Mark Twain on BREXIT and GLOBAL WARMING

'If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.'

BIG PICTURE

AND THE LITTLE PICTURE

THE BIG PICTURE

AND THE LITTLE PICTURE

h/t smalldeadanimals

PTSD from the reporter who fired an AR15.

Found at Powerline.

To Die Is To Run Out Of Fuel

Dying is not a sacred duty.  Not all things die (or have sex).  Dying, like sex,  is an evolutionary tool to give a competitive renewal edge to our species.  Dying is running out of fuel.   Re-fuel and live a long time.  It's not immoral, just an opportunity.   Refuelling means cleaning up protein tangles on neurons, refreshing heart muscle with our own stem cells,  re-growing flexible clear eyeballs, taking DNA tweaks. It also means having high integrity data backups.   If you are present holographically in more than one location with avatars and sensing some things as if part of your own body, just who the heck are you, anyway?  And if part goes down, are you still there?      We already know that parts of our body can be gone without the "This is me" part disappearing.  Limbs gone or paralyzed don't stop you from saying "I am".  An ear can go, both eyes can go, the lower jaw can go, but the experience of "I" continues.   Add back in sensations that will be coming in from avatars at remote places where people interact with you.  What have you got?  This question is coming up with uncomfortable answers soon.

I should have taken the DNA tweak package
on my 120th birthday.

Death has been treated like religion because up until now you could count on it, plan your life around it, and couldn't skip it.  I think it's becoming optional for some, to be replaced by a balance sheet of how much stuff you have in the world that's working and how much is not.

Our Robot Overlords

Robots and AI networks will be making battlefield calls:

"Bots will enable the automation of terrorism (a truly transformational development) ..... When any bot learns something, it can then share that "understanding" with every other bot connected to the cloud".  From John Robb (CIA consultant on future weapon systems) at Global Guerillas.

Think about it.  When one device learns a tactic, they all learn it.  A drone can fly into the soccer stadium and spray fake poison powder to stampede the crowd, or it can set off real explosives next to the head of a presidential candidate at the mike.  We can hack our enemies AI defence and teach all devices to bow and pray to Allah instead of firing a weapon when attacked.  This ain't Star Wars.  Some of it is off-the-shelf technology you can order from amazon.  It just hasn't been weaponized yet.  To own and defend The Cloud is to own the high ground.

LA Times accidentally reveals Clinton "Pay to Play" in Hillary-friendly story.

Calling Susie Tompkins Buell "Hillary's Soul Mate", the LA Times reveals that the first $100,000 donation she made to the Clintons came out of the blue.  

The Clinton campaign was confused,    They asked me what I wanted,” she said.

I want to throw away my garbage, not redeem it.

Stuff you used to throw away is now embedded in religious ritual.  Children are taught the three Rs but it has nothing to do with Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic.  Instead it is Reduce, Re-Use, and Re-Cycle.  Those 3R's make a certain amount of sense but expect to be shunned and shamed if you don't spend unpaid hours every month kowtowing to the blue box and the compost pail, the organics bin and the paper and cardboard bins and the plastic & glass recycle bins, and a separate place if there is a deposit for the container, and the special drop off for styrofoams and another one for paints.  Perhaps you drop off your empty plastic bags and tetrapaks at the grocery store, too.   Are you running containers through the dishwasher with hot water.  They're supposed to be clean! Drive a $20,000 car to the recycle depot with paint and old TVs.  Instead of being preoccupied with pee and poo, folks are fixated on the arsehole of society and everything that was cast out formerly must now be retained and played with.   Clearly cost is nothing and ritual all.  Cost is how the market gives us a clue about what is wise behaviour and what is foolish.  Did I mention that your time is free?  You don't get minimum wage, you don't get a dime a day for your trouble, just a sense of virtue and escape from those who carp at your failings.  The politicians and rent seekers price in the paid workers but your reward is just virtue, a religious good.  The recycling movement is a net cost to society and everyone is poorer.  Good judgement will always find things to reduce and others to re-use and still others to recycle but the priests of garbage want it all.

The entire waste of North America for the next hundred years could fit into a cubic mile of land fill in the desert.  If I had been born about fifty years later, a few years from now I'd be bidding for landfill sites to make my first billion dollars sorting them with high tech at a single site.  They are gold mines.  Money and officialdom gave us rules that make garbage nearly illegal.  The costs of cleaning it, sorting it, washing it and blessing it with new credentials has soared.  This should be redirected to challenge the market to find a way to make a buck transforming garbage into dirt and oil and copper and feed-stocks and fuel without relying on unpaid labour from you and me.

The recycle bins at our condo have a restrictive sticker saying what can go in them.  Now the sticker has a sticker over top of the first one with even more restrictive nonsensical rules.  No more lids.  Only clean containers.  Give me a gigantic break.   Bring back something big I can throw stuff into and charge me so much a month for the deal.  YOU fix it up.  I don't expect to compost my body waste before flushing the toilet and I don't expect to redeem my garbage before I hand it over to someone expert and efficient at handling it.

Reason is the garnish, culture is the meal.

Cartoon showing how liberals think is pretty much true for how everybody thinks. h/t Powerline

College for Profit: Two rules

Pick a useful degree.
Finish the course.

That's the takeaway in Casselman's article.
While you dawdle in school, debts pile onto debts and if you don't go for a skill degree, then income to pay the loans back and to start a home or family just isn't going to be there.

Source at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rent-is-less-damn-high/ , scroll down past the rents section to the schooling part.

"The next president must be a WHITE MALE REPUBLICAN". Yes.

How else will the lapdog press bark at those who trespass against the rule of law.  The others get facelicks.

The press interviewing a favoured one.

h/t  Glen Reynolds.

The Dumb Can Talk With Virtual Reality Gloves

Two college students invented a pair of gloves that change American Sign Language as it is being signed into written and spoken words.  Wonderful.  The gloves can be made for $100 and use the same motion capture techniques that virtual reality games use to introduce your body motion into the action.

Commonwealth 2.0

Pay attention to the June 23 BREXIT vote in the UK.  Conrad Black seeys a win for the "Leavers"  might revive the Commonwealth with Canada playing a notable role.  A Britain that breaks with the EU may ally with top tier Commonwealth states (Canada, Australia and New Zealand with Singapore, too) and strengthen the nexus with the U.S.A.  This grouping, even without the USA, would have the economic clout of a China and be second in military might to the USA.

Flint reportage more toxic than the water

Being innumerate and credulous will equip you for Flint lead-in-the-water outrage.

The outrage begins with a change in water sourcing a year ago.   That last little blip in the chart is, almost unbelievably, the source of the killer narrative.

Exhibit one:  Wikipedia summary
Exhibit two:  Chart of lead levels in Flint chldren's blood (micrograms per decalitre).
Exhibit three:  Corruption sideline as mayor's PAC siphons off the remediation money.
Exhibit four:  The earth's temperature for the last several hundred thousand years.  The pattern is ignored to focus outrage on misreporting the last few ticks on the chart where politics and money get traction.

Exhibit One:

The Flint water crisis is a drinking water contamination issue in Flint, Michigan, United States that started in April 2014. After Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (which was sourced from Lake Huron as well as the Detroit River) to the Flint River (to which officials had failed to apply corrosion inhibitors), its drinking water had a series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger. The corrosive Flint River water caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply, causing extremely elevated levels of the heavy metal. In Flint, between 6,000 and 12,000 children have been exposed to drinking water with high levels of lead and they may experience a range of serious health problems.[1] Due to the change in water source, the percentage of Flint children with elevated blood-lead levels may have risen from about 2.5% in 2013 to as much as 5% in 2015.

Exhibit Two:

Exhibit Three:

 

Exhibit Four:

 

Hyopocrisy from the left, edtion 9534.

 

  
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/05/the-week-in-pictures-false-id-edition.php

Jadges and babies are nicer after a feed. We deceive ourselves to think we are objective.

Ben Gurion researchers found Israeli judges gave almost all their kindly decisions right after a meal and most of their cranky ones when they were getting hungry.  "Whether or not a prisoner got a favorable ruling depended in part on how long it had been since the judge had something to eat."  The right side of the chart is the percentage of favourable rulings like parole or a move to a more convenient jail.  The bottom line is how many cases they had listened to so far that day.

Application:  Politicians and dates should be wined and dined before you bring up favours that must get to YES.

Romney's Dog On The Roof Should Have Won Him The Election.

Trump would have had a field day making you laugh.  Poor Mitt folded over Seamus, the Irish Setter, who got diarrhea while riding in the car top carrier.    That was Romney's most human moment in 2012.  His car is packed out with the kids and his wife and luggage for the holiday and their beloved dog got to ride on top instead of being left behind.

Seamus "Romney"

 A guy like this should have been president, seeing a simple friendly way to get things done when resources are short.  If Seamus hadn't stolen turkey off the counter before being loaded up, you'd never have heard the rest of it.  The righteous prigs who scolded him now have Donald J. Trump.    If I was an American, thanks to Seamus alone, I'd have voted for Mitt Romney.  Loved him for it but he wimped out and wiped out.
That's a lot of family to pack into the car.  Put a proper carrier on top with a windscreen and take away the mockery of Big Bird, and you see what I see.

Gun toting Republican replaces founder of the Democratic Party on $US 20

Ms Tubman = Gun-toting Republican.  Wondrous humour from Iowahawk/Burge.

Panama Papers blow the lid off secret money. Putin, FIFA, Iceland just for starters.

Snowden, Climategate and now the Panama Papers.   11 million files (not all illegal) cover decades of offshore paper facades designed to conceal what the powerful and rich are doing.  Stay tuned.  Several hundred reporters have been recruited to work with Suddeutsche Zeitung  The German newspaper received the 2.6 terabyte dump of secret files stolen from the Panama-based legal firm, Mossack Fonseca.

First contact and response at Suddeutsche Zeitung.
Guardian link.     $2 billion trail from Putin, FIFA, Iceland's PM. 
Sidney Morning Herald   mentions Xi Jinping too.
USA Today:  "Worldwide, Jaws Drop"  "Biggest data leak in history".

Stay tuned.
The death of privacy is the new normal.
The little guy loses it.  The big guy loses it.
Every dollar you spend, every GPS signal your phone emits, each page you view is tracked.
The same is happening to the market moguls and tyrants and the merely rich and influential.  Their secrets too are tempting targets.  They put up better walls than you and I but they attract bigger predators too.

Update: Illustrated lede at The Daily Mail.

Hope Wanted For Aging Optimist

I'm a glass-half-full guy.  My partner and my wife tell me I'm too trusting.   Life and love have never been better but I've an awfully hard time looking for the bright side of culture and politics.

Faced with a photo of Justin Trudeau, that handsome young fellow with the selfie camera, I turn my eyes away.  Seeing Barack Obama palling around with Raoul Castro, makes me cringe.  When ex-Rubio people post GQ shots of Trump's wife to help Cruz' campaign and Trump brags his wife is prettier that Cruz' wife, I'm brought to despair.  Reading in-your-face false reporting from both Republican and Democrat leaders to make Donald Trump look like a crazed idiot and force him out at the convention  gives me heartache.   University students get the vapours when they see a campaign sign, "Trump 2016" chalked by the sidewalk.   What it reveals about mainstream culture gives  me a heavier heart than any of The Donald's antics.  The twilight of the Chretien era was easier to stomach.

As noted by Milo Yiannopoulos:  "The weak, ineffectual conservative establishment, with their utter inability to defeat the left on cultural issues, has made Donald Trump a necessary, even vital force in American politics."

I'm cheering for Donald because he gives me hope that American and Canadian politics can be refreshed, like root-bound plants getting re-potted.  There will be an "after" after Trump.

The More Multiculturalism Prevails, The Less Community We Have. Breaking Racial Barriers Not Worth The Full Price.

Some is excellent.  A lot is ruin.

"Putnam found that diversity promotes alienation, disengagement, and social isolation. This all runs counter to a host of prevailing clichés and pieties.  ..  As a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust plummets. People tend to “hunker down,” ... banding together with a shrunken and shrinking group of friends or alone ... Trust in political leaders, the political process, and even voting decline precipitously. Volunteerism, from charitable giving to carpooling, deteriorates. Political activism increases as people look to government to solve problems that once might have been solved by a simple conversation across a coffee table or a shared fence between neighbors.

h/t Ed Driscoll from his tale of moving to Texas from California.

Hype Tool For Political Journalists

From mathwithbaddrawings comes this pointed cartoon.
"Read Me. Be surprised" is the message.
Reporting less so.

Enjoy a browse at the mother page
before you leave the topic.