Your place for useless information that just might possibly be interesting.
This isn’t what you think, I guarantee you…
Truck owner wants DEA to pay up after botched sting
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Owner-wants-DEA-to-pay-for-truck-damage-from-sting-3743683.php
As hard as it is to believe that this even happened, it is even more difficult to believe that our Great Government didn’t lift a damn finger to help this poor guy. I keep imagining that we have reached the lowest we can go as a nation and then I read crap like this!
Our Chick-fil-A economy
What happens when Americans start thinking about economic policy the same way they do gay marriage or abortion?
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/03/our_chick_fil_a_economy/
Man am I getting liberal in my old age! Reading this article and its comments on the Prosperity Economics manifesto had me nodding along like a robot:
…Let’s embrace the philosophy that says shared prosperity for all offers the best path to vigorous economic growth. Let’s pump money directly into infrastructure and higher education, job training and scientific research. Let’s give unions a hand instead of the iron boot and tighten regulations on the banks instead of loosen them. Most difficult of all — in order to pay for all these bold initiatives, let’s raise taxes from their historic lows instead of cutting them even further.
The core of this article is all about the absence of any sort of evidence-based decision making. In the ‘good old days’ when we had government officials that actually represented the _population_ rather than just some hyper partisan Gerrymandered slice, it seemed fairly routine for politicians to evaluate what actually worked (or authorize experiments in absence of data) and then get behind what the evidence pointed out. Today, of course, the idea of anyone in the US making decisions based on actual _evidence_ is enough to cause side splitting laughter (as a way to cover up the tears of depression in many cases)…
But consensus is no longer a workable proposition in contemporary politics. We can blame the Voting Rights Act for turning the South Republican, or we can note Roe v. Wade for energizing an entire generation of hard-right religiously flavored conservative activists, or we can target ’60s-era hippie enlightenment for spreading the trippy idea that the earth is a fragile organism threatened by human activities, but one thing’s for sure, partisan realignment has made compromise and coalition virtually impossible. And one of the byproducts of this realignment is that positions on economic policy have now become as immovable as one’s position on abortion. Economists might look at the data, but most people don’t. Politics has become little more than a vehicle for cultural warfare — something vividly demonstrated by the post 2010 antics of Tea Party Republicans in the House, who used the budget process to go after not just healthcare or overall spending, but Planned Parenthood and the EPA and NPR. There’s no sense that Congress’ job is to solve problems by coming together in a compromise deal that responds to the necessities of the day — it’s all about scoring points that advance one side or the other’s ideological agenda.
I am almost motivated to read the manifesto, but I just can’t develop the enthusiasm necessary to get past the activation energy because I am so certain it is a meaningless waste of resources.
Videographer had bottoms up view of nuclear blast, lives to tell tale
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/27/how-does-it-feel-to-stand-under-nuclear-bomb/
Granted it was ‘only’ 2 kiloton (or 2,000 tons which is 4,000,000 lbs, according to my math), but 10,000 feet is less than two miles away. Of course, back then people didn’t have the same sort of ‘appreciation’ we have for nuclear energy as we do today.
Cancer Stem Cells May Be Responsible For Tumor Growth
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/248537.php
A very interesting concept and one that, if proven to be true, basically means that all our efforts in the last 40+ years to combat cancer have been totally wasted.
I will be keeping my eye on this development, though I expect that even if it were proved to the satisfaction of the majority of researchers we are still an easy decade away from relevant treatments.
Education reform’s central myths
The education debate rests on two faulty premises: that public schools are failures, and choice is the solution
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/01/school_choice_vs_reality/
My complaints about our education system pull from my background. Maybe our education system isn’t really bad, when compared with other nation’s systems, but that is damning with faint praise because my education pretty much sucked. I learned _in spite of_ my education, not because of and while I (like I imagine all other humans) harbor thoughts deep in my psych about being special and all that crap, I know I am pretty much an ordinary person. Thus, I can’t help but remain convinced that our education system was operating far, far away from its potential when I was an inmate some 40 years ago. I have little reason to think that there has been any improvement in our system in the intervening decades (rather the opposite based on my, admittedly informal, research), so in my book our system is still a sucky one capable of dramatic improvement.
Now, I firmly agree that one should have some sort of experimental evidence that an approach has been successful before one commits the word’s largest economy on a path and it seems to me that there is little evidence that vouchers do a damn thing to make inner city ghetto schools one tiny bit better. If, as I suspect is quite true, it is these same inner city ghetto schools that are ‘dragging down’ our cumulative scores, then ‘success’ in improving our system should focus on dealing directly with those schools and ignoring the ones that already produce students in the top percentile in the world. And there is evidence that it is quite trivial to have success with the under performing students and schools. Of course, that isn’t about transferring middle class tax payments into the hands of the oligarchy, so it ain’t gunna happen!
Ludicrous Times Op-Ed Forgets Entire Year of Wall Street History
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/ludicrous-times-op-ed-forgets-entire-year-of-wall-street-history-20120801
More proof, as if we needed it, that we are all in really deep shit.
Chris Hayes on elite failure
Why don’t American oligarchs fear the consequences of their corruption, and how can that be changed?
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/01/chris_hayes_on_elite_failure/
It is a bit repetitive to bring up the police state again so soon, but this is another very important article to read. Just as I discuss the ‘conspiracy’ of the elites, Glenn mentions it in his article:
…Hayes described how American elite culture is so insulated that it “produce[s] cognitive capture,” meaning that even those who enter it with hostility to its orthodoxies end up shaped by — succumbing to — its warped belief system and corrupt practices.
As I mentioned in my post I alluded to above, I am guilty of ‘cognitive capture’ already and I haven’t even reached the point where I can realistically discuss my joining the elite (at least from a monetary perspective). Soon we will have a charismatic leader (not unlike Hitler) who will motivate the masses to rise up. Even if he (or she) is promptly assassinated there will be plenty of people to pick up the slack. What is the chance that these people, self appointed, will actually be interested in the greatest good for the greatest number? What chance that, in the unlikely event they start out thinking that way that they will continue as such? How easy to fall into the elite trap where you (I) treat the population like sheeple that can be (are) lead around by their ignorances and biases?
The really horrifying thing to me is I can easily envision myself falling into that way of thinking were I to be struck by lightning (when running naked across a golf course at night; think about those odds! I don’t even golf!) and wind up in charge as a charismatic leader. Indeed, despite having spent decades considering forms of government that might be capable of being immune from corruption (none so far, btw) and given considerable thought to how to provide the greatest good for the greatest number (all due to my ‘fantasy’ of being able to start my own government as part of my project to establish human populations in space), I can see myself trivially falling into the trap of treating ‘ordinary’ people as idiot morons incapable of caring for themselves (regular readers will no doubt be well aware of my low opinion of humans (‘human’ is my favorite curse word, doanchano)). Given that the looming charismatic leader is, almost by default, going to be a con man in it to enrich him (her) self (lets do something different and have a _female_ revolutionary leader (and hopefully a hot one!)), how can any rational person (the three or four of us out there (see, I can’t help being one of those damn elite conspiracists)) expect that our revolutionary leaders are even looking out for the greatest good for the greatest number?
To add insult to injury (whatever that means), what likelihood is it that our charismatic revolutionary leader is actually educated in forms of leadership? Much more likely, whether or not a con man (woman), they really got no idea what they are doing and are forced to rely on advisers. What chance those advisers are not idiots just grabbing on to the coat tails for the ride?
Given the anti-science attitude in our country, I find it almost inconceivable that any revolution will spare the intellectual class and people like me will be swept up in the (here I go again) idiot sheeple ignorance as they attack _all_ educated intellectuals as they sweep up the Wall Street oligarchs.
Emigration keeps sounding better all the time. However, I will probably wind up getting caught out just like I did in the popping of the housing bubble; I just can’t seem to make things happen fast enough. Some days (today being one near the top of the list), ignorance really seems like bliss!
Your wallpaper could soon be an HD display
http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/30/technology/microsoft-vx-display/index.htm?source=cnn_bin
Like that deleted scene in Avatar (available on the extended version), at some point in the not-too-distant-future we will have the ability to have an HD screen the size of our wall for a trivial cost. The screen will double as your computer ‘net interface, video phone, etc. Once they _finally_ work out the problems in OLEDs and make them huge and affordable, then the control issue this article discusses will finally be relevant.
I can’t wait!
Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy
Is the present American national legislature an “exact transcript of the whole society”?
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/30/plutocratic_vistas_salpart/
This is really interesting in its historical perspective. I talked earlier about the elite ‘conspiracy’ to rule the world, some of the historical quotes makes it plain that success came long ago.
The article talks about an interesting approach to a representative government, draw lots from eligible voters:
How would sortition work? Fortunately, there is a blueprint to hand: a short book called A Citizen Legislature by Ernest Callenbach (author of Ecotopia, one of the finest utopian novels ever written) and Michael Phillips. The process is not complicated. Every county in America maintains a list of prospective jurors. Combine these lists in one national master list, and a computer may easily be programmed to choose a random sample of 435 (the size of the present House of Representatives).
I would go with the much more historically realistic number of 10,000 for the House, though.
Of course, it is depressing when one thinks about how long the oligarchy (elite) has been in total control of our government. I suppose that the combination of the stock market crash, depression AND World War II was needed to weaken their power enough to get the dribs and drabs of social safety net that was put in place (only tiny shreds of that meager safety net remain and while I abhor Obama, I am convinced that if Romney is put in charge he will work diligently to strip the last remaining cobwebs).
Extremism normalized
How Americans are efficiently trained to acquiesce to ideas once deemed so radical as to be unthinkable
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/31/extremism_normalized/
Regular reader(s) will no doubt be well aware of my thoughts on our police state. I haven’t had a lot to say on it recently not because there was nothing to say (quite the contrary!) but because I get tired of typing the same thing over and over and over again. Glenn’s article, though, does a fine job of summarizing how far down the path to Nazism we have traveled already. This quote is particularly interesting:
After Dick Cheney criticized John McCain this weekend for having chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, this was McCain’s retort:
Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have.
Of course Cheney’s book is nothing but an admission of guilt in engaging in unconstitutional (hence illegal) activities, yet he goes on book tours and makes millions going on about the laws he broke. Isn’t America great? It allows rich and powerful people to do whatever they please and to hell with the rest of the population! Unlike in Germany, there has been no beer hall putsch created out of an economic depression, instead, all of this has been done by and for elected officials in their expected capacity (though we are in an economic depression, it has had nothing to do with the re-purposing of our government against its people). Oh, and the Jews are not being persecuted this time, it is the Muslims instead. The number of parallels are quite eery as is the path our government is taking.
I will note, however, that at the time I was surprised (and gratified) that Bush/Cheney didn’t invoke some sort of scandal or terrorist action as excuse to declare marshal law to keep Obama out of office, but now I see that Obama is just a darker-skinned version of Bush/Cheney so continuity was assured. It is quite clear to me that Romney is no different from Obama (or Bush/Cheney), so our idiotic path following Nazism will be unperturbed no matter who wins in November.
Please read the rest of Glenn’s article, it has several other quite eye opening passages. Eye opening in the sense that today they barely qualify as news at all, which is really terrifying.