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We begin with open source instructions on building and making the tools of an industrialized civilization.
Continuing on, a short but vital piece in understanding why brilliant people are prone to depression early in their lives. They make the connections and draw the right conclusions, but at that point, they have to find the next step. Guidance from adults that have been down that road will help, if done right.
A question of whether Dr. Seuss is sexist and misogynistic based on the prevalence of male speaking roles in his books and some statements he made about Women's Lib in the 70s. Ware for Woe, Spiders, and an early-comments nuking in the comment section (it does settle down eventually). Perseverance pays in this case. There's also several people pointing out some problems with the concept of the SlutWalk, and the ways that it doesn't really do outreach past white women or be all that inclusive.
And then a very serious question - considering how much society rewards bullies, both on the schoolyard and in adult lives (like radio personalities), the advice of "no be there" is becoming increasingly irrelevant, because They Are Everywhere. How do we slap bullies upside the head and get them to stop?
Out in the world today, with proper investment from governments, renewable resources could power eighty percent of the world's energy demand within forty years, according to an IPCC report.
The students of the University of London are looking to get a professor sacked after an article he penned in Psychology Today that used Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics to "prove" that black women are objectively less attractive than other women.
Perhaps because one of the Chinese generals said that Chinese forces are insufficient to handle the United States in a war, the United States says they're receptive to cadet and other exchange programs with China in the interests of improved relations.
The next technological bogeyman, when we're not hostile to China, is North Korea.
Perhaps in the department of "making nice to the people we should really be more concerned about", the United States is strengthening its ties to Saudi Arabia, and devoting time and space to exaimining the past of Anwar al-Awlaki, presumptive successor to Osama bin Laded.
Military Times profiles Lt. General John Allen, the next commander of forces in Afghanistan, who will replace David Petraeus, newly-tapped head of the CIA, relatively soon.
Last out, according to images, Pakistan may be building a fourth nuclear reactor in the country with the express purpose of developing plutonium.
Domestically, a reminder that the United States still gives several hundred millions of dollars in subsidies to the most profitable industry in the country. This while new graduates struggle with experienced workers for too few jobs, which has the knock-on effect of making it that much tougher for people with no degree and a little experience to find work.
A study suggests that the hunt for Osama bin Laden cost the United States economy more than 3 trillion dollars, only a tiny fraction of which was damage caused by the bin Laden plots.
Speaking of economic damage, how about we close up the loophole that lets people who make their money mostly through buying and selling securities pay less tax on their income than people who earn it through normal labor and/or public service?
And we stop letting the media cabals push through bills that will ignore the provisions set out in the Constitution regarding search and seizure? (And stop electing people that appoint judges that belive police should have the authority to raid houses and other places without warrants if they hear any signs of life on the other side of a closed and locked door.) Why not instead see how the pricing models of content tends to encourage piracy in plaves because distributors don't think about what their costs look like translated to the local currency and economy?
Training for the Marine Corps on the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy is dry, boring, and mostly by-the-book. Now the question appears as to whether the troops and the officers will be accepting or not of their openly gay and lesbian comrades. There are some reports of the trainings not being taken seriously (which is to be expected.)
The gold standard of the adult men's magazine, Playboy, has digitized their entire run and made them available for subscription on-line, at $8 / month or $60 / year (USD). Thus, those who want the magazine for the articles can go and get them, and those who want to see how the changing face of beauty and the march of both plastic surgery and image manipulation programs will have fifty-seven years of centerfolds to examine in detail. I think there will be more academic interest in a subscription like this, as while people may turn elsewhere to get their nude fixes, Playboy as a cultural icon still holds weight.
Finally, a judge refused to even temporarily stay Indiana's new bill that cuts off most of Planned Parenthood's funding, prevents the use of Medicaid there, and adds onerous restrictions and requirements for any woman seeking an abortion procedure. Mitch Daniels and Indiana legislature, if you want women barefoot and pregnant, you should at least have the willingness to say so openly and get your laws callenged for waht they are, instead of stabbing organizations in the back.
In tech, streaming content consumed more bandwidth than P2P applications for the first time last month. In which Netflix consumed more bandwidth than even BitTorrent. Huh - if you give someone a cheap licensed option, they'll usually take it. I wonder where that lesson could be applied...
A Yarnbomb to make the Berkeley Public Library bike rack more colorful.
Robots are inventing their own language and using it to map their surroundings and communicate that map to other robots.
Scientists are testing a hypothesis that the atmosphere heats before a significant earthquake, after data from climate sensors above Fukushima indicated significant heating before the magnitude-9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
Take a look at a picture of the last launch of space shuttle Endeavour.
Finally, a device that will read your fingerprints at a two-meter distance. Perfect for law enforcement to scan you without your consent, or for anyone to steal your biometric identification, if biometrics becomes a popular security measure. In all cases, your privacy is most likely going to be invaded even more, and at a distance so that you don't even know it.
In opinions, a request to bring back actual courtship in YA novels, instead of going straight to the totally in love at first sight bit.
Mr. Spencer believes that in articulating the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, President Obama has betrayed Israel and wishes to see it destroyed by The Bloodthirsty Religion that will surely take hold in a Palestinian state. There can be no Palestine, says he, only Israel and the Jews triumphant.
Mr. Pendry understands not the message of Memorial Day with his admonitions to the people on how to celebrate it. Namely:
On a different tack of the same point, Mr. Thornton says the reason things worked so well for previous generations is that the schools taught them only about being Americans and forced them to discard any part of their home culture that was incompatible with being American, so they all assimilated. Schools today, with their focus on heritage and multicultralism, as well as an insistence that people shouldn't be discriminated against in textbooks, are letting people complain about how much better home was while staying here in America, and That's Just Wrong. ("Love It or Leave It", I believe it was back in the post 11 September arena.) As if acknowledging all the ways that America has been cruel is somehow unworthy of schooling, which must only teach the jingoistic hagiography of America and not actual history, no matter how obvious and glaring the difference between hagiography and reality there is.
Mr. Hanson believes the President is unserious about real immigration reform because he doesn't support building fences to keep people out, and floats ideas like voluntary citizenship intiatives as carrots without indicating where the necessary stick to put them on that path will be. Mr. Hanson comes perilously close to "They're takin ur jaaaaaabs." in his column, but settles simply for "Lots of illegals, high unemployment, money heading back to Mexico. Don't you want Good Upstanding (White?) Folk to be employed here in this country, spending their money here instead?"
Ms. Dale suggests that President Obama assert American excpetionalism in an outreach speech to Muslims after bin Laden's death, to be proud of the way that things were handled, and not to apologize for anything done. The things that made George W. Bush a reviled figure, y'know.
The WSJ savages Newt Gingrich for not being fully behind Paul Ryan's unserious proposal on handling Medicare. As Ms. Maddow points out, being fully behind the Ryan proposal is the litmus test for being conservative enough to be called a Republican, but that's most likely going to cause serious difficulties for a candidate when they make it to the general election. Not that, y'know, Mr. Gingrich isn't doing his damndest to backpedal what he said anyway, so that he can still be seen as a Real Republican. Mr. Brownfield says the government has to control its spending, and uses the opportunity to tout the Heritage Budget, the one that says tax increases are completely off the table, and thus, everything must be redesigned after giant targeted spending slashes to screw the poor in the name of getting entitlements under control. Those redesigns will continue screwing the poor by replacing progessive income taxes with a flat income tax for people and businesses as the only way of generating revenue, turning Social Security into a flat payment that's higher than the poverty level, but indexed to wages, raising the age at which one can collect such), and then taking what would be a worker's social security contribution and forcing them to put it in a savings plan that is subject to The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) so as to ensure that retirement depends on companies doing well and a lack of crashes right around retirement ages. (Of course, if you work past your retirement, you'll get a tax deduction. Yaaaaay. Oh, and it will turn Medicare into a private insurance premium support system, only provide tax credits for those who purchase health insurance instead of any direct support outside of Medicare. So, y'know, poor people, sucks to be you.
(They also gut infrastructure, privatizing or spinning off transportation, reducing funding for public schools, farmers, and antipoverty measures, repealing PPACA, selling large amounts of federal land, requiring budgeters to project for 75 years into the future, but make sure that the military gets everything it wants and more. It's pretty much like the Ryan plan with a little bit of Ron Paul added in.)
Mr. McGurn is sure that Barack Obama will have to break his pledge to only raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 USD, and it's only a matter of when, not if. It might even happen because Republicans will force his hand to sign a bill that raises those taxes, or will pass an override over his veto. He managed to avoid a major break while the Democrats controlled all the houses, as best I can tell, but with Republicans in the House, it's almost a guarantee anything that gets out will break that promise.
The WSJ is seeing Democratic political moves at every turn, characterizing a decision by the IRS to start enforcing parts of its code regarding donations to certain political organizations unleashed by Citizens United as Democrats attempting to silence donations to Republicans by corporations. The fact that it only affects wealthy donors under the gift tax and the IRS's sudden decision to start enforcing it can only be Democratic machinations at work. Or, perhaps, because of the citizens United Decision, the IRS has decided to re-focus on that area after seeing how effectively that money is being used and what kind of tax dodge is going on if there isn't enforcement. That doesn't make for good political paranoia, though.
Speaking of taxes, Mr. Sowell makes two points about taxes in a column only intended about one - lower tax rates mean more actual revenue, he says, because more people pay it. The unstated point Mr. Sowell is also supporting, however, is "Higher taxes can mean more revenue if there are less ways for the high-income people to shelter or otherwise move their money beyond the reach of the taxing authority." So if you want to raise taxes to get more revenue, close loopholes while you do it. Perhaps we do want to leave a few doors open, like investing in municipalities and state bonds - tax-free investment in your community to get them the funds they need.
In his own critique of Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Jeffrey believes that because the Ryan plan gives people ten years to get used to Medicare being a voucher system, it can't possibly be considered radical change, like Obamacare socialism is. He also makes the claim that the Ryan plan stops government bureaucrats from rationing care without following it to the conclusion that private companies will do the rationing instead. Mr. Borwnfield takes the line of "Obamacare bad" by proclaiming that the amount of waivers granted already proves that the legislation itself is critically flawed and requires a repeal, without going into too much detail about why the waivers are being granted - usually, it's so that workers aren't screwed by their employers into having no insurance, allowing them to retain the partial-benefit insurance they have.
Mr. Williams sees dollars not as a convenient medium for the exchagne of goods, backed by government fiat, but as certificates that someone served his fellow man, and the more dollars one has, the more people were pleased with that service. Thus, nobody who has more dollars should be forced to give them back to government or to those who have fewer dollars, but instead those people who have few dollars must work harder to produce things that please their fellows and convince them to part with their own dollars. You poor, you're poor because you choose to be that way and no other reason, says Mr. Williams, and the government should not steal from those who chose to be rich to help you out at all.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee lays out his reasons why the military should get everything it asks for and more, reasoning that increased commitments in foreign lands requires increased funding and troops to do those jobs. Utterly ignored is the question of whether or not the U.S. should be taking on those kinds of commitments, because for the speaker, that's a given - Team America, World Police, Leading the Way.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Henninger likes the incumbent position for the next set of elections, because they don't have to run an 18-month campaign against the Internet that looks for whatever it can find to destroy them, and build campaign reserves while they're at it.
Last out, a letter requesting the importation of a very precise clock into Spain to allow its handler to use it to tune one of the native clocks.
Continuing on, a short but vital piece in understanding why brilliant people are prone to depression early in their lives. They make the connections and draw the right conclusions, but at that point, they have to find the next step. Guidance from adults that have been down that road will help, if done right.
A question of whether Dr. Seuss is sexist and misogynistic based on the prevalence of male speaking roles in his books and some statements he made about Women's Lib in the 70s. Ware for Woe, Spiders, and an early-comments nuking in the comment section (it does settle down eventually). Perseverance pays in this case. There's also several people pointing out some problems with the concept of the SlutWalk, and the ways that it doesn't really do outreach past white women or be all that inclusive.
And then a very serious question - considering how much society rewards bullies, both on the schoolyard and in adult lives (like radio personalities), the advice of "no be there" is becoming increasingly irrelevant, because They Are Everywhere. How do we slap bullies upside the head and get them to stop?
Out in the world today, with proper investment from governments, renewable resources could power eighty percent of the world's energy demand within forty years, according to an IPCC report.
The students of the University of London are looking to get a professor sacked after an article he penned in Psychology Today that used Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics to "prove" that black women are objectively less attractive than other women.
Perhaps because one of the Chinese generals said that Chinese forces are insufficient to handle the United States in a war, the United States says they're receptive to cadet and other exchange programs with China in the interests of improved relations.
The next technological bogeyman, when we're not hostile to China, is North Korea.
Perhaps in the department of "making nice to the people we should really be more concerned about", the United States is strengthening its ties to Saudi Arabia, and devoting time and space to exaimining the past of Anwar al-Awlaki, presumptive successor to Osama bin Laded.
Military Times profiles Lt. General John Allen, the next commander of forces in Afghanistan, who will replace David Petraeus, newly-tapped head of the CIA, relatively soon.
Last out, according to images, Pakistan may be building a fourth nuclear reactor in the country with the express purpose of developing plutonium.
Domestically, a reminder that the United States still gives several hundred millions of dollars in subsidies to the most profitable industry in the country. This while new graduates struggle with experienced workers for too few jobs, which has the knock-on effect of making it that much tougher for people with no degree and a little experience to find work.
A study suggests that the hunt for Osama bin Laden cost the United States economy more than 3 trillion dollars, only a tiny fraction of which was damage caused by the bin Laden plots.
Speaking of economic damage, how about we close up the loophole that lets people who make their money mostly through buying and selling securities pay less tax on their income than people who earn it through normal labor and/or public service?
And we stop letting the media cabals push through bills that will ignore the provisions set out in the Constitution regarding search and seizure? (And stop electing people that appoint judges that belive police should have the authority to raid houses and other places without warrants if they hear any signs of life on the other side of a closed and locked door.) Why not instead see how the pricing models of content tends to encourage piracy in plaves because distributors don't think about what their costs look like translated to the local currency and economy?
Training for the Marine Corps on the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy is dry, boring, and mostly by-the-book. Now the question appears as to whether the troops and the officers will be accepting or not of their openly gay and lesbian comrades. There are some reports of the trainings not being taken seriously (which is to be expected.)
The gold standard of the adult men's magazine, Playboy, has digitized their entire run and made them available for subscription on-line, at $8 / month or $60 / year (USD). Thus, those who want the magazine for the articles can go and get them, and those who want to see how the changing face of beauty and the march of both plastic surgery and image manipulation programs will have fifty-seven years of centerfolds to examine in detail. I think there will be more academic interest in a subscription like this, as while people may turn elsewhere to get their nude fixes, Playboy as a cultural icon still holds weight.
Finally, a judge refused to even temporarily stay Indiana's new bill that cuts off most of Planned Parenthood's funding, prevents the use of Medicaid there, and adds onerous restrictions and requirements for any woman seeking an abortion procedure. Mitch Daniels and Indiana legislature, if you want women barefoot and pregnant, you should at least have the willingness to say so openly and get your laws callenged for waht they are, instead of stabbing organizations in the back.
In tech, streaming content consumed more bandwidth than P2P applications for the first time last month. In which Netflix consumed more bandwidth than even BitTorrent. Huh - if you give someone a cheap licensed option, they'll usually take it. I wonder where that lesson could be applied...
A Yarnbomb to make the Berkeley Public Library bike rack more colorful.
Robots are inventing their own language and using it to map their surroundings and communicate that map to other robots.
Scientists are testing a hypothesis that the atmosphere heats before a significant earthquake, after data from climate sensors above Fukushima indicated significant heating before the magnitude-9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
Take a look at a picture of the last launch of space shuttle Endeavour.
Finally, a device that will read your fingerprints at a two-meter distance. Perfect for law enforcement to scan you without your consent, or for anyone to steal your biometric identification, if biometrics becomes a popular security measure. In all cases, your privacy is most likely going to be invaded even more, and at a distance so that you don't even know it.
In opinions, a request to bring back actual courtship in YA novels, instead of going straight to the totally in love at first sight bit.
Mr. Spencer believes that in articulating the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, President Obama has betrayed Israel and wishes to see it destroyed by The Bloodthirsty Religion that will surely take hold in a Palestinian state. There can be no Palestine, says he, only Israel and the Jews triumphant.
Mr. Pendry understands not the message of Memorial Day with his admonitions to the people on how to celebrate it. Namely:
But evil does not surrender, it is always lurking. There are other forces at work inside our country that are bent on its destruction. Multiculturalism and hyphenated Americanism among them as well as those who would cheerfully discard our founding documents and constitution. Our Soldiers cannot battle this enemy; it is one for the rest of us....On this Memorial Day, think about what it means to be an American. Contemplate all of the things that are happening in our country today in the name of diversity and tolerance that undermine our national motto and our most enduring founding principle. Then get on your knees and thank God for this place and for the American men and women who have sacrificed throughout our history to defend the freedom we enjoy in this most blessed nation. Then take up the fight that our Soldiers cannot.Mr. Pendry's interpretation of E Pluribus Unum seems to conjure visions of lock-stepped persons who have the same opinion on everything, always jingoistically positive about America and discarding the rest as a plot to undermine. We also want to know who are these enemies that cheerfully discard the documents - the data I see seems to be that they fall in the camp of torture apologists, corporations and their lackeys, and Republicans whose zeal to make sure that no woman will ever have sex unless she wants to get pregnant and carry the child to term. People who would like to remember some of their own heritage while becoming part of the shared heritage of the United States certainly don't seem to rank in that set, but Mr. Pendry is fairly consistently a person who believes that only those who want to abandon everything they had before should be welcome in the country. After all, they might remind us that there are other ways of doing things, ways that might even be better, and that's unacceptable.
On a different tack of the same point, Mr. Thornton says the reason things worked so well for previous generations is that the schools taught them only about being Americans and forced them to discard any part of their home culture that was incompatible with being American, so they all assimilated. Schools today, with their focus on heritage and multicultralism, as well as an insistence that people shouldn't be discriminated against in textbooks, are letting people complain about how much better home was while staying here in America, and That's Just Wrong. ("Love It or Leave It", I believe it was back in the post 11 September arena.) As if acknowledging all the ways that America has been cruel is somehow unworthy of schooling, which must only teach the jingoistic hagiography of America and not actual history, no matter how obvious and glaring the difference between hagiography and reality there is.
Mr. Hanson believes the President is unserious about real immigration reform because he doesn't support building fences to keep people out, and floats ideas like voluntary citizenship intiatives as carrots without indicating where the necessary stick to put them on that path will be. Mr. Hanson comes perilously close to "They're takin ur jaaaaaabs." in his column, but settles simply for "Lots of illegals, high unemployment, money heading back to Mexico. Don't you want Good Upstanding (White?) Folk to be employed here in this country, spending their money here instead?"
Ms. Dale suggests that President Obama assert American excpetionalism in an outreach speech to Muslims after bin Laden's death, to be proud of the way that things were handled, and not to apologize for anything done. The things that made George W. Bush a reviled figure, y'know.
The WSJ savages Newt Gingrich for not being fully behind Paul Ryan's unserious proposal on handling Medicare. As Ms. Maddow points out, being fully behind the Ryan proposal is the litmus test for being conservative enough to be called a Republican, but that's most likely going to cause serious difficulties for a candidate when they make it to the general election. Not that, y'know, Mr. Gingrich isn't doing his damndest to backpedal what he said anyway, so that he can still be seen as a Real Republican. Mr. Brownfield says the government has to control its spending, and uses the opportunity to tout the Heritage Budget, the one that says tax increases are completely off the table, and thus, everything must be redesigned after giant targeted spending slashes to screw the poor in the name of getting entitlements under control. Those redesigns will continue screwing the poor by replacing progessive income taxes with a flat income tax for people and businesses as the only way of generating revenue, turning Social Security into a flat payment that's higher than the poverty level, but indexed to wages, raising the age at which one can collect such), and then taking what would be a worker's social security contribution and forcing them to put it in a savings plan that is subject to The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) so as to ensure that retirement depends on companies doing well and a lack of crashes right around retirement ages. (Of course, if you work past your retirement, you'll get a tax deduction. Yaaaaay. Oh, and it will turn Medicare into a private insurance premium support system, only provide tax credits for those who purchase health insurance instead of any direct support outside of Medicare. So, y'know, poor people, sucks to be you.
(They also gut infrastructure, privatizing or spinning off transportation, reducing funding for public schools, farmers, and antipoverty measures, repealing PPACA, selling large amounts of federal land, requiring budgeters to project for 75 years into the future, but make sure that the military gets everything it wants and more. It's pretty much like the Ryan plan with a little bit of Ron Paul added in.)
Mr. McGurn is sure that Barack Obama will have to break his pledge to only raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 USD, and it's only a matter of when, not if. It might even happen because Republicans will force his hand to sign a bill that raises those taxes, or will pass an override over his veto. He managed to avoid a major break while the Democrats controlled all the houses, as best I can tell, but with Republicans in the House, it's almost a guarantee anything that gets out will break that promise.
The WSJ is seeing Democratic political moves at every turn, characterizing a decision by the IRS to start enforcing parts of its code regarding donations to certain political organizations unleashed by Citizens United as Democrats attempting to silence donations to Republicans by corporations. The fact that it only affects wealthy donors under the gift tax and the IRS's sudden decision to start enforcing it can only be Democratic machinations at work. Or, perhaps, because of the citizens United Decision, the IRS has decided to re-focus on that area after seeing how effectively that money is being used and what kind of tax dodge is going on if there isn't enforcement. That doesn't make for good political paranoia, though.
Speaking of taxes, Mr. Sowell makes two points about taxes in a column only intended about one - lower tax rates mean more actual revenue, he says, because more people pay it. The unstated point Mr. Sowell is also supporting, however, is "Higher taxes can mean more revenue if there are less ways for the high-income people to shelter or otherwise move their money beyond the reach of the taxing authority." So if you want to raise taxes to get more revenue, close loopholes while you do it. Perhaps we do want to leave a few doors open, like investing in municipalities and state bonds - tax-free investment in your community to get them the funds they need.
In his own critique of Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Jeffrey believes that because the Ryan plan gives people ten years to get used to Medicare being a voucher system, it can't possibly be considered radical change, like Obamacare socialism is. He also makes the claim that the Ryan plan stops government bureaucrats from rationing care without following it to the conclusion that private companies will do the rationing instead. Mr. Borwnfield takes the line of "Obamacare bad" by proclaiming that the amount of waivers granted already proves that the legislation itself is critically flawed and requires a repeal, without going into too much detail about why the waivers are being granted - usually, it's so that workers aren't screwed by their employers into having no insurance, allowing them to retain the partial-benefit insurance they have.
Mr. Williams sees dollars not as a convenient medium for the exchagne of goods, backed by government fiat, but as certificates that someone served his fellow man, and the more dollars one has, the more people were pleased with that service. Thus, nobody who has more dollars should be forced to give them back to government or to those who have fewer dollars, but instead those people who have few dollars must work harder to produce things that please their fellows and convince them to part with their own dollars. You poor, you're poor because you choose to be that way and no other reason, says Mr. Williams, and the government should not steal from those who chose to be rich to help you out at all.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee lays out his reasons why the military should get everything it asks for and more, reasoning that increased commitments in foreign lands requires increased funding and troops to do those jobs. Utterly ignored is the question of whether or not the U.S. should be taking on those kinds of commitments, because for the speaker, that's a given - Team America, World Police, Leading the Way.
Last out of opinions, Mr. Henninger likes the incumbent position for the next set of elections, because they don't have to run an 18-month campaign against the Internet that looks for whatever it can find to destroy them, and build campaign reserves while they're at it.
Last out, a letter requesting the importation of a very precise clock into Spain to allow its handler to use it to tune one of the native clocks.
