What difference, at this point, does it make?
American military forces were available for a rescue operation not long after the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, came under attack by terrorists Sept. 11, 2012, according to an email to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest aides.
“The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns“:
For some, the Elf on the Shelf doll, with its doe-eyed gaze and cherubic face, has become a whimsical holiday tradition — one that helpfully reminds children to stay out of trouble in the lead-up to Christmas.
For others — like, say, digital technology professor Laura Pinto — the Elf on the Shelf is “a capillary form of power that normalizes the voluntary surrender of privacy, teaching young people to blindly accept panoptic surveillance and” [deep breath] “reify hegemonic power.”
The paper was published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Because of course it was.
November 5, 2008:
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
November 30, 2015:
US President Barack Obama has outlined a vision of the world that includes “submerged countries, abandoned cities and fields that no longer grow”
Who is funding ISIS?
…just last week in the aftermath of the French terror attack but long before the Turkish downing of the Russian jet, we wrote about “The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking” in which we asked who is the one “breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various “western alliance” governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?”
Hint: It isn’t Halliburton.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry recommended Thursday that Russians refrain from visiting Turkey, and called on those already in the country to return home.
Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium has increased in the past three months even though Tehran is supposed to reduce it significantly under a deal with major powers, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) determined in a confidential report Reuters saw on Wednesday afternoon.
Iran has also started to dismantle uranium enrichment centrifuges at its Natanz and Fordow nuclear facilities, the IAEA report states. Under the deal with major powers reached in July, Iran is supposed to reduce the number of centrifuges it has in operation.
New Democrat leader Dwain Lingenfelter’s promise to get more electricity from wind turbines is being criticized by the Saskatchewan Party.
The party says if elected on Nov. 7, an NDP government will add 400 megawatts of new wind power over four years.
But Sask. Party Leader Brad Wall says there’s a huge hole in the NDP platform because it’s not being costed out.
According to SaskPower planning documents, large wind power projects have capital costs of between $2 million and $3 million per megawatt…
Wall said that’s another example of the NDP making unaffordable promises.
“Are you going to make SaskPower borrow the money? Is it going to come from the general revenue fund? Or are people going to pay higher electricity rates?” Wall asked.
The wind power promise is part of the NDP’s environmental plan to ensure that by 2025, 50 per cent of the province’s electricity is clean, renewable energy.
A plan to generate half of Saskatchewan’s power from renewable sources by 2030 is “ambitious,” but the provincial government insists it can be done.
Days after Premier Brad Wall announced that by 2030, wind, solar and geothermal power would be developed to meet a 50-per-cent renewable target, minister responsible for SaskPower Bill Boyd on Monday said he was “confident SaskPower can meet the target by taking an ‘all of the above’ approach to planning.
Wynneing, flatlander-style.
He seems nice:
Dana Durnford is charged with two counts of criminal harassment for online videos attacking researchers Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Jay Cullen of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
In expletive-laden recordings available until recently on the Internet, Durnford rails against the pair and other leading scientists and calls for their deaths.
“Every university, every academic, every nuclear scientist will be hunted down and f—ing murdered,” he declares in one video. “We want you dead.”
Ironically finishing off the job Fukushima never did.
Save the unicorns!
According to FT, “Snapchat has been marked down by one of its most high-profile investors, raising further questions about the soaring valuations of private technology companies. Fidelity, the only fund manager to have invested in the four-year-old company best known for disappearing photos, wrote down the value of its stake by 25 per cent in the third quarter, according to data from investment research firm Morningstar. It had valued each share at $30.72 at the end of June but dropped the valuation to $22.91 by the end of September.”
#Its2015
So five of Trudeau's Ministers are actually Ministers of State. And they are all women. https://t.co/NlL2FeWmIt
— Kathryn Marshall (@Kathryn_Lawsome) November 5, 2015
Rona Ambrose smart move for CPC interim. It's 2015.
— Mike McDonald (@BCMikeMcD) November 5, 2015
Step 1: Recognize that culture has been appropriated:
Step 2: Realize you need to change the culture:
Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November — and then are surprised that it doesn’t make much difference. Culture trumps politics — which is why, once the question’s been settled culturally, conservatives are reduced to playing catch-up, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why gay marriage is really conservative after all, or why 30-million unskilled immigrants with a majority of births out of wedlock are “natural allies” of the Republican Party.
Step 3: Change the culture:
The National Geographic Society of Washington will lay off about 180 of its 2,000 employees in a cost-cutting move that follows the sale of its famous magazine and other assets to a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds gets it:
That’s a big difference, and Charles Koch is not going to overcome it by running a few TV ads in election season. With media properties selling at a discount now is a good time to buy some. (And the opportunity is bigger than just news media. People like the Kochs could have a big impact buying “soft” media like women’s magazines and websites that lean even further left.)
Breaking up the monoculture will help voters see the world from different perspectives, will provide a check on the worst excesses of biased media and may even help the John Harwoods of the world realize that they, themselves, are not actually unbiased.
Providing public goods is the only legitimate reason we have governments.
In reality, we have governments for lots of reasons, most of them illegitimate:
When it comes to government, if you aren’t involved in the provision of actual public goods, you are involved in extortion. It may be legal. It may have the blessing of the mayor, the city council, and your union representative, but it’s still extortion. And you should be ashamed of yourself. If your only purpose is getting in the way until somebody hands you money, then you are part of a protection racket. And you might want to think about going into a more honorable line of work.
The “great lesson” here is actually something different. I’ve spent the last several weeks re-reporting aspects of Nir’s story and interviewing her sources. Not only did Nir’s coverage broadly mischaracterize the nail salon industry, several of the men and women she spoke with say she misquoted or misrepresented them. In some cases, she interviewed sources without translators despite their poor English skills. When her sources’ testimonies ran counter to her narrative, she omitted them altogether.
The second article lent the Times’ imprimatur to unproven theories, while committing science journalism’s cardinal sin of highlighting alarmist anecdotes that aren’t representative of systematic research.
If it hadn’t had real-world consequences, the series–and subsequent attempt by Nir and her editors to parry criticism–wouldn’t be worth such intense scrutiny. But the day after the first article appeared in the print edition of the Times, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) announced a new multi-agency task force to inspect nail salons. In August, Cuomo issued an emergency order mandating that salons purchase a new form of insurance called a “wage bond” so that if owners are discovered paying their employees less than the legally required wage, the workers have recourse to collect.
The rush to legislate based solely on the Times’ shoddy reporting has hurt the industry
You don’t say.
Matt Ridley on what the climate wars did for science:
For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.
Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience–homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.
Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.
Thoughts are with our farming SDA followers as they work to get the crop off.
Stay safe as you harvest your bounty!
Aegrescit medendo:
No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation — a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise.
But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation — one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant.
Epidemiologists speak of “stochastic deaths,” those they predict will happen in the future because of radiation or some other risk. With no names attached to the numbers, they remain an abstraction.
But these other deaths were immediate and unequivocally real.
“The government basically panicked,” said Dr. Mohan Doss, a medical physicist who spoke at the Tokyo meeting, when I called him at his office at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “When you evacuate a hospital intensive care unit, you cannot take patients to a high school and expect them to survive.”
What is the opposite of diversity?
This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.
European Union renewable energy sources, 2013:
Using woodchips as a renewable alternative to coal is like using sperm whales to replace gasoline.