really-caused-implosion-occupy-movement-insiders-view
Originally shared by John Poteet
Originally shared by John Poteet
It took me six tries to get this posted. Major historical event here.
I shouldn't have to explain why.
OK, I ran into a cartography challenged individual who I respect greatly so here goes the rundown.
The little green circle is the North Pole, or as close as I can get on this map site.
It's December 30th, 2015.
The temperature is above freezing. (0.1 C)
A few years ago I thought it was significant that it was raining instead of snowing at 86º North in June and it was. This is off the charts.
Source: http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=-201.69,90.55,367/loc=74.608,89.768
An arrow to the heart.
An arrow to the heart.
Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette
The Winners from the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest (13 Photos) http://twistedsifter.com/2015/12/national-geographic-photo-contest-2015-winners/ …
http://twistedsifter.com/2015/12/national-geographic-photo-contest-2015-winners
Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette
The Winners from the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest (13 Photos) http://twistedsifter.com/2015/12/national-geographic-photo-contest-2015-winners/ …
http://twistedsifter.com/2015/12/national-geographic-photo-contest-2015-winners
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
"These people described Mr. Sanders’ team as decidedly less emphatic in private discussions about having more primary debates than they have been in public, realizing that debates are not his strength."
"These people described Mr. Sanders’ team as decidedly less emphatic in private discussions about having more primary debates than they have been in public, realizing that debates are not his strength."
and
“I asked Senator Sanders” to do more, said Mr. O’Malley. “Senator Sanders didn’t want to do more debates either. He kind of liked where it is.”
Originally shared by ****
For those of you who are struggling with the Bernie campaign behavior this will help make sense of the behavior you see……
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/29/top-bernie-sanders-aide-rankles-those-in-and-out-of-campaign/?_r=0
and
“I asked Senator Sanders” to do more, said Mr. O’Malley. “Senator Sanders didn’t want to do more debates either. He kind of liked where it is.”
Originally shared by ****
For those of you who are struggling with the Bernie campaign behavior this will help make sense of the behavior you see……
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/29/top-bernie-sanders-aide-rankles-those-in-and-out-of-campaign/?_r=0
"I’ve come to believe that, in some ways, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton is a subversive act."
"I’ve come to believe that, in some ways, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton is a subversive act."
http://sadydoyle.tumblr.com/post/135664586198/likable
http://sadydoyle.tumblr.com/post/135664586198/likable
Friday, December 25, 2015
Originally shared by Jani Siekkinen
Originally shared by Jani Siekkinen
On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world.
Happy birthday Isaac Newton B. Dec 25,1642.
Originally shared by Matt Austern
Originally shared by Matt Austern
Apparently people in at least some circles are worried about the possibility that Hilary Clinton might already have the Democratic nomination wrapped up despite Bernie Sanders's popularity. I looked up the numbers and references to respond to a friend's post, so as long as I've got all that stuff collected I may as well hoist it from comments. Summary: this idea has some basis in fact, but it's more false than true.
The true part is that, of the 712 superdelegates (people who are delegates by virtue of holding an official position, and who aren't required to vote for a specific candidate), 359 of them have said they support Clinton and only 8 have said they support Sanders, at least as of a month ago. The remainder haven't endorsed any candidate. (http://www.npr.org/2015/11/13/455812702/clinton-has-45-to-1-superdelegate-advantage-over-sanders)
The false parts: (a) The superdelegates are a small fraction of the total 4764 delegates expected at the Democratic convention. (https://ballotpedia.org/Democratic_National_Convention,_2016#Delegation_selection) This gives Clinton an edge over Sanders and O'Malley, but by no means a lock. (b) Superdelegates can and do change their mind depending on who wins primaries. Clinton started with an edge in superdelegates in 2008 too, after all. If in fact Sanders wins the primary votes then I expect he'll get the nomination. (c) A phrase like "despite Sanders's popularity" is misleading at best, by suggesting that Sanders is the popular choice. In fact, though, an aggregate of the latest polls (http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-national-democratic-primary) shows Clinton with a considerable lead over Sanders and O'Malley combined. Clinton's lead over Sanders is about as large as Sanders's lead over O'Malley. It's a long time before any votes get cast, so things might well change, but at this point it looks like Clinton will probably get the nomination the old fashioned way, by getting the most votes.
http://www.npr.org/2015/11/13/455812702/clinton-has-45-to-1-superdelegate-advantage-over-sanders
Apparently people in at least some circles are worried about the possibility that Hilary Clinton might already have the Democratic nomination wrapped up despite Bernie Sanders's popularity. I looked up the numbers and references to respond to a friend's post, so as long as I've got all that stuff collected I may as well hoist it from comments. Summary: this idea has some basis in fact, but it's more false than true.
The true part is that, of the 712 superdelegates (people who are delegates by virtue of holding an official position, and who aren't required to vote for a specific candidate), 359 of them have said they support Clinton and only 8 have said they support Sanders, at least as of a month ago. The remainder haven't endorsed any candidate. (http://www.npr.org/2015/11/13/455812702/clinton-has-45-to-1-superdelegate-advantage-over-sanders)
The false parts: (a) The superdelegates are a small fraction of the total 4764 delegates expected at the Democratic convention. (https://ballotpedia.org/Democratic_National_Convention,_2016#Delegation_selection) This gives Clinton an edge over Sanders and O'Malley, but by no means a lock. (b) Superdelegates can and do change their mind depending on who wins primaries. Clinton started with an edge in superdelegates in 2008 too, after all. If in fact Sanders wins the primary votes then I expect he'll get the nomination. (c) A phrase like "despite Sanders's popularity" is misleading at best, by suggesting that Sanders is the popular choice. In fact, though, an aggregate of the latest polls (http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-national-democratic-primary) shows Clinton with a considerable lead over Sanders and O'Malley combined. Clinton's lead over Sanders is about as large as Sanders's lead over O'Malley. It's a long time before any votes get cast, so things might well change, but at this point it looks like Clinton will probably get the nomination the old fashioned way, by getting the most votes.
http://www.npr.org/2015/11/13/455812702/clinton-has-45-to-1-superdelegate-advantage-over-sanders
Thursday, December 24, 2015
It really must be watched...
It really must be watched...
Originally shared by Woozle Hypertwin
I couldn't resist the opportunity to do this. The weather was just too right. Sorry for the shaky camera and shaky voice. >.>
I feel like I should go back and add piano or something, but then I'd still be working on this in January. Maybe I'll do that for next year.
-- Lyrics --
I'm looking at a wet Christmas
Not like the ones we used to know
When the globe is warming
There'll be no snow forming
Just a winter mix to make the traffic slow
I'm looking at a wet Christmas
Not like the ones we used to know
Now the climate's changing
It's re-arranging
The jet stream, and what happens down below
I'm looking at a wet Christmas
Without a flake of snow in sight
May you enjoy December
As you remember
When all your Christmases were white.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPzSGTxaO6M
Originally shared by Woozle Hypertwin
I couldn't resist the opportunity to do this. The weather was just too right. Sorry for the shaky camera and shaky voice. >.>
I feel like I should go back and add piano or something, but then I'd still be working on this in January. Maybe I'll do that for next year.
-- Lyrics --
I'm looking at a wet Christmas
Not like the ones we used to know
When the globe is warming
There'll be no snow forming
Just a winter mix to make the traffic slow
I'm looking at a wet Christmas
Not like the ones we used to know
Now the climate's changing
It's re-arranging
The jet stream, and what happens down below
I'm looking at a wet Christmas
Without a flake of snow in sight
May you enjoy December
As you remember
When all your Christmases were white.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPzSGTxaO6M
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Originally shared by Kris Nelson
Originally shared by Kris Nelson
Never in my life would i have imagined sharing something for FOX but this is the best endorsement Bush 111 could give
https://mobile.twitter.com/MPasset/status/677138228701495296
Originally shared by McSpockyTM Is Watching
Originally shared by McSpockyTM Is Watching
http://bit.ly/1OMeKsq
http://bit.ly/1OMeKsq
The video clip is also interesting. Not the bombast that's become so common, but instead, thoughtful, carefully considered positions.
The video clip is also interesting. Not the bombast that's become so common, but instead, thoughtful, carefully considered positions.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/15/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-she-called-wall-street-regula/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/15/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-she-called-wall-street-regula/
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
"We rate Sanders’ claim that the campaign didn’t "go out and take" information as Mostly False."
"We rate Sanders’ claim that the campaign didn’t "go out and take" information as Mostly False."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/22/bernie-s/Sanders-take-Clinton-voter-data/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/22/bernie-s/Sanders-take-Clinton-voter-data/
"For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals."
"For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals."
Of course, this comes from the NY Times, which, as everybody knows, is conspiring with Clinton...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/politics/the-right-aims-at-democrats-on-social-media-to-hit-clinton.html?_r=0
Of course, this comes from the NY Times, which, as everybody knows, is conspiring with Clinton...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/politics/the-right-aims-at-democrats-on-social-media-to-hit-clinton.html?_r=0
Monday, December 21, 2015
Amazing human turd in operation
Amazing human turd in operation
Originally shared by ****
Trumpites? This is your leader……..?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-disgusting/index.html
Originally shared by ****
Trumpites? This is your leader……..?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-disgusting/index.html
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Originally shared by Joshua Robbin Marks (יהושע רובין מארקס)
Originally shared by Joshua Robbin Marks (יהושע רובין מארקס)
Amazing. Nearly 200 nations just signed a historic climate agreement in Paris and not a single question about climate change at last night's Democratic presidential debate.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/12/19/climate_change_was_absent_from_abc_s_democratic_debate.html
Amazing. Nearly 200 nations just signed a historic climate agreement in Paris and not a single question about climate change at last night's Democratic presidential debate.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/12/19/climate_change_was_absent_from_abc_s_democratic_debate.html
"Sheeple" is such a stupid word...
"Sheeple" is such a stupid word...
Originally shared by John Hardy
Sheeple
If you are a frequent and unironic user of this term, please uncircle me now.
Thanks.
https://xkcd.com/610/
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Friday, December 18, 2015
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
The audit logs from the Sanders campaign seem... extraordinarily bad. They explicitly searched Hillary's data from early primary states for low and high-affinity voters -- a search which is more-or-less useless for anything other than targeting voters which Hillary has written off.
If the Sanders campaign was simply trying to prove that they could get into someone else's namespace, they picked the most suspicious way to do it. The DNC has almost certainly done the right thing by restoring Sanders' access -- it's not the whole campaign's fault -- but both contractor that let this happen and Bernie's entire IT staff should be fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/12/18/merged_document.pdf
The audit logs from the Sanders campaign seem... extraordinarily bad. They explicitly searched Hillary's data from early primary states for low and high-affinity voters -- a search which is more-or-less useless for anything other than targeting voters which Hillary has written off.
If the Sanders campaign was simply trying to prove that they could get into someone else's namespace, they picked the most suspicious way to do it. The DNC has almost certainly done the right thing by restoring Sanders' access -- it's not the whole campaign's fault -- but both contractor that let this happen and Bernie's entire IT staff should be fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/12/18/merged_document.pdf
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
The audit logs from the Sanders campaign seem... extraordinarily bad. They explicitly searched Hillary's data from early primary states for low and high-affinity voters -- a search which is more-or-less useless for anything other than targeting voters which Hillary has written off.
If the Sanders campaign was simply trying to prove that they could get into someone else's namespace, they picked the most suspicious way to do it. The DNC has almost certainly done the right thing by restoring Sanders' access -- it's not the whole campaign's fault -- but both contractor that let this happen and Bernie's entire IT staff should be fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/12/18/merged_document.pdf
The audit logs from the Sanders campaign seem... extraordinarily bad. They explicitly searched Hillary's data from early primary states for low and high-affinity voters -- a search which is more-or-less useless for anything other than targeting voters which Hillary has written off.
If the Sanders campaign was simply trying to prove that they could get into someone else's namespace, they picked the most suspicious way to do it. The DNC has almost certainly done the right thing by restoring Sanders' access -- it's not the whole campaign's fault -- but both contractor that let this happen and Bernie's entire IT staff should be fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/12/18/merged_document.pdf
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Originally shared by Jordan Peacock
Originally shared by Jordan Peacock
Venkatesh Rao:
1/ Keynes famously asked, "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"
2/ For many people, the answer is, "I restate what I already believe more stridently." In other words, when the facts change, they derp.
9/ In a tribal world of timeless sacred beliefs, where new information is profane by default, to change your mind is to betray your tribe.
10/ Derping is a degenerate form of motivated reasoning, where you don't even bother looking for confirmatory evidence. You just repeat yourself.
17/ To get out of the habit of derping, you can do two things: practice changing your mind in public and practice contingent reasoning.
20/ Contingent reasoning -- working with if-then assertions that have a finite scope rather than absolute, unqualified assertions -- is like insurance against changing facts.
21/ This does not mean slipping into weasel mode where you hem and haw about everything to avoid making decisions or acting.
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=6c1a8c9db3
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=6c1a8c9db3
Venkatesh Rao:
1/ Keynes famously asked, "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"
2/ For many people, the answer is, "I restate what I already believe more stridently." In other words, when the facts change, they derp.
9/ In a tribal world of timeless sacred beliefs, where new information is profane by default, to change your mind is to betray your tribe.
10/ Derping is a degenerate form of motivated reasoning, where you don't even bother looking for confirmatory evidence. You just repeat yourself.
17/ To get out of the habit of derping, you can do two things: practice changing your mind in public and practice contingent reasoning.
20/ Contingent reasoning -- working with if-then assertions that have a finite scope rather than absolute, unqualified assertions -- is like insurance against changing facts.
21/ This does not mean slipping into weasel mode where you hem and haw about everything to avoid making decisions or acting.
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=6c1a8c9db3
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=6c1a8c9db3
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Originally shared by Steve S
Originally shared by Steve S
Sanders goes negative, then changes his mind.
Oh, and the accusation he uses is false.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/12/sanders-abruptly-pulls-internet-ad-saying-clinton-is-being-funded-by-big-money-interests
Sanders goes negative, then changes his mind.
Oh, and the accusation he uses is false.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/12/sanders-abruptly-pulls-internet-ad-saying-clinton-is-being-funded-by-big-money-interests
Originally shared by Pete McGowan
Originally shared by Pete McGowan
Even Bloomberg Financial News can see that President Obama's refusal to send ground troops to Syria isn't that bad of a plan. President Putin apparently didn't learn anything from the Russian quagmire in Afghanistan, and is rapidly burning through Russia's now small checkbook. The Ruble is now breaking through its 2014 lows, which was already essentially at the bottom of a cliff. The Ruble has lost half its value since 2014.
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD&view=5Y
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-09/putin-proves-obama-prescient-on-syria-as-russia-faces-quagmire-ihzauuvr
Even Bloomberg Financial News can see that President Obama's refusal to send ground troops to Syria isn't that bad of a plan. President Putin apparently didn't learn anything from the Russian quagmire in Afghanistan, and is rapidly burning through Russia's now small checkbook. The Ruble is now breaking through its 2014 lows, which was already essentially at the bottom of a cliff. The Ruble has lost half its value since 2014.
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD&view=5Y
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-09/putin-proves-obama-prescient-on-syria-as-russia-faces-quagmire-ihzauuvr
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Originally shared by John Walkup
Originally shared by John Walkup
" A loose network of 4,556 individuals with overlapping ties to 164 organizations do the most to dispute climate change in the U.S....
ExxonMobil and the family foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch emerge as the most significant sources of funding for these skeptics.
He examined Internal Revenue Service data showing which groups in the network of climate contrarians accepted funding from ExxonMobil or Koch foundations between 1993 and 2013. Recipients from those two sources tend to occupy central nodes in what he calls a "contrarian network." Groups funded by ExxonMobil or the Kochs "have greater influence over flows of resources, communication, and the production of contrarian information," Farrell wrote.
The research was neither easy nor glamorous. One particular element of tedium was making sure that individuals were not represented more than once. Farrell analyzed the individuals, eliminated all middle initials, corrected misspellings, and deleted courtesy titles. "This was completed by hand," he noted, "on all 4,556 names." A supplement to the paper lists all 164 of the organizations he identified as promoting climate-change skepticism, a roster that includes the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute.
Once he understood the network, Farrell investigated which organizations were most successful in pushing their view. He found that groups with ties to the two big donors were more likely to see their viewpoints make it into media than those without such ties.
Farrell's research took him through 40,785 documents from contrarian groups; 14,943 from the New York Times, Washington Times, and USA Today; 1,930 from U.S. presidents; and 7,786 from Congress.
For Robert Brulle, a sociology professor at Drexel University who has conducted research on the topic, Farrell's research helps define how climate denial works. "Corporate funders create and support conservative think tanks," which then pass off climate misinformation as valid. The mainstream media pick up on it, which helps shape public opinion.
"This brings up the following question," Brulle said. "Why is the media picking up and promulgating the central themes of climate misinformation?" "
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-30/unearthing-america-s-deep-network-of-climate-change-deniers
" A loose network of 4,556 individuals with overlapping ties to 164 organizations do the most to dispute climate change in the U.S....
ExxonMobil and the family foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch emerge as the most significant sources of funding for these skeptics.
He examined Internal Revenue Service data showing which groups in the network of climate contrarians accepted funding from ExxonMobil or Koch foundations between 1993 and 2013. Recipients from those two sources tend to occupy central nodes in what he calls a "contrarian network." Groups funded by ExxonMobil or the Kochs "have greater influence over flows of resources, communication, and the production of contrarian information," Farrell wrote.
The research was neither easy nor glamorous. One particular element of tedium was making sure that individuals were not represented more than once. Farrell analyzed the individuals, eliminated all middle initials, corrected misspellings, and deleted courtesy titles. "This was completed by hand," he noted, "on all 4,556 names." A supplement to the paper lists all 164 of the organizations he identified as promoting climate-change skepticism, a roster that includes the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute.
Once he understood the network, Farrell investigated which organizations were most successful in pushing their view. He found that groups with ties to the two big donors were more likely to see their viewpoints make it into media than those without such ties.
Farrell's research took him through 40,785 documents from contrarian groups; 14,943 from the New York Times, Washington Times, and USA Today; 1,930 from U.S. presidents; and 7,786 from Congress.
For Robert Brulle, a sociology professor at Drexel University who has conducted research on the topic, Farrell's research helps define how climate denial works. "Corporate funders create and support conservative think tanks," which then pass off climate misinformation as valid. The mainstream media pick up on it, which helps shape public opinion.
"This brings up the following question," Brulle said. "Why is the media picking up and promulgating the central themes of climate misinformation?" "
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-30/unearthing-america-s-deep-network-of-climate-change-deniers
Friday, December 11, 2015
Originally shared by Kee Hinckley
Originally shared by Kee Hinckley
These are my daughters. If you attack Middle Easterners fleeing persecution, you attack them. Their mother came here from Iran after the revolution, looking for a safer life. America let her in despite our conflict with Iran, because American principles are more important than our fears and disputes. If you don't believe our principles always come first, then you don't believe in America.
Make no mistake. When you attack immigrants, you're attacking America. We're a nation of immigrants. Of all races. Of all creeds. Anyone who doesn't believe that, is welcome to leave and find another country. Because if you turn your back on immigrants in need, if you turn your back on freedom of religion, you understand less about what it means to be an American than every immigrant who ever stepped onto our soil.
Being born an American is nothing to be proud of. Being born an American is easy; any idiot can get born here. Immigrants and refugees earned the right to come here. Nobody is more American than the person who came here fleeing repression and seeking freedom.
If you want to be proud of being an American, then you have to support American ideals. Speak out against those who seek to limit speech, limit religion, or turn away people in need. Don't mute what they say. Don't let it go for the sake of friendship or family. Speak out.
Silence isn't just death. Silence is blood on our hands. The blood of those we turned away. And the blood of a country that fell, not because of war or terrorism, but because we were afraid to trust the very principles that made it strong.
#syria #refugees #freedom
"And there’s the rub. Had Merkel not presided over the arrival of nearly one million refugees and migrants in one year (950,000, according to the latest official figures), she would still be the unchallenged empress of Germany and Europe."
"And there’s the rub. Had Merkel not presided over the arrival of nearly one million refugees and migrants in one year (950,000, according to the latest official figures), she would still be the unchallenged empress of Germany and Europe."
Originally shared by Victor H
After her finest hour, Merkel now needs help from all Europe.
http://gu.com/p/4fxmk?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Google%2B
Originally shared by Victor H
After her finest hour, Merkel now needs help from all Europe.
http://gu.com/p/4fxmk?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Google%2B
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Monday, December 7, 2015
The comments are a hoot. Some Bernie supporters, unfortunately, will feel right at home.
The comments are a hoot. Some Bernie supporters, unfortunately, will feel right at home.
Originally shared by David Badash
http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/hillary_clinton_beats_every_top_gop_presidential_candidate_especially_donald_trump_in_latest_poll
Originally shared by David Badash
http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/hillary_clinton_beats_every_top_gop_presidential_candidate_especially_donald_trump_in_latest_poll
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Originally shared by mark white
Originally shared by mark white
We Asked a Fascism Expert if Donald Trump Is a Fascist via the @VICE Android App http://m.vice.com/read/we-asked-a-fascism-expert-if-donald-trump-is-a-fascist-124
http://m.vice.com/read/we-asked-a-fascism-expert-if-donald-trump-is-a-fascist-124
We Asked a Fascism Expert if Donald Trump Is a Fascist via the @VICE Android App http://m.vice.com/read/we-asked-a-fascism-expert-if-donald-trump-is-a-fascist-124
http://m.vice.com/read/we-asked-a-fascism-expert-if-donald-trump-is-a-fascist-124
The Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment are frequently referenced as examples of how through the action of perceived authority people can be twisted to do evil. However, one can imagine similar experiments where the students were conditioned to acts of unusual kindness.
The Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment are frequently referenced as examples of how through the action of perceived authority people can be twisted to do evil. However, one can imagine similar experiments where the students were conditioned to acts of unusual kindness.
Three corollaries: 1) a saintly society is possible; 2) people in authority, in particular, political figures and news outlets, bear significant responsibility for the bad behavior of their followers; 3) we all bear a responsibility to proselytize goodness.
Three corollaries: 1) a saintly society is possible; 2) people in authority, in particular, political figures and news outlets, bear significant responsibility for the bad behavior of their followers; 3) we all bear a responsibility to proselytize goodness.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
"Clinton has continued to occupy that same space for the better part of three decades now, a one-woman culture war who plays the political game the same way the men around her do. But unlike those men, Clinton is chided for being “disingenuous” and a “political insider.” Everyone else just gets to do their job."
"Clinton has continued to occupy that same space for the better part of three decades now, a one-woman culture war who plays the political game the same way the men around her do. But unlike those men, Clinton is chided for being “disingenuous” and a “political insider.” Everyone else just gets to do their job."
Comments to original, please...
Originally shared by Victor H
I do agree with the author of this article and have refrained from any attacks on HRC myself in order to make my choice for POTUS, Sanders, look better in comparison. His merits stand well on their own.
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/05/the_ridiculous_left_wing_crusade_against_hillary_clinton_needs_to_stop/?source=newsletter
Comments to original, please...
Originally shared by Victor H
I do agree with the author of this article and have refrained from any attacks on HRC myself in order to make my choice for POTUS, Sanders, look better in comparison. His merits stand well on their own.
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/05/the_ridiculous_left_wing_crusade_against_hillary_clinton_needs_to_stop/?source=newsletter
Originally shared by ****
Originally shared by ****
This girl has to be remembered and culture has to arrive to the ignorant, cruel and fanatic people who are able to become killers only to keep children's abuse as an accepted way of life.
https://youtu.be/CY4gNBf2n3o
This girl has to be remembered and culture has to arrive to the ignorant, cruel and fanatic people who are able to become killers only to keep children's abuse as an accepted way of life.
https://youtu.be/CY4gNBf2n3o
Friday, December 4, 2015
Originally shared by Zaid El-Hoiydi
Originally shared by Zaid El-Hoiydi
Cold War Syndrome: guns are made available for everyone, making everyone feels the need to get a gun.
In 2003 the Japanese went as far as to ban the ownership of swords (http://goo.gl/aicBdl). Needless to say that, during our days in Japan, we have never had the slightest reason to fear anything but the rain and a craving to buy silly stuff.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-guns-how-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/
Cold War Syndrome: guns are made available for everyone, making everyone feels the need to get a gun.
In 2003 the Japanese went as far as to ban the ownership of swords (http://goo.gl/aicBdl). Needless to say that, during our days in Japan, we have never had the slightest reason to fear anything but the rain and a craving to buy silly stuff.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-guns-how-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Dystopia turned up to 11: a method to supply child brides for the excess males resulting from the one child policy...
Dystopia turned up to 11: a method to supply child brides for the excess males resulting from the one child policy...
Originally shared by Ciro Villa
Chinese scientist claim to have achieved the necessary technology to clone humans
"The Chinese scientist behind the world's biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction.
Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020.
But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun's ambitions.
In the factory pipeline are also thoroughbred racehorses, as well as pet and police dogs, specialised in searching and sniffing.
Boyalife is already working with its South Korean partner Sooam and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to improve primate cloning capacity to create better test animals for disease research.
And it is a short biological step from monkeys to humans—potentially raising a host of moral and ethical controversies."
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-china-clone-factory-scientist-eyes.html
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-china-clone-factory-scientist-eyes.html
Originally shared by Ciro Villa
Chinese scientist claim to have achieved the necessary technology to clone humans
"The Chinese scientist behind the world's biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction.
Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020.
But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun's ambitions.
In the factory pipeline are also thoroughbred racehorses, as well as pet and police dogs, specialised in searching and sniffing.
Boyalife is already working with its South Korean partner Sooam and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to improve primate cloning capacity to create better test animals for disease research.
And it is a short biological step from monkeys to humans—potentially raising a host of moral and ethical controversies."
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-china-clone-factory-scientist-eyes.html
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-china-clone-factory-scientist-eyes.html
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Sunday, November 29, 2015
I'm very sorry to wax political, but unfortunately, the times seem to require it.
I'm very sorry to wax political, but unfortunately, the times seem to require it.
Originally shared by Rugger Ducky
This is Army of God's website. Just now. If you're confused who they are, they're a violent anti-abortion Christian terrorist organization. They hid and protected Eric Rudolph through his years hiding from law enforcement.
I've had at least a dozen white Christian men tell me today there is no active hate machine determined to murder abortion providers. And certainly not in the name of their god.
Of course they're all applauding yesterday's murders.
Because they aren't pro life. They aren't Christians. They're hateful people looking for any excuse to hate someone. And this gives them the twisted belief that they're saving people.
http://www.armyofgod.com/index.html
Saturday, November 28, 2015
a bit of a counterweight to the Bernie Fever...
a bit of a counterweight to the Bernie Fever...
Originally shared by Steve S
You know idolization is going on when people start with their notion of perfection and project it onto their target to fill in all the blanks in their knowledge.
Reality:
"""
But on his home turf in Vermont, ... gay rights advocates say Mr. Sanders was less than a leader, and not entirely present, on the issue.
"""
In 1996, his office explained that he voted against the Defense of Marriage Act because it infringed on states’ rights, traditionally a conservative argument.
"""
“I don’t think anybody thought about Bernie Sanders,” said Jan Backus, a state senator at the time who called Mr. Sanders “invisible on the issue.”
"""
But getting the state’s congressman to express his position on gay marriage was like “pulling teeth ... from a rhinoceros,” wrote the Vermont publication Seven Days.
"""
Mr. Sanders was not “a real active participant in the fight” for civil rights, said David Moats, the author of “Civil Wars,” who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on the issue in The Rutland Herald.
"""
When it came time for Mr. Sanders to speak, he deplored the demonization of gay people but complained that the virulent opposition to civil unions diverted attention from prescription drug costs, health care and other economic issues.
“There are a dozen other issues out there that are as important or more important as that issue,” he said.
"""
Asked in a debate against his Republican opponent whether the federal government should overturn laws on same-sex marriage, he argued that it was a states’ rights issue. When asked by a reporter whether Vermont should legalize same-sex marriage, he said, “Not right now, not after what we went through.”
"""
In 2009, the Vermont legislature overrode a governor’s veto and passed legislation that explicitly recognized same-sex marriages and extended more rights to same-sex couples. That year Mr. Sanders articulated his support for gay marriage.
"""
But as Mr. Sanders tells it, he was a champion on the issue for decades. “Twenty years have come and gone, and as the conservative Supreme Court said, everybody’s entitled to get marriage,” he said in the interview. “So what does it mean to be 19 years ahead of the curve?”
"""
Look, it was only recently that politicians could openly support same-sex marriage without shooting themselves in the foot, so this isn't really about whether, all things being equal, he supported same-sex marriage. Even Obama had to pretend to "evolve" on the issue, and then only after Biden's rainbow balloon was floated successfully.
The real issue is that Sanders is a real person, and a real politician, not some fucking leftist unicorn. When I speak with his supporters, I often feel that I'm comparing an actual human being in the form of Clinton with an imaginary idol named Sanders, and this disconnect from reality is unhealthy.
(Oh, and a shout-out to that asshole, +Ole Olsen, who's done his level best to prop up the myth and hide the man. He's the GOP's best friend among progressives.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/politics/as-gay-rights-ally-bernie-sanders-wasnt-always-in-vanguard.html
Originally shared by Steve S
You know idolization is going on when people start with their notion of perfection and project it onto their target to fill in all the blanks in their knowledge.
Reality:
"""
But on his home turf in Vermont, ... gay rights advocates say Mr. Sanders was less than a leader, and not entirely present, on the issue.
"""
In 1996, his office explained that he voted against the Defense of Marriage Act because it infringed on states’ rights, traditionally a conservative argument.
"""
“I don’t think anybody thought about Bernie Sanders,” said Jan Backus, a state senator at the time who called Mr. Sanders “invisible on the issue.”
"""
But getting the state’s congressman to express his position on gay marriage was like “pulling teeth ... from a rhinoceros,” wrote the Vermont publication Seven Days.
"""
Mr. Sanders was not “a real active participant in the fight” for civil rights, said David Moats, the author of “Civil Wars,” who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on the issue in The Rutland Herald.
"""
When it came time for Mr. Sanders to speak, he deplored the demonization of gay people but complained that the virulent opposition to civil unions diverted attention from prescription drug costs, health care and other economic issues.
“There are a dozen other issues out there that are as important or more important as that issue,” he said.
"""
Asked in a debate against his Republican opponent whether the federal government should overturn laws on same-sex marriage, he argued that it was a states’ rights issue. When asked by a reporter whether Vermont should legalize same-sex marriage, he said, “Not right now, not after what we went through.”
"""
In 2009, the Vermont legislature overrode a governor’s veto and passed legislation that explicitly recognized same-sex marriages and extended more rights to same-sex couples. That year Mr. Sanders articulated his support for gay marriage.
"""
But as Mr. Sanders tells it, he was a champion on the issue for decades. “Twenty years have come and gone, and as the conservative Supreme Court said, everybody’s entitled to get marriage,” he said in the interview. “So what does it mean to be 19 years ahead of the curve?”
"""
Look, it was only recently that politicians could openly support same-sex marriage without shooting themselves in the foot, so this isn't really about whether, all things being equal, he supported same-sex marriage. Even Obama had to pretend to "evolve" on the issue, and then only after Biden's rainbow balloon was floated successfully.
The real issue is that Sanders is a real person, and a real politician, not some fucking leftist unicorn. When I speak with his supporters, I often feel that I'm comparing an actual human being in the form of Clinton with an imaginary idol named Sanders, and this disconnect from reality is unhealthy.
(Oh, and a shout-out to that asshole, +Ole Olsen, who's done his level best to prop up the myth and hide the man. He's the GOP's best friend among progressives.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/politics/as-gay-rights-ally-bernie-sanders-wasnt-always-in-vanguard.html
Friday, November 27, 2015
From "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats"
From "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats"
by Gwynne Dyer. This is a worst case business-as-usual scenario:
'Scenario 1
The Year: 2045
Average global temperature: 2.8 degrees Celsius higher than 1990
Global population: 5.8 billion.
'Since the final collapse of the European Union in 2036, under the stress of mass migration from the southern to the northern members, the reconfigured Northern Union (France Benelux, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland and the old Hapsburg domains in central Europe) has succeeded in closing its borders to any further refugees from the famine-stricken Mediterranean countries. Italy, south of Rome, has been largely overrun by refugees from even harder hit north African countries and is no longer part of an organised state, but Spain,
Padania (northern Italy) and Turkey have all acquired nuclear weapons and are seeking (with little success) to enforce food sharing on the better-fed countries of northern Europe. Britain, which has managed to make itself just about self-sufficient in food by dint of a great national effort, has withdrawn from the continent and shelters behind its enhanced nuclear deterrent.
'Russia, the greatest beneficiary of climate change in terms of food
production, is the undisputed great power of Asia. However, the
reunification of China after the chaos of the 2020s and the 2030s poses a renewed threat to its Siberian borders, for even the much reduced Chinese population of eight hundred million is unable to feed itself from the country's increasingly arid farmland, which was devastated by the decline of rainfall over the north Chinese plain and the collapse of the major river systems. Southern India is re-emerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh remain swept by famine and anarchy, due to the collapse of the flow in the glacier-fed Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and the increasingly frequent failure of the monsoon. Japan, like Britain, has withdrawn from its continent and is an island of relative prosperity bristling with nuclear weapons.
'The population of the Islamic Republic of Arabia, which had risen to forty million, fell by half in five years after the exhaustion of the giant
Ghawar oil field in 2020, and has since halved again due to the exorbitant price of what little food remains available for import from any source. Uganda's population, 5 million at independence in 1962, reached 110 million in 2030 before falling back to 30 million, and the majority of the survivors are severely malnourished. Brazil and Argentina still manage to feed themselves, but Mexico has been expelled from the North American Free Trade Area, leaving the United States and Canada with just enough food and water to maintain at least a shadow of their former lifestyles. The wall along the US-Mexican border is still holding.
'Human greenhouse-gas emissions temporarily peaked in 2032, at 47 percent higher than 1990, due largely to the dwindling oil supply and the Chinese Civil War. However, the release of thousands of megatons of methane and carbon dioxide from the melting permafrost in Arctic Canada, Alaska and Siberia has totally overwhelmed human emissions cuts, and the process has slid beyond human ability to control. The combined total of human
and'-neo-natural' greenhouse-gas emissions continues to rise rapidly, and the average global temperature at the end of the century is predicted to be 8 or 9 degrees Celsius higher than 1990.'
by Gwynne Dyer. This is a worst case business-as-usual scenario:
'Scenario 1
The Year: 2045
Average global temperature: 2.8 degrees Celsius higher than 1990
Global population: 5.8 billion.
'Since the final collapse of the European Union in 2036, under the stress of mass migration from the southern to the northern members, the reconfigured Northern Union (France Benelux, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland and the old Hapsburg domains in central Europe) has succeeded in closing its borders to any further refugees from the famine-stricken Mediterranean countries. Italy, south of Rome, has been largely overrun by refugees from even harder hit north African countries and is no longer part of an organised state, but Spain,
Padania (northern Italy) and Turkey have all acquired nuclear weapons and are seeking (with little success) to enforce food sharing on the better-fed countries of northern Europe. Britain, which has managed to make itself just about self-sufficient in food by dint of a great national effort, has withdrawn from the continent and shelters behind its enhanced nuclear deterrent.
'Russia, the greatest beneficiary of climate change in terms of food
production, is the undisputed great power of Asia. However, the
reunification of China after the chaos of the 2020s and the 2030s poses a renewed threat to its Siberian borders, for even the much reduced Chinese population of eight hundred million is unable to feed itself from the country's increasingly arid farmland, which was devastated by the decline of rainfall over the north Chinese plain and the collapse of the major river systems. Southern India is re-emerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh remain swept by famine and anarchy, due to the collapse of the flow in the glacier-fed Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and the increasingly frequent failure of the monsoon. Japan, like Britain, has withdrawn from its continent and is an island of relative prosperity bristling with nuclear weapons.
'The population of the Islamic Republic of Arabia, which had risen to forty million, fell by half in five years after the exhaustion of the giant
Ghawar oil field in 2020, and has since halved again due to the exorbitant price of what little food remains available for import from any source. Uganda's population, 5 million at independence in 1962, reached 110 million in 2030 before falling back to 30 million, and the majority of the survivors are severely malnourished. Brazil and Argentina still manage to feed themselves, but Mexico has been expelled from the North American Free Trade Area, leaving the United States and Canada with just enough food and water to maintain at least a shadow of their former lifestyles. The wall along the US-Mexican border is still holding.
'Human greenhouse-gas emissions temporarily peaked in 2032, at 47 percent higher than 1990, due largely to the dwindling oil supply and the Chinese Civil War. However, the release of thousands of megatons of methane and carbon dioxide from the melting permafrost in Arctic Canada, Alaska and Siberia has totally overwhelmed human emissions cuts, and the process has slid beyond human ability to control. The combined total of human
and'-neo-natural' greenhouse-gas emissions continues to rise rapidly, and the average global temperature at the end of the century is predicted to be 8 or 9 degrees Celsius higher than 1990.'
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Greybeard in command...
Greybeard in command...
Originally shared by Venus Panthar
If you have not heard Jimmy Herring before - you are in for a mega big time ear treat!!! Check out this #Beatles cover of "Within You Without You" (2020) AWESOME #Live perfomance!!
#guitarsolo #GuitarInstrumental #GuitaristsCommunity #MusiciansCommunity #Music #MusicVideo
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=0C3dVBwnA7M&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVAPqfeSvf9s%26feature%3Dshare
Originally shared by Venus Panthar
If you have not heard Jimmy Herring before - you are in for a mega big time ear treat!!! Check out this #Beatles cover of "Within You Without You" (2020) AWESOME #Live perfomance!!
#guitarsolo #GuitarInstrumental #GuitaristsCommunity #MusiciansCommunity #Music #MusicVideo
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=0C3dVBwnA7M&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVAPqfeSvf9s%26feature%3Dshare
Originally shared by rare avis
Originally shared by rare avis
The notion that animals think and feel may be rampant among pet owners, but it makes all kinds of scientific types uncomfortable.
“If you ask my colleagues whether animals have emotions and thoughts,” says Philip Low, a prominent computational neuroscientist, “many will drop their voices to a whisper or simply change the subject. They don’t want to touch it.” Jaak Panksepp, a professor at Washington State University, has studied the emotional responses of rats. “Once, not very long ago,” he said, “you couldn’t even talk about these things with colleagues.”
That may be changing. A profusion of recent studies has shown animals to be far closer to us than we previously believed — it turns out that common shore crabs feel and remember pain, zebra finches experience REM sleep, fruit-fly brothers cooperate, dolphins and elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, chimpanzees assist one another without expecting favors in return and dogs really do feel elation in their owners’ presence.
In the summer of 2012, an unprecedented document, masterminded by Low — “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals” — was signed by a group of leading animal researchers in the presence of Stephen Hawking. It asserted that mammals, birds and other creatures like octopuses possess consciousness and, in all likelihood, emotions and self-awareness.
Scientists, as a rule, don’t issue declarations. But Low claims that the new research, and the ripples of unease it has engendered among rank-and-file colleagues, demanded an emphatic gesture. “Afterward, an eminent neuroanatomist came up to me and said, ‘We were all thinking this, but were afraid to say it,’” Low recalled.
It is not the habit of researchers to speculate broadly about the implications of their work; even groundbreaking studies tend to light up grottoes of data without revealing an overall vista. “We’re on the same page in general, but not at all on the specifics,” said Panksepp, who was a signatory of the declaration.
“As far as science is concerned, animal thought remains at the argumentative level.” Low readily admits that scientists have not even been able to agree on a working definition of consciousness. “When we were discussing the declaration, we agreed to shelve that issue for the time being,” he told me.
Though he follows the research, Virga, 56, is not a researcher; his convictions about animal individuality predate the recent science. And while the hypotheses and theories about animal cognition are fascinating to consider, they aren’t always germane to a behaviorist crouching behind a barn door amid a row of trash cans while being charged by a 700-pound takin — a hirsute Tibetan goat-antelope with a not-trivial set of horns — named Chopper.
Zoos contact Virga when animals develop difficulties that vets and keepers cannot address, and he is expected to produce tangible, observable results. Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras.
“Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,” Virga told me.
“But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.”
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/zoo-animals-and-their-discontents.html
The notion that animals think and feel may be rampant among pet owners, but it makes all kinds of scientific types uncomfortable.
“If you ask my colleagues whether animals have emotions and thoughts,” says Philip Low, a prominent computational neuroscientist, “many will drop their voices to a whisper or simply change the subject. They don’t want to touch it.” Jaak Panksepp, a professor at Washington State University, has studied the emotional responses of rats. “Once, not very long ago,” he said, “you couldn’t even talk about these things with colleagues.”
That may be changing. A profusion of recent studies has shown animals to be far closer to us than we previously believed — it turns out that common shore crabs feel and remember pain, zebra finches experience REM sleep, fruit-fly brothers cooperate, dolphins and elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, chimpanzees assist one another without expecting favors in return and dogs really do feel elation in their owners’ presence.
In the summer of 2012, an unprecedented document, masterminded by Low — “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals” — was signed by a group of leading animal researchers in the presence of Stephen Hawking. It asserted that mammals, birds and other creatures like octopuses possess consciousness and, in all likelihood, emotions and self-awareness.
Scientists, as a rule, don’t issue declarations. But Low claims that the new research, and the ripples of unease it has engendered among rank-and-file colleagues, demanded an emphatic gesture. “Afterward, an eminent neuroanatomist came up to me and said, ‘We were all thinking this, but were afraid to say it,’” Low recalled.
It is not the habit of researchers to speculate broadly about the implications of their work; even groundbreaking studies tend to light up grottoes of data without revealing an overall vista. “We’re on the same page in general, but not at all on the specifics,” said Panksepp, who was a signatory of the declaration.
“As far as science is concerned, animal thought remains at the argumentative level.” Low readily admits that scientists have not even been able to agree on a working definition of consciousness. “When we were discussing the declaration, we agreed to shelve that issue for the time being,” he told me.
Though he follows the research, Virga, 56, is not a researcher; his convictions about animal individuality predate the recent science. And while the hypotheses and theories about animal cognition are fascinating to consider, they aren’t always germane to a behaviorist crouching behind a barn door amid a row of trash cans while being charged by a 700-pound takin — a hirsute Tibetan goat-antelope with a not-trivial set of horns — named Chopper.
Zoos contact Virga when animals develop difficulties that vets and keepers cannot address, and he is expected to produce tangible, observable results. Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras.
“Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,” Virga told me.
“But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.”
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/magazine/zoo-animals-and-their-discontents.html
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Originally shared by Jürgen Hubert
Originally shared by Jürgen Hubert
I do not get warm and fuzzy feelings upon reading this. In fact, pretty much the opposite.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34907983
I do not get warm and fuzzy feelings upon reading this. In fact, pretty much the opposite.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34907983
Monday, November 23, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
I like to listen to this once in a while...
I like to listen to this once in a while...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hio_22IrGc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hio_22IrGc0
Originally shared by Kee Hinckley
Originally shared by Kee Hinckley
Sultans of Swing. Still one of my favorite songs of all time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-J1wf2KHc&feature=share
Sultans of Swing. Still one of my favorite songs of all time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-J1wf2KHc&feature=share
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Originally shared by Mary T
Originally shared by Mary T
Animals will be considered “sentient beings” instead of property in a bill tabled in the Canadian province of Quebec. The legislation states that "animals are not things. They are sentient beings and have biological needs."
Agriculture Minister Pierre Paradis proposed the bill and wants to change Quebec's infamous image as a haven for puppy mills.
The legislation specifies that animals have biological needs and includes fines of up to $250,000 for those who are cruel to animals, as well as jail time for repeat offenders.
Paradis said the bill puts Quebec more in line with other Canadian provinces like Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba. The act will apply to all domesticated and farm animals and certain wild animals. Paradis said he wants to see animals “treated with dignity as much as possible” it doesn’t matter what animal.
"If you have a goldfish you have to take care of it," he said. "Don't get a goldfish if you don't want to take care of it."
Under the bill inspectors will have the power to demand to see an animal if they have “reasonable cause” to suspect the pet or animal is being mistreated. They also can also obtain a warrant to enter a home and seize animals. Repeat offenders would also come under fire as authorities and judges would have the discretion to increase fines and sentence serial violators to jail for up to 18 months.
Read more at http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty#BLccpxUBcPz9DXjq.99
http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty
Animals will be considered “sentient beings” instead of property in a bill tabled in the Canadian province of Quebec. The legislation states that "animals are not things. They are sentient beings and have biological needs."
Agriculture Minister Pierre Paradis proposed the bill and wants to change Quebec's infamous image as a haven for puppy mills.
The legislation specifies that animals have biological needs and includes fines of up to $250,000 for those who are cruel to animals, as well as jail time for repeat offenders.
Paradis said the bill puts Quebec more in line with other Canadian provinces like Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba. The act will apply to all domesticated and farm animals and certain wild animals. Paradis said he wants to see animals “treated with dignity as much as possible” it doesn’t matter what animal.
"If you have a goldfish you have to take care of it," he said. "Don't get a goldfish if you don't want to take care of it."
Under the bill inspectors will have the power to demand to see an animal if they have “reasonable cause” to suspect the pet or animal is being mistreated. They also can also obtain a warrant to enter a home and seize animals. Repeat offenders would also come under fire as authorities and judges would have the discretion to increase fines and sentence serial violators to jail for up to 18 months.
Read more at http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty#BLccpxUBcPz9DXjq.99
http://www.dogheirs.com/tamara/posts/6804-quebec-bill-changes-animals-from-property-to-sentient-beings-and-includes-jail-time-for-cruelty
You have probably already seen this, but if you haven't, Yonatan Zunger 's commentary is a long read, but well worth it.
You have probably already seen this, but if you haven't, Yonatan Zunger 's commentary is a long read, but well worth it.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
Twenty-four hours after an attack by Da'esh (the organization formerly known as ISIS [1]) on Paris left 129 dead and 352 wounded, the Internet and the airwaves alike have been filled with profound waves of self-serving nonsense and stupidity from left and right alike. Everyone seems to have found a way in which this situation justifies their position – protect the refugees! Exile the refugees! Bomb someone! Stop all bombing of anyone! – and magically, it seems that one of the most complex political situations of our time can be reduced to simple slogans.
Well, I've run out of patience with this, so let me seriously discuss what just happened here, and what it tells us. I'm going to talk about three things which have combined to lead to yesterday's massacre: the refugee crisis, Europe's Muslim population, and Da'esh. I'll then talk about a few things which I think have little or nothing to do with what we're seeing – most importantly, religion and oil – and a few things which do – such as food and water. And finally, we'll talk about what it's going to take to fix this, both in the short term and the long term.
Being entirely out of patience right now, forgive me for being particularly blunt. I suspect that, by the end of this, you will be thoroughly offended by my opinions, whether you are American, European, or Middle Eastern, left or right: nobody has behaved well in the lead-up to this.
The first thing to realize about the refugees streaming into Europe from Syria and its environs is that not only are they not, by and large, terrorists – they're people fleeing these exact terrorists. France was just hit by Da'esh, with over five hundred casualties; in Syria, people are surrounded by Da'esh on one side, and a bloodthirsty army on the other side, and have been seeing death on the scale of yesterday's attack every single day for the past four and a half years. [2] If you were living there, you would very likely be fleeing, too.
But the second thing to realize about the refugees is that there are, in fact, Da'esh members among them. It's clear that at least one of the attackers came in from Syria as part of October's refugee flood, and there's no reason at all not to believe that quite a few more are among them, working both at short- and long-term goals. (More on which in a moment)
Everyone seems to have simplistic solutions, here: kick out all the Muslims (as America's Ann Coulter and Donald Trump suggest), settle the refugees more permanently, build giant prison camps. These solutions tend to miss a few very basic points:
(1) When you have hundreds of thousands of people who are quite literally willing to risk not only their deaths, but the deaths of their families, in order to escape, your odds of being able to keep them out aren't actually great, unless your plan is to mobilize a giant army and start attacking inward until they're fleeing in the opposite direction.
(2) You do not have enough prison camp capacity to handle this many people, nor could you build it. Nor do you have enough housing and residential infrastructure capacity to easily settle this many people, because the flux you're seeing out of Syria is very far from the end of it.
This is why large regional disasters quickly tend to spread into adjacent regions. This is why it's important not to let regional disasters get out of hand, no matter how politically appealing isolationism may appear.
The second thing to be aware of is that this didn't happen in a vacuum: Europe has a very large Muslim population, and it seems that most of the attackers were French or Belgian citizens. This started out with Europe's colonial ambitions, back in the day: France, for example, ruled over Algeria with a mind-bogglingly bloodthirsty approach [3] for decades, but now has a large population of people with a right to French residence who have been moving in to the country in search of a better economic situation. (Hardly surprising, when you leave behind a colony wracked by a horrifying civil war for decades) And France is far from alone in this.
Europe's Muslim population is both profoundly European and profoundly not European. They are European in that they have been living there, often for more than a generation; they work there, they pay taxes, they have become as assimilated as they can. They are not European in that Europe has been profoundly unwilling to allow them to assimilate. This is far from a historical anomaly: Europe has historically defined itself in terms of villages or cities and their local populations, which one can't really join very easily. Groups marked as outsiders – be they Jews, Romany, or Muslims – have been considered only marginally European. At times, there has been a high degree of apparent assimilation: for example, Jews were thoroughly integrated into European culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intermarrying, forming friendships and professional associations across the board. As you may notice, "thorough integration" can be an awfully chancy business.
Muslims in today's Europe, on the other hand, don't have anything close to this superficial level of integration; France has been routinely passing laws banning Muslims from dressing the way they did in their home countries in the past few years, which should tell you a great deal about local opinions of that population.
So you have a large population who finds it systematically hard to find work, impossible to be accepted, the regular target of police, and told every day that they should probably be kicked out of the country. I'm sure you will find it shocking that, if you do this to a few tens of millions of people for a few decades at a stretch, you will end up with a disillusioned and disenfranchised youth, some of which will combine this with the general hot-headedness and stupidity of being a young adult to become easy fodder for people who have shown up to recruit.
Lots of people seem to have half-assed solutions here, and they tend to be even more foolish than the solutions to the refugee crisis. "Send them back," the European right frequently cries: back to where? Most of the Muslim population is no longer fresh immigrants; they are second and third generation Europeans. They don't have homes anywhere else. The European left, on the other hand, preaches a mealymouthed combination of urging assimilation and unmistakeable racism.
For some context, go back to the Charlie Hebdo attacks several months ago. There was a large outcry, saying that what the magazine (a notable left-wing satirical organ) had been doing was entirely in the bounds of proper satire, that the satire of religion was a hallowed European tradition. What this explanation glosses over is that nobody on the receiving end of the satire saw it as satire of religion, for the simple reason that religious affiliation, in Europe as in the Middle East, has little to do with what you believe and much to do with who you are. Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other. And that's precisely the European left-wing line: Muslims are fine, so long as they become completely European, to the extent that we can forget that they were ever from someone else. Which, realistically, might mean they have to intermarry for a few generations and acquire blue eyes and blond hair, but that's OK, we welcome them!
The honest fact is this: neither the European left nor the right have ever made the large Muslim community into a full part of society. One side has covered it in nice words, while the other side has blared its xenophobia from the rooftops, but nobody on the receiving end of either of these has been fooled.
You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen?
And then we come over to our friends in the Middle East, the psychotically bloodthirsty bastards of Da'esh itself. It's a bit off to even refer to them as Islamist extremists in the mold of al-Qaeda; they've gone so far off the rails of Islam that the only clear ideology that often seems left is power and murder. Exhortations from theologians of any stripe aren't really going to have an effect on them.
But they seem to have realized that they are on an upswing of power, nobody having the resources or will to stop them, and have come up with the idea of spreading this worldwide, with attacks spreading to places like Russia and France – and, as soon as they can, everywhere else. Because as far as anyone can tell, they want to take over the world.
(Yes, this is a kind of screwy plan, and they barely even control chunks of land in the ass end of Syria and Iraq. But they've had enough luck with killing people that they seem to have convinced themselves that if they engage in even more killing people, it'll continue to work just as well. [4])
They seem to have one fairly simple strategic objective with these new attacks: drive a hard wedge between Muslim and infidel populations around the world, so that the Muslims will have no choice but to join them and become their army, overthrowing the local governments and establishing a world-wide Caliphate.
Unfortunately, political stupidity seems likely to help them. If the response to these attacks is to further isolate Muslim populations – both settled and refugee – then they will certainly have a far easier time recruiting among them. It's not actually going to lead to them taking over the world, but it will lead to bloodshed.
This recruitment tends to take a few forms. One is to recruit fighters to come and help in the bloodshed in existing battlefields; the second is to recruit suicide bombers and the like in other countries. These are somewhat disjoint processes, since the process of recruiting someone to commit suicide is rather different and targets different sorts of people, but there is also overlap: one strategy which al-Qaeda long favored was to recruit people to come to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Chechnya to fight, and later export trained fighters elsewhere.
One important thing about these tactics is that they seem to be realizing that surprisingly little training and planning is required. Yesterday's attack required some coordination among teams, but nothing spectacular; it did require practice in gunplay. But even this was fairly complex compared to the bare minimum required; consider the amount of chaos caused by the D.C. Sniper back in 2002.
Da'esh poses a particular danger because they seem to have latched onto the idea of exporting their violence to the rest of the world, but they're hardly the first or the last group to do this. If they were to be wiped out, I wouldn't bet any money that someone else wouldn't get the same idea soon after, much like al-Qaeda did before them. It's not even a particularly regional idea; the notion that if we kill enough people we can restructure the world to be perfectly {Aryan, Muslim, Democratic, Christian, Communist, etc.}, or to be the economic vassal states of the {X} empire, is frankly a cliché by now on pretty much every square kilometer of the planet.
So let's review where we are, for a moment. There's a large European Muslim population which is disillusioned, disenfranchised, underemployed, and generally treated as outsiders and fair political punching bags by the society as a whole. There's a giant stream of refugees pouring in to Europe, combining huge numbers of people running for their lives from bloodthirsty maniacs with small numbers of bloodthirsty maniacs looking to recruit. There's a factory of particularly bloodthirsty maniacs with a vision of taking over the world through (a) killing people and (b) convincing the rest of the world to treat Muslims even more like outsiders, who are actively trying to both create refugee streams and send out recruiters, to this end.
At this point, I expect to hear a chorus of voices blaming two things for this: religion (specifically, Islam), and oil (specifically, the West's insatiable need for it). To which my main response to both is "hogwash."
The reason I reject Islam as an explanation for this is that there's nothing particularly Muslim about any of it. The European Muslims which are being treated as second-class citizens aren't being treated that way because they pray on rugs facing Mecca, rather than in pews facing an altar; they're being treated this way because they're "dirty foreigners." (I'll spare you the actual terms used to describe them) Da'esh's plan to take over the world isn't rooted in a theological destiny of Muslims; it's rooted in an explicitly political vision of conquest. And quite frankly, the people being shot at the most are Muslims, too; remember who the refugees were running from?
More profoundly, people in the Middle East aren't systematically any more religious than people are in America. You have the same spectrum from the wholly secular to the crazed fundamentalist, with the former predominating in cities and the latter in the countryside. There's a tendency to assume (for example) that any woman wearing a headscarf must be extremely devout, or subject to domination and terror by some devout man; you have to back away and look at it in its local context, where sometimes it's a sign of devotion or a political statement, but it's also just what people wear; for many people, walking around with one's hair exposed is not done in much the same way people don't walk around in most of the US or Europe with their asses hanging out.
Oil is generally used as a proxy for "if only the Americans|Europeans never intervened in the Middle East, it would be peaceful there!" This bespeaks a rather curious innocence as to the history of the Middle East, combined with a reversed vision of (generally American) exceptionalism, that somehow our surpassing evil can corrupt otherwise noble savages. It's certainly true that without oil, most of the Middle East would be desperately poor – but as it happens, most of it is desperately poor anyway. Oil is not uniformly distributed, and Syria doesn't have that much of it to begin with.
There is one sense in which this is true, which is that the 2003 invasion of Iraq created a spectacular disaster. George W. Bush's belief that if we just created enough of a power vacuum, democracy would magically rush in to fill the void – the precise belief which his father didn't have, mind you, which is why GHWB made the explicit and deliberate decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power – proved to be exactly as unwise as it sounds when written so plainly. The result was a giant area of anarchy and civil war smack in the center of the Middle East, into which would-be fighters from all over the region (as well as other regions) swarmed: veterans of Chechnya and Bosnia found new employment in Iraq, as Sunnis and Shi'ites alike slaughtered one another. This anarchy, never resolved, has been the perfect factory of chaos which quite easily spilled over elsewhere.
But there's one profound factor which has driven the violence in the Middle East far more than oil ever could: water.
The entire Middle East has been in a water, and thus food, crisis for decades. In Egypt, for example, the Nile Valley has been drying out ever since the Aswan Dam was completed in 1970; as this once-fertile soil turned to desert, people have streamed into Cairo, doubling and tripling its population by forming tremendous shantytowns. Unemployment was extreme, as it's not like the cities suddenly had tens of millions of new jobs in them; the government kept order as well as it could by importing grain in tremendous quantities (the government's by-far largest annual expense) and selling bread cheaply. Unfortunately, a drought in Russia and Ukraine, Egypt's primary suppliers, caused those countries to cut off wheat exports in 2011 – and the government collapsed soon after.
Syria is a similar story: the lead-in to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship was steady droughts in the Syrian countryside driving people into the cities by the hundreds of thousands, leading to mass unemployment and unrest. People's livelihoods had simply disappeared. Stories like this repeat across the entire Middle East.
When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade. When there isn't enough food, people move from the countryside to the cities; and now you have giant groups of people who still don't have jobs or food, and that's a recipe for the collapse of governments as surely today as it was in Europe in the 1840's.
If you've ever wondered why I have often said that we need to be very actively worried about climate change, this is it. Changing climate breaks agriculture in various areas; the people who were farming there don't magically turn into factory workers or teleport to places which are (slowly) becoming more fertile; they become desperate former farmers, generally flooding into cities.
So given all of this, what can we actually conclude? I think the most important thing is that you can't bury your head in the sand, and assume that problems in some other part of the world aren't your own. A drought or a civil war somewhere else can easily start to spill over in unexpected ways.
If you want to avoid terrible consequences, what you have to do is plan, and in particular never let kindling build up. For example:
(1) If you have a large, disenfranchised, population, this is trouble waiting to start. The only way to fix this problem is to enfranchise them: give them a full stake in your society. Yes, that means treating people who are very different from you like full equals. Yes, it also means that your society – that is, the set of people that you're responsible for – now includes a bunch of people who are a lot poorer than you are, and this is going to be expensive to fix. You're not going to like it. But you're going to like the alternative a whole lot less.
(2) If there's political instability, or worst of all, food supply instability somewhere else in the world, it doesn't matter how far away it seems: you need to get together with everyone else and have a serious plan to deal with it. Once masses of hundreds of thousands of people start streaming across the countryside, chaos will follow in their wake.
(3) Climate change isn't an abstract fear for the future; it's a major political problem right now. You can't punt it away and talk about what to do about carbon emissions or its effect on the economy; you have to sit down and come up with serious strategic plans for what to do when agricultural productivity in critical breadbaskets drops sharply, or watersheds dry up. Contingency planning for any government needs to include anything from hurricanes to long-term droughts, and not just as one-offs, but what to do if these start happening a lot. The reason you need to plan for this is that it's not a goddamned hypothetical, you idiot.
What do we do in the short term? This is harder, because right now Da'esh has been sending agents across the planet to cause as much trouble as they can. One obvious prong of the solution is ordinary police work; that's proven far more effective than complex intelligence solutions at catching terrorists. Another prong is stopping their support system at the root. Because Da'esh's plans are so focused on actual conquest, a collapse of their regime back home is likely to have more of an effect on their satellite agents than the collapse of a more ideologically-oriented organization like al-Qaeda.
A third prong is to stabilize the situation in Syria: here the key isn't so much blowing anyone up as giving people a way to stop fighting. There are three key obstacles to this. One is Da'esh, which seems to be pretty committed to fighting for its own sake; this is unlikely fixable by any means short of straightforward military defeat. One is the underlying lack of food availability. The third is that quite a lot of people have reason to believe that they will be killed either if al-Assad regains power, or if he loses power. They need a serious guarantee of personal safety in any peace.
What this probably means is that a peace agreement will require very heavy international support: aid to rebuild the country, neutral military forces to guarantee cease-fires, and some way to deal with the underlying economic issues. That's going to require heavy international coordination of the profoundly unsexy sort: not deploying giant militaries to bomb targets and wave banners, or propping up regimes and helping them "suppress insurgencies," but working on the long-term realities of helping locals build a government that they're invested in – even when said government is unlikely to be either similar to Western norms, or friendly to Western aims. Military force to crush Da'esh is almost certainly needed as a precondition to this, but it's by far the smaller part of the game.
The short version is: if you want to fix problems, you're going to have to deal with some very serious, expensive, and unsexy solutions. Because life isn't simple, and you can't just bomb your way out of trouble.
[1] See this recent editorial for the argument for switching to the term Da'esh more broadly: https://www.freewordcentre.com/blog/2015/02/daesh-isis-media-alice-guthrie/ [Thanks to Lisa Straanger for finding this more in-depth discussion than the Boston Globe op-ed which I had earlier cited]
[2] cf, for example, this infographic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/14/world/middleeast/syria-war-deaths.html
[3] cf, for example, this obituary of a proud French torturer: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/1PQQQ3XfnYA
[4] cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B3slX6-_20
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/string-of-paris-terrorist-attacks-leaves-over-120-dead/2015/11/14/066df55c-8a73-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-high_paris-330am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
Twenty-four hours after an attack by Da'esh (the organization formerly known as ISIS [1]) on Paris left 129 dead and 352 wounded, the Internet and the airwaves alike have been filled with profound waves of self-serving nonsense and stupidity from left and right alike. Everyone seems to have found a way in which this situation justifies their position – protect the refugees! Exile the refugees! Bomb someone! Stop all bombing of anyone! – and magically, it seems that one of the most complex political situations of our time can be reduced to simple slogans.
Well, I've run out of patience with this, so let me seriously discuss what just happened here, and what it tells us. I'm going to talk about three things which have combined to lead to yesterday's massacre: the refugee crisis, Europe's Muslim population, and Da'esh. I'll then talk about a few things which I think have little or nothing to do with what we're seeing – most importantly, religion and oil – and a few things which do – such as food and water. And finally, we'll talk about what it's going to take to fix this, both in the short term and the long term.
Being entirely out of patience right now, forgive me for being particularly blunt. I suspect that, by the end of this, you will be thoroughly offended by my opinions, whether you are American, European, or Middle Eastern, left or right: nobody has behaved well in the lead-up to this.
The first thing to realize about the refugees streaming into Europe from Syria and its environs is that not only are they not, by and large, terrorists – they're people fleeing these exact terrorists. France was just hit by Da'esh, with over five hundred casualties; in Syria, people are surrounded by Da'esh on one side, and a bloodthirsty army on the other side, and have been seeing death on the scale of yesterday's attack every single day for the past four and a half years. [2] If you were living there, you would very likely be fleeing, too.
But the second thing to realize about the refugees is that there are, in fact, Da'esh members among them. It's clear that at least one of the attackers came in from Syria as part of October's refugee flood, and there's no reason at all not to believe that quite a few more are among them, working both at short- and long-term goals. (More on which in a moment)
Everyone seems to have simplistic solutions, here: kick out all the Muslims (as America's Ann Coulter and Donald Trump suggest), settle the refugees more permanently, build giant prison camps. These solutions tend to miss a few very basic points:
(1) When you have hundreds of thousands of people who are quite literally willing to risk not only their deaths, but the deaths of their families, in order to escape, your odds of being able to keep them out aren't actually great, unless your plan is to mobilize a giant army and start attacking inward until they're fleeing in the opposite direction.
(2) You do not have enough prison camp capacity to handle this many people, nor could you build it. Nor do you have enough housing and residential infrastructure capacity to easily settle this many people, because the flux you're seeing out of Syria is very far from the end of it.
This is why large regional disasters quickly tend to spread into adjacent regions. This is why it's important not to let regional disasters get out of hand, no matter how politically appealing isolationism may appear.
The second thing to be aware of is that this didn't happen in a vacuum: Europe has a very large Muslim population, and it seems that most of the attackers were French or Belgian citizens. This started out with Europe's colonial ambitions, back in the day: France, for example, ruled over Algeria with a mind-bogglingly bloodthirsty approach [3] for decades, but now has a large population of people with a right to French residence who have been moving in to the country in search of a better economic situation. (Hardly surprising, when you leave behind a colony wracked by a horrifying civil war for decades) And France is far from alone in this.
Europe's Muslim population is both profoundly European and profoundly not European. They are European in that they have been living there, often for more than a generation; they work there, they pay taxes, they have become as assimilated as they can. They are not European in that Europe has been profoundly unwilling to allow them to assimilate. This is far from a historical anomaly: Europe has historically defined itself in terms of villages or cities and their local populations, which one can't really join very easily. Groups marked as outsiders – be they Jews, Romany, or Muslims – have been considered only marginally European. At times, there has been a high degree of apparent assimilation: for example, Jews were thoroughly integrated into European culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intermarrying, forming friendships and professional associations across the board. As you may notice, "thorough integration" can be an awfully chancy business.
Muslims in today's Europe, on the other hand, don't have anything close to this superficial level of integration; France has been routinely passing laws banning Muslims from dressing the way they did in their home countries in the past few years, which should tell you a great deal about local opinions of that population.
So you have a large population who finds it systematically hard to find work, impossible to be accepted, the regular target of police, and told every day that they should probably be kicked out of the country. I'm sure you will find it shocking that, if you do this to a few tens of millions of people for a few decades at a stretch, you will end up with a disillusioned and disenfranchised youth, some of which will combine this with the general hot-headedness and stupidity of being a young adult to become easy fodder for people who have shown up to recruit.
Lots of people seem to have half-assed solutions here, and they tend to be even more foolish than the solutions to the refugee crisis. "Send them back," the European right frequently cries: back to where? Most of the Muslim population is no longer fresh immigrants; they are second and third generation Europeans. They don't have homes anywhere else. The European left, on the other hand, preaches a mealymouthed combination of urging assimilation and unmistakeable racism.
For some context, go back to the Charlie Hebdo attacks several months ago. There was a large outcry, saying that what the magazine (a notable left-wing satirical organ) had been doing was entirely in the bounds of proper satire, that the satire of religion was a hallowed European tradition. What this explanation glosses over is that nobody on the receiving end of the satire saw it as satire of religion, for the simple reason that religious affiliation, in Europe as in the Middle East, has little to do with what you believe and much to do with who you are. Charlie Hebdo's targets weren't simply religious extremists preaching from Saudi mosques; they were a portrayal of the French Muslim population as violent extremists, the dangerous other. And that's precisely the European left-wing line: Muslims are fine, so long as they become completely European, to the extent that we can forget that they were ever from someone else. Which, realistically, might mean they have to intermarry for a few generations and acquire blue eyes and blond hair, but that's OK, we welcome them!
The honest fact is this: neither the European left nor the right have ever made the large Muslim community into a full part of society. One side has covered it in nice words, while the other side has blared its xenophobia from the rooftops, but nobody on the receiving end of either of these has been fooled.
You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. What did you expect was going to happen?
And then we come over to our friends in the Middle East, the psychotically bloodthirsty bastards of Da'esh itself. It's a bit off to even refer to them as Islamist extremists in the mold of al-Qaeda; they've gone so far off the rails of Islam that the only clear ideology that often seems left is power and murder. Exhortations from theologians of any stripe aren't really going to have an effect on them.
But they seem to have realized that they are on an upswing of power, nobody having the resources or will to stop them, and have come up with the idea of spreading this worldwide, with attacks spreading to places like Russia and France – and, as soon as they can, everywhere else. Because as far as anyone can tell, they want to take over the world.
(Yes, this is a kind of screwy plan, and they barely even control chunks of land in the ass end of Syria and Iraq. But they've had enough luck with killing people that they seem to have convinced themselves that if they engage in even more killing people, it'll continue to work just as well. [4])
They seem to have one fairly simple strategic objective with these new attacks: drive a hard wedge between Muslim and infidel populations around the world, so that the Muslims will have no choice but to join them and become their army, overthrowing the local governments and establishing a world-wide Caliphate.
Unfortunately, political stupidity seems likely to help them. If the response to these attacks is to further isolate Muslim populations – both settled and refugee – then they will certainly have a far easier time recruiting among them. It's not actually going to lead to them taking over the world, but it will lead to bloodshed.
This recruitment tends to take a few forms. One is to recruit fighters to come and help in the bloodshed in existing battlefields; the second is to recruit suicide bombers and the like in other countries. These are somewhat disjoint processes, since the process of recruiting someone to commit suicide is rather different and targets different sorts of people, but there is also overlap: one strategy which al-Qaeda long favored was to recruit people to come to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Chechnya to fight, and later export trained fighters elsewhere.
One important thing about these tactics is that they seem to be realizing that surprisingly little training and planning is required. Yesterday's attack required some coordination among teams, but nothing spectacular; it did require practice in gunplay. But even this was fairly complex compared to the bare minimum required; consider the amount of chaos caused by the D.C. Sniper back in 2002.
Da'esh poses a particular danger because they seem to have latched onto the idea of exporting their violence to the rest of the world, but they're hardly the first or the last group to do this. If they were to be wiped out, I wouldn't bet any money that someone else wouldn't get the same idea soon after, much like al-Qaeda did before them. It's not even a particularly regional idea; the notion that if we kill enough people we can restructure the world to be perfectly {Aryan, Muslim, Democratic, Christian, Communist, etc.}, or to be the economic vassal states of the {X} empire, is frankly a cliché by now on pretty much every square kilometer of the planet.
So let's review where we are, for a moment. There's a large European Muslim population which is disillusioned, disenfranchised, underemployed, and generally treated as outsiders and fair political punching bags by the society as a whole. There's a giant stream of refugees pouring in to Europe, combining huge numbers of people running for their lives from bloodthirsty maniacs with small numbers of bloodthirsty maniacs looking to recruit. There's a factory of particularly bloodthirsty maniacs with a vision of taking over the world through (a) killing people and (b) convincing the rest of the world to treat Muslims even more like outsiders, who are actively trying to both create refugee streams and send out recruiters, to this end.
At this point, I expect to hear a chorus of voices blaming two things for this: religion (specifically, Islam), and oil (specifically, the West's insatiable need for it). To which my main response to both is "hogwash."
The reason I reject Islam as an explanation for this is that there's nothing particularly Muslim about any of it. The European Muslims which are being treated as second-class citizens aren't being treated that way because they pray on rugs facing Mecca, rather than in pews facing an altar; they're being treated this way because they're "dirty foreigners." (I'll spare you the actual terms used to describe them) Da'esh's plan to take over the world isn't rooted in a theological destiny of Muslims; it's rooted in an explicitly political vision of conquest. And quite frankly, the people being shot at the most are Muslims, too; remember who the refugees were running from?
More profoundly, people in the Middle East aren't systematically any more religious than people are in America. You have the same spectrum from the wholly secular to the crazed fundamentalist, with the former predominating in cities and the latter in the countryside. There's a tendency to assume (for example) that any woman wearing a headscarf must be extremely devout, or subject to domination and terror by some devout man; you have to back away and look at it in its local context, where sometimes it's a sign of devotion or a political statement, but it's also just what people wear; for many people, walking around with one's hair exposed is not done in much the same way people don't walk around in most of the US or Europe with their asses hanging out.
Oil is generally used as a proxy for "if only the Americans|Europeans never intervened in the Middle East, it would be peaceful there!" This bespeaks a rather curious innocence as to the history of the Middle East, combined with a reversed vision of (generally American) exceptionalism, that somehow our surpassing evil can corrupt otherwise noble savages. It's certainly true that without oil, most of the Middle East would be desperately poor – but as it happens, most of it is desperately poor anyway. Oil is not uniformly distributed, and Syria doesn't have that much of it to begin with.
There is one sense in which this is true, which is that the 2003 invasion of Iraq created a spectacular disaster. George W. Bush's belief that if we just created enough of a power vacuum, democracy would magically rush in to fill the void – the precise belief which his father didn't have, mind you, which is why GHWB made the explicit and deliberate decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power – proved to be exactly as unwise as it sounds when written so plainly. The result was a giant area of anarchy and civil war smack in the center of the Middle East, into which would-be fighters from all over the region (as well as other regions) swarmed: veterans of Chechnya and Bosnia found new employment in Iraq, as Sunnis and Shi'ites alike slaughtered one another. This anarchy, never resolved, has been the perfect factory of chaos which quite easily spilled over elsewhere.
But there's one profound factor which has driven the violence in the Middle East far more than oil ever could: water.
The entire Middle East has been in a water, and thus food, crisis for decades. In Egypt, for example, the Nile Valley has been drying out ever since the Aswan Dam was completed in 1970; as this once-fertile soil turned to desert, people have streamed into Cairo, doubling and tripling its population by forming tremendous shantytowns. Unemployment was extreme, as it's not like the cities suddenly had tens of millions of new jobs in them; the government kept order as well as it could by importing grain in tremendous quantities (the government's by-far largest annual expense) and selling bread cheaply. Unfortunately, a drought in Russia and Ukraine, Egypt's primary suppliers, caused those countries to cut off wheat exports in 2011 – and the government collapsed soon after.
Syria is a similar story: the lead-in to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship was steady droughts in the Syrian countryside driving people into the cities by the hundreds of thousands, leading to mass unemployment and unrest. People's livelihoods had simply disappeared. Stories like this repeat across the entire Middle East.
When we talk about the ultimate causes of the situation, this is the fact we tend to ignore: at the root of it, there isn't enough water, and there isn't enough food, and droughts have been hitting the area harder and harder for a decade. When there isn't enough food, people move from the countryside to the cities; and now you have giant groups of people who still don't have jobs or food, and that's a recipe for the collapse of governments as surely today as it was in Europe in the 1840's.
If you've ever wondered why I have often said that we need to be very actively worried about climate change, this is it. Changing climate breaks agriculture in various areas; the people who were farming there don't magically turn into factory workers or teleport to places which are (slowly) becoming more fertile; they become desperate former farmers, generally flooding into cities.
So given all of this, what can we actually conclude? I think the most important thing is that you can't bury your head in the sand, and assume that problems in some other part of the world aren't your own. A drought or a civil war somewhere else can easily start to spill over in unexpected ways.
If you want to avoid terrible consequences, what you have to do is plan, and in particular never let kindling build up. For example:
(1) If you have a large, disenfranchised, population, this is trouble waiting to start. The only way to fix this problem is to enfranchise them: give them a full stake in your society. Yes, that means treating people who are very different from you like full equals. Yes, it also means that your society – that is, the set of people that you're responsible for – now includes a bunch of people who are a lot poorer than you are, and this is going to be expensive to fix. You're not going to like it. But you're going to like the alternative a whole lot less.
(2) If there's political instability, or worst of all, food supply instability somewhere else in the world, it doesn't matter how far away it seems: you need to get together with everyone else and have a serious plan to deal with it. Once masses of hundreds of thousands of people start streaming across the countryside, chaos will follow in their wake.
(3) Climate change isn't an abstract fear for the future; it's a major political problem right now. You can't punt it away and talk about what to do about carbon emissions or its effect on the economy; you have to sit down and come up with serious strategic plans for what to do when agricultural productivity in critical breadbaskets drops sharply, or watersheds dry up. Contingency planning for any government needs to include anything from hurricanes to long-term droughts, and not just as one-offs, but what to do if these start happening a lot. The reason you need to plan for this is that it's not a goddamned hypothetical, you idiot.
What do we do in the short term? This is harder, because right now Da'esh has been sending agents across the planet to cause as much trouble as they can. One obvious prong of the solution is ordinary police work; that's proven far more effective than complex intelligence solutions at catching terrorists. Another prong is stopping their support system at the root. Because Da'esh's plans are so focused on actual conquest, a collapse of their regime back home is likely to have more of an effect on their satellite agents than the collapse of a more ideologically-oriented organization like al-Qaeda.
A third prong is to stabilize the situation in Syria: here the key isn't so much blowing anyone up as giving people a way to stop fighting. There are three key obstacles to this. One is Da'esh, which seems to be pretty committed to fighting for its own sake; this is unlikely fixable by any means short of straightforward military defeat. One is the underlying lack of food availability. The third is that quite a lot of people have reason to believe that they will be killed either if al-Assad regains power, or if he loses power. They need a serious guarantee of personal safety in any peace.
What this probably means is that a peace agreement will require very heavy international support: aid to rebuild the country, neutral military forces to guarantee cease-fires, and some way to deal with the underlying economic issues. That's going to require heavy international coordination of the profoundly unsexy sort: not deploying giant militaries to bomb targets and wave banners, or propping up regimes and helping them "suppress insurgencies," but working on the long-term realities of helping locals build a government that they're invested in – even when said government is unlikely to be either similar to Western norms, or friendly to Western aims. Military force to crush Da'esh is almost certainly needed as a precondition to this, but it's by far the smaller part of the game.
The short version is: if you want to fix problems, you're going to have to deal with some very serious, expensive, and unsexy solutions. Because life isn't simple, and you can't just bomb your way out of trouble.
[1] See this recent editorial for the argument for switching to the term Da'esh more broadly: https://www.freewordcentre.com/blog/2015/02/daesh-isis-media-alice-guthrie/ [Thanks to Lisa Straanger for finding this more in-depth discussion than the Boston Globe op-ed which I had earlier cited]
[2] cf, for example, this infographic: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/14/world/middleeast/syria-war-deaths.html
[3] cf, for example, this obituary of a proud French torturer: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/1PQQQ3XfnYA
[4] cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B3slX6-_20
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/string-of-paris-terrorist-attacks-leaves-over-120-dead/2015/11/14/066df55c-8a73-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-high_paris-330am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Originally shared by ****
Originally shared by ****
It is well established that ISIS uses social media to recruit. Make sure careless words aren't spoken; if not for refugees then for your own security.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Originally shared by Victor H
Originally shared by Victor H
There's a lot riding on this next election and I am supporting Sanders. However, I have to agree with this article 100%, if HRC gets the nod, she gets my vote. To stay home and pout should Sanders not get nominated is foolishness, and will impact future generations in a bad way should the GOP regain the Presidency.
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/12/hey_progressives_hillary_isnt_the_enemy_im_a_sanders_supporter_but_im_sick_of_bernie_bros_clinton_derangement_syndrome/?source=newsletter
There's a lot riding on this next election and I am supporting Sanders. However, I have to agree with this article 100%, if HRC gets the nod, she gets my vote. To stay home and pout should Sanders not get nominated is foolishness, and will impact future generations in a bad way should the GOP regain the Presidency.
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/12/hey_progressives_hillary_isnt_the_enemy_im_a_sanders_supporter_but_im_sick_of_bernie_bros_clinton_derangement_syndrome/?source=newsletter
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Originally shared by Lauren Weinstein
Originally shared by Lauren Weinstein
// "Yes, we do agree on a number of issues, and by the way, on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day," he said. //
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton_563f6c93e4b0b24aee4aa19a
// "Yes, we do agree on a number of issues, and by the way, on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day," he said. //
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton_563f6c93e4b0b24aee4aa19a
Friday, November 6, 2015
more important than it might seem...
more important than it might seem...
https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Those NASA people are really artistic...
Those NASA people are really artistic...
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1403/marsHirise_ESP_035143_1325.jpg
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1403/marsHirise_ESP_035143_1325.jpg
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Monday, November 2, 2015
Originally shared by Marcel Gagne
Originally shared by Marcel Gagne
Speaking of inconvenient truths. Science has been described as either physics or stamp collecting. On one hand, you collect lots and lots and lots of data, looking for patterns that form part of the 'observation, hypothesis, experimentation' loop. Once you have enough data to generate a response, what's left is physics, namely the natural forces that explain all the data you collected. Science is never finished because it's always open to more stamp collecting, but we like to think that the answers we provide as we go through the loop toward the physics part of science aren't going to get us killed. Scientists are often just curious people looking to satisfy their curiosity. If we're lucky, the scientists share the interesting parts of their stamp collecting with us. Generally, unless they're going up against some kind of hardcore religion, where truth can really be inconvenient, they don't expect to receive death threats for sharing information about their stamp collecting.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/canadian-researcher-targeted-by-hate-campaign-over-fukushima-findings/article27060613
Speaking of inconvenient truths. Science has been described as either physics or stamp collecting. On one hand, you collect lots and lots and lots of data, looking for patterns that form part of the 'observation, hypothesis, experimentation' loop. Once you have enough data to generate a response, what's left is physics, namely the natural forces that explain all the data you collected. Science is never finished because it's always open to more stamp collecting, but we like to think that the answers we provide as we go through the loop toward the physics part of science aren't going to get us killed. Scientists are often just curious people looking to satisfy their curiosity. If we're lucky, the scientists share the interesting parts of their stamp collecting with us. Generally, unless they're going up against some kind of hardcore religion, where truth can really be inconvenient, they don't expect to receive death threats for sharing information about their stamp collecting.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/canadian-researcher-targeted-by-hate-campaign-over-fukushima-findings/article27060613
Originally shared by Pierre Markuse
Originally shared by Pierre Markuse
Active Fires on Earth in September 2015
In this image you can see active fires on Earth in September 2015 imaged by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra satellite. The image is color-coded, white pixels show the high end of the count — as many as 100 fires in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day. Yellow pixels show as many as 10 fires, orange shows as many as 5 fires, and red areas as few as 1 fire in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day.
More active fire maps and other datasets can be found here at NASA's Earth Observation (NEO) website:
http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Terra (EOS AM-1) satellite
The Terra satellite is part of the Earth Observing System (EOS, https://goo.gl/XYed36), its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) can take measurements in 36 spectral bands ranging in wavelength from 0.4 µm to 14.4 µm, another MODIS instrument is orbiting Earth aboard the Aqua satellite.
More on the Terra satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) here:
http://terra.nasa.gov/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_(satellite)
http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/design.php
Image credit: ACTIVE FIRES SEPTEMBER 2015 (1 MONTH - TERRA/MODIS)These Fire Maps were created by Reto Stockli, NASA's Earth Observatory Team, using data courtesy the MODIS Land Science Team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center http://goo.gl/IQXKix
#science #earth #fire #wildfire #modis #eos #terra #spacetechnology #earthobservation
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Originally shared by Lissette Carlo
Originally shared by Lissette Carlo
I'll go with what Bill Maher said the other day which I'm totally behind.
You have a choice between the fish or the chicken.
If the fish isn't available then you opt for the chicken.
Because no matter what #Hillary2016 or #Bernie2016 is a whole lot better than the #GOP choices.
And if we get Hillary, that's 2 for the price of one. Bill Clinton & Hillary Clinton
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Originally shared by James Allan
Originally shared by James Allan
Kinkaku-iji Temple, Kyoto January 2015 during the heaviest snowfall for 60 years
Originally shared by Andrew Pam
Originally shared by Andrew Pam
Great article on the pervasive issues of the "attention economy".
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/
Great article on the pervasive issues of the "attention economy".
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/
Friday, October 23, 2015
Originally shared by Susan Stone
Originally shared by Susan Stone
quote: I don't know how Clinton would be as a public President, with all the mix of engagement, charisma and circumspection that involves. But showing how she might be as a private president, a Situation Room president, I think it was perhaps a transformative performance. When I watched my thought was, Wow, she'd be rock solid. Granular and detailed is seldom spell-binding. But over the course of the endless testimony, anyone who had the slightest sense that Clinton had been some sort of figurehead Secretary of State who left the key work to subordinates would have been thoroughly disabused of that notion.
Clinton's time under questioning sent a number of messages. One was simply the scope of her knowledge and experience that made her questioners look increasingly insipid and small. But there was also a simple toughness and resilience under pressure. She knows her stuff and she's a pro. You could not watch that testimony and not come away with that conclusion. This engagement gave her a live telecast opportunity to demonstrate that fact, which is almost invaluable. It is very difficult to imagine any of the Republican presidential candidates - even the ones serving in the Senate - able to roll with that kind of questioning or show the range of knowledge and clarity that was required to do so.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/long-twilight-struggle
quote: I don't know how Clinton would be as a public President, with all the mix of engagement, charisma and circumspection that involves. But showing how she might be as a private president, a Situation Room president, I think it was perhaps a transformative performance. When I watched my thought was, Wow, she'd be rock solid. Granular and detailed is seldom spell-binding. But over the course of the endless testimony, anyone who had the slightest sense that Clinton had been some sort of figurehead Secretary of State who left the key work to subordinates would have been thoroughly disabused of that notion.
Clinton's time under questioning sent a number of messages. One was simply the scope of her knowledge and experience that made her questioners look increasingly insipid and small. But there was also a simple toughness and resilience under pressure. She knows her stuff and she's a pro. You could not watch that testimony and not come away with that conclusion. This engagement gave her a live telecast opportunity to demonstrate that fact, which is almost invaluable. It is very difficult to imagine any of the Republican presidential candidates - even the ones serving in the Senate - able to roll with that kind of questioning or show the range of knowledge and clarity that was required to do so.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/long-twilight-struggle
Originally shared by Isaac Kuo
Originally shared by Isaac Kuo
This is the first evidence I trust showing Jeb's campaign truly is crumbling. I had thought that the continuous flow of "establishment" money would keep his campaign going like the Energizer Bunny until most of the rest simply ran out of steam.
But the inability of that money to shift poll numbers is evidently taking its toll.
What does this mean, in the big picture? What if Trump or Carson continue to ride high into the nomination, despite the fact that the big money donors hate them? Maybe this heralds a new era of democracy, where big money and TV ads don't have the sway they used to.
Who is driving this? I think it's the right wing base of primary voters who are highly engaged in political news. These are not "low information" voters, but rather voters who lap up "information" from right wing media such as WND, Drudge, Blaze etc...people who may often find even Fox News too "liberal" or "lamestream media". Fox News can try to push the establishment candidate onto them, but they now trust alternate political news sources more than FNC...alternate sources which are harder for the establishment elite to control.
I think we're seeing a demonstration of what an "informed" electorate can do. That these voters are basically living in a weird reality denial bubble makes for an interesting experiment (albeit one which we can't just dispassionately observe because the consequences are dire).
I am generally skeptical of the idea that the Internet is capable of radically changing the balance of power when it comes to money in politics. But I'll be delighted to be proven wrong about that...
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/jeb-bush-orders-across-board-pay-cuts-on-campaign-215106
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/jeb-bush-orders-across-board-pay-cuts-on-campaign-215106
This is the first evidence I trust showing Jeb's campaign truly is crumbling. I had thought that the continuous flow of "establishment" money would keep his campaign going like the Energizer Bunny until most of the rest simply ran out of steam.
But the inability of that money to shift poll numbers is evidently taking its toll.
What does this mean, in the big picture? What if Trump or Carson continue to ride high into the nomination, despite the fact that the big money donors hate them? Maybe this heralds a new era of democracy, where big money and TV ads don't have the sway they used to.
Who is driving this? I think it's the right wing base of primary voters who are highly engaged in political news. These are not "low information" voters, but rather voters who lap up "information" from right wing media such as WND, Drudge, Blaze etc...people who may often find even Fox News too "liberal" or "lamestream media". Fox News can try to push the establishment candidate onto them, but they now trust alternate political news sources more than FNC...alternate sources which are harder for the establishment elite to control.
I think we're seeing a demonstration of what an "informed" electorate can do. That these voters are basically living in a weird reality denial bubble makes for an interesting experiment (albeit one which we can't just dispassionately observe because the consequences are dire).
I am generally skeptical of the idea that the Internet is capable of radically changing the balance of power when it comes to money in politics. But I'll be delighted to be proven wrong about that...
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/jeb-bush-orders-across-board-pay-cuts-on-campaign-215106
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/jeb-bush-orders-across-board-pay-cuts-on-campaign-215106
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Originally shared by Stephen Hemminger
Originally shared by Stephen Hemminger
Help Dave Taht fix wifi like he helped fix #bufferbloat https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
Help Dave Taht fix wifi like he helped fix #bufferbloat https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Friday, October 16, 2015
Clavichords are famously difficult to record, but the tone here is captured beautifully.
Clavichords are famously difficult to record, but the tone here is captured beautifully.
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=TWt7US7DM5I&u=/watch?v%3DfF1MRROM1jY%26feature%3Dshare
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=TWt7US7DM5I&u=/watch?v%3DfF1MRROM1jY%26feature%3Dshare
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Originally shared by annarita ruberto
Originally shared by annarita ruberto
What Happens When Your Brain Can’t Tell Which Way is Up?
In space, there is no “up” or “down.” That can mess with the human brain and affect the way people move and think in space. An investigation on the International Space Station seeks to understand how the brain changes in space and ways to deal with those changes.
Previous research and first-hand reports suggest that humans have a harder time controlling physical movement and completing mental tasks in microgravity. Astronauts have experienced problems with balance and perceptual illusions – feeling as if, for example, they are switching back and forth between right-side-up and upside down.
The Spaceflight Effects on Neurocognitive Performance: Extent, Longevity, and Neural Bases (NeuroMapping) study is examining changes in both brain structure and function and determining how long it takes to recover after returning from space.
Researchers are using both behavioral assessments and brain imaging. Astronauts complete timed obstacle courses and tests of their spatial memory, or the ability to mentally picture and manipulate a three-dimensional shape, before and after spaceflight. The spatial memory test also is performed aboard the station, along with sensory motor adaptation tests and computerized exercises requiring them to move and think simultaneously. Astronauts are tested shortly after arriving aboard the station, mid-way through and near the end of a six-month flight.
Structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the brain are done pre-flight and post-flight.
► Read the whole article for knowing more>>
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/neuromapping
► Left image explanation: This illustration shows the configuration for conducting neurocognitive assessments for the Neuromapping study aboard the International Space Station.
Credits: NASA
► Right image explanation: These slides show changes in volume in certain areas of the brain that occur with long-duration, head-down tilt bed rest. The Neuromapping Flight Study examines whether similar changes occur with spaceflight.
Credits: University of Michigan
#NASA #neuroscience #brain #NeuroMapping #space #InternationalSpaceStation
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