Network news is broken. Defend the internet, it's your only hope.

Reading Sharyl Atkisson's book, Stonewalled, I am struck not by how the White House is illegally using the spy services to disable critics, but by how corrupt and broken network news is.  The government has mastered the art of snooping, flattering and intimidating.  The network news managers have mastered the art of copying each other so the same half dozen stories appear on every network.  Investigative reporting that puts the Obama White house or major sponsors in a bad light will die or be shunted to the website.

The branches of the US government seem united in suppressing whistleblowers and everything embarrassing.  Stonewalling is the norm.  False friendly calls from officials are to "pump and mine" which means to find out what documents you may have got hold of and get copies of them and the names of leakers.  They say they want to respond to the specifics but they are just checking to see how much of the truth you know.  Lying is standard operating procedure.  Canada seems better but bureaucracy will always trend towards covering its butt.

The reporters largely don't want to rock the boat.
The network managers are busy scanning the New York Times and Huffington Post and the Washington post to find out what has been defined as "news".  Then they send their reporters out to cover the same ground with a little distinctive spin.  New stories are not wanted and new stories that make the White House or Democrats or sponsors look bad are slow-walked and stopped.  (The one bright light:  Unwanted stories may make it into the web edition despite being studiously ignored in newscasts.)

It's disgusting.  I don't think it's going to be fixed.  The government under Obama and Holder and company have gotten too good at disabling inquiry.  The owners of the networks are too lost in sniffing each other's bums to find out what's for dinner.  The internet can be suppressed, as China has almost proven, but it is a wild wild west by comparison to network TV news.  Look to the internet for the missing viewpoints and fight to protect the freedoms it enjoys.

Sharyl Atkisson is pretty good at what she does.  When being pumped and mined, she pushes back with bold well-documented questions that I wouldn't have had the balls to pose.  ("Don't ask me what was said. You had your people at the meeting!" (No, we didn't). "Yes you did." (Names names))

Ancient mosaics look like they were laid yesterday. Colour portraits from 200 BC.

From the Greek city of Zeugma in modern Turkey comes this memorable photograph. 

(h/t extragoodshit.phlap.net)

Note also how deep into the ground this tile floor was buried. 2200 years ago is almost modern history. In many regions the earth's surface today is almost unrecognizable compared to 20,000 years ago when modern man was learning to talk and spearing mastodons.

Could DNA have seeded earth? DNA survived blastoff and re-entry on the skin of a rocket.

From Science Daily News: 

Scientists Dr. Cora Thiel and Professor Ullrich dabbed DNA on the outside of the rocket. The DNA survived and still worked.  We could have been seeded here.   Our rockets could accidentally seed another world.

"The genetic material DNA can survive a flight through space and re-entry into Earth's atmosphere -- and still pass on genetic information. A team of scientists from UZH obtained these astonishing results during an experiment on the TEXUS-49 research rocket mission.  Applied to the outer shell of the payload section of a rocket using pipettes, small, double-stranded DNA molecules flew into space from Earth and back again. After the launch, space flight, re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and landing, the so-called plasmid DNA molecules were still found on all the application points on the rocket from the TEXUS-49 mission. And this was not the only surprise: For the most part, the DNA salvaged was even still able to transfer genetic information to bacterial and connective tissue cells."

Source

America saved from socialism in 1623.

Switching to private property rights saved the Pilgrims from starvation. Planting corn the Indian way is a story, not an analysis.  Feel-good rules about enforced communal transfers could have been written this week in Washington.  They failed because they wasted people's talents and locked in perverse incentives against doing one's best for self and family.  Then they prospered by (apologetically) exploiting man's cupidity and preference for his own kin.  Read an extract from Ilya Somin's article then, intrigued, finish it in the original.

"People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. Governor William Bradford, in his 1647 history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that this system was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. The problem was that “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced.

Giving people economic incentives changed their behavior. Once the new system of property rights was in place, the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability."

For Thanksgiving, watch Friedman on the virtues of greed:

Microaggression and the Mosquito test

The "microaggression farce"has been outed as a campus fad that will create a new generation of permanent victims.  To push back against getting the vapours over microaggression, ask yourself this question:   Does this bother me less than the sound of one mosquito near my pillow?  If you would take more action to dispatch the mosquito than to right the micro-wrong, forget about it and find some way to be useful to other people.

To me, this is an example of Parkinson's law:  Work expands to fill the time available to do it. The aggrieved students are in an expensive little hot house catering to their tantrums and should get a life.

The idea that we shouldn't be peeved, tested or mocked is an odd one that implies man or God is lord over nature and this sorry world should be remade so we can all make nice to one another.  In dramatic terms, life is viewed as a comedy which must always have a happy ending, never a tragedy.   The Christian doctrine that we are born into sin is more helpful and keeps us humble in present circumstances.

Caveman politics

Lefties, Greens, liberals,  Green Peacers, PC, PETA, Occupy types --- a long list of labels is fit for the trash pile.  Stacy McCain has summarized the belief package and calls it Caveman Politics

Women, good; men, bad.

Youth, good; adults, bad.

Atheists, good; Christians, bad.

Hedonism, good; responsibility, bad.

Abortion, good; motherhood, bad.

Sodomy, good; normal sex, bad.

Wilderness, good; carbon energy, bad.

Labor unions, good; entrepreneurs, bad.

Government, good; corporations, bad.

Foreigners, good; Americans, bad.

Democrats, good; Republicans, bad.

Link from Don Surber to McCain's article.

You can add:   Gaia good, mankind bad

                         Non-judgemental, good.  Judgemental and discriminating,bad.

Gay Pride, Toronto July 2014

Stairway to Heaven

An earthly stairway in snow beneath a white one that fell from heaven last night.

Plant kingdom recruits humans for seed dispersal, gives us Doggy Treats.

Primates are "indispensable for regeneration of tropical forests" through seed dispersion.  "In tropical rain forests, the seeds of 80 to 90 percent of trees and lianas are dispersed by animals. In addition to primates, birds and bats are the major animal groups that are responsible for seed dispersal."

A ten foot high bank of blackberries
near Sidney BC.  

We Sapiens are primates too and have been recruited to spread plants throughout the new and old worlds. First the Polynesians and then Caucasians brought the flora of South Asia and the Caribbean to the pacific islands where it would flourish.  Without us, bananas and bougainvillea and coconuts would never have reached this near ideal environment to grow and reproduce. If you spend time on Tahiti, you'll see that almost every significant plant and beautiful flower is introduced as the old timers got dislodged.   Self important people decry the invasive species and predict the end of a stable world ecology.   Plants don't care.  They got what they needed, access to prime habitat.  Our reward, some pretty colours, smells and fruity bites. That's like a doggy treat from the plant kingdom.

Here on Vancouver Island, the broom and gorse and blackberry thickets almost define the landscape at the margins. That's hardly a hundred and fifty years of plant history, a successful colonization. Some groups actually spend time trying to extirpate these colonists, feeling moral ripping out immigrants to re-establish Eden. It's like a zoning bylaw to keep Hispanics and Asians out of a nice Caucasian neighbourhood.  Ulex and Rubus are not pleased.

Hummingbird flight: The magic is filmed and animated.

A thousand frames a second from four cameras captured the motion and a computer has created an animation of hummingbird flight showing the structure of the air around the wing..  Like insects, they create lift on the upstroke too, 30% of the lift thus for 30% of the effort. They rotate wing pitch to optimize the lift of hundreds of vortices that agglomerate into larger ones to let it hover.  I love watching something this intricate and  normally invisible --- the turbulent air flow that lofts such a beautiful creature.  Reported at Science Daily News.

Robinson Crusoe for Geeks: The Martian -- best ever survival story

I spent two days struggling to survive on Mars, captivated by Andy Weir's obsessively accurate survival story about a man left behind for dead on Mars, a story set just a few years in the future. My wife likes it too.

Andy has been running Mars scenarios for years, even writing software to calculate rescue orbits.   He gamed possible answers to worse case life-ending scenarios and lured me into his world.  The astronaut's mates aborted the mission without him when signals showed his suit had depressurized and life signals stopped, but the wind had dropped him with the puncture facing into the sand, his blood sealed the hole, the suit re-pressurized.  I wanted to be there using a spare spacesuit to cache water that I had just manufactured from rocket fuel so I could grow enough potato calories per day so I could survive until the first possible rescue date.   Then there's the moment when a NASA tech scanned the abandoned site to see what could be re-used to fund an extra mission and saw an emergency tent had deployed.  All plausible, heart-stoppingly plausible.  These aren't spoilers because about a hundred
similar obstacles are met and overcome
with Yankee grit and engineering know how.

He published this free, a chapter at a time.  Later he put out a Kindle version for 99 cents.  Now it's over $11 and a movie is in the works.

Obama Scuppering Hillary.

President Obama made the news today with this zinger:  The American people are going to want the new car smell in 2016.   "They want to drive something off the lot that doesn't have as much mileage as me".  (ABC)  There's only one possible candidate with more mileage than him and that's Hillary Clinton.

This doesn't come out of nowhere.  Klein's book, Blood Feud, spells out the bad relations between Clintons and Obamas.

Subsequent to the 2012 election, Bill Clinton followed up with President Obama on the deal they had made in which Bill would help Obama get reelected, while theoretically Obama would for one thing place Clinton’s handpicked political allies in the DNC — including replacing Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as its chair. Obama did not follow through. And in a post-election phone call, the following occurred according to Klein:

“‘Obama cut right to the chase,’ Clinton’s associate continued. ‘He said he wasn’t prepared to turn over his campaign’s digital operations, data mining, and social media juggernaut to the Clintons. Instead, he said he was going to fold that operation into Organization for Action, his second-term political pressure group. Hillary would have to build her own data and analytics system. Bill listened, said, ‘Okay,’ and let it go at that.
‘Then Obama said it was too early to make a decision about 2016 and who he was going to support of the Democratic Party nomination. He wasn’t prepared to back Hillary now. He was keeping his options open. He was reneging on his promise.
‘Bill’s blood began to boil. He was speechless with rage.

DNA Is The Engine But Not The Sole Driver Of Inheritance

Genes are real but cells are complex.  Shit happens.  While genes set coding in motion, complex proteins by the thousands are folding intricately in a competitive environment.  The geometry of the folds determine the resulting chemistry.  We haven't been able to predict which way the folds will go by using DNA as the sole input.  It looks like the bustle in the cells and not just DNA can trigger the working protein shape.  The cell phenotype is the working model, not the code.  When cells divide, the new ones have the same state, the same working behaviour as the precursor.

Finnish scientists, Arto Annila and Keith Baverstock, a physicist and a chemist, describe this, beginning in paragraph six of Ricki Lewis' review.    A sample:

"The evidence clearly points to routine cellular function (apart from cell division) and regulation in somatic cells being a matter for proteins without the intervention of genes. If, for example, the dark/light rhythm changes (travel over a few time zones) then intervention involving new transcription to adjust the circadian rhythm does occur, but otherwise circadian rhythm is taken care of by protein chemistry."

ADDED:  Threespine sticklebacks, small fish found around the globe, undergo rapid evolutionary change when they move from the ocean to freshwater lakes, losing their armor and gaining more teeth in as little as 10 years. A biologist shows that this rapid change results not from mutations in functional genes, but changes in regulatory DNA.


A view of how beautiful and complex cell life really is:

Student Debt Will Elect Republicans.

Grads with debt load need good jobs.  Democrats lost half their advantage with young voters in the mid-terms.   Market-friendly politicians will look good to someone $33,000 in the hole, unable to afford a down payment on a bungalow or to kit-out a baby room.   That means Republicans and Libertarians more than it means Democrats.   Young and old, we want a place of our own and many would like to be Mom and Dad.  When the credibility of big government is in decline, voters look around.


The feel good degrees are worth a lot less than ones we actually need. The chart shows technical degrees offer double the starting salary of lib arts diplomas.  The soft diplomas have better pay increases over the next five years but that looks like catchup as they learn skills they should have had in college.
Those first years are hard on a debt-slave college grad.  She and he want to leave school and get a good job.   Jobs come from the market looking after what people need and want from each other.

The bottom scale is what you can expect your first year on the job  and the side scale is what sort of raise you can expect over the next five years.

Big Gov Heading for the Crapper: Gruber and UKIP

In Britain, UKIP's byelection wins shine light on the failure of big government to serve voters.  In the US, Gruber does the same, showing big government and Obamacare are built on the premise voters are stupid.  (Why Grubergate is so devastating to Democrats).  Exegeses from both continents follow:

First Stanley of the Telegraph (h/t barrel strength):

Somehow these posh, wide boys have managed to connect with an extraordinary coalition of angry middle-class and alienated working-class voters. How?  The answer must surely lie with collapsing faith in Westminster. The Credit Crunch, the expenses scandal, NHS horror stories, child abuse nightmares, even the dark hints of paedophile gangs at the heart of power – it all adds up to a sense that the establishment is irredeemably broken.                 People don’t necessarily agree with Farage or even possibly like him. But they know what he is; they understand a man like that. And so long as Ukip is respected for being unpretentious, it also won’t be punished in the same way as the other parties are."

And from The Fiscal Times:  "Why Grubergate is so devasting to Democrats":

(Gruber) has become an avatar of not only Obamacare, but of liberal paternalism, a caricature of the snotty know-it-all technocrat who will make decisions for people without consulting them.

The growing impression that politicians don’t play straight with their constituents is completely toxic, particularly to Democrats, who actually want to use government to improve people’s lives. 

Politicians will always be corrupted to some degree by power and will always lie selectively, but perhaps the cure is in the Telegraph article about Nigel Farage which praises the unpretentious:

Nigel

"People don’t necessarily agree with Farage or even possibly like him. But they know what he is; they understand a man like that."

In Toronto there was the wild cannon, Rob Ford.  Many hated him but he people "understood a man like that".

Do I really think Big Government is heading to the Crapper?  I think networks that rule the land will become increasingly complex but the few with their hands on the tiller will have to let more of us into the inner circle.
The loot acquired by nation states is opening to market bidding and rule will be more democratic as a result.  I blame the internet for this, making obscure and secret information harder to protect and cheaper to distribute quickly.

US Illegals sneaking into Canada

This is a spoof, right?   Illegal lefty immigrants crossing the Manitoba border, fleeing the Republican onslaught.

"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies".

The lovely spoof dates from the re-election of George Bush but seems written for today.

Robot Yoga ?

This robot standing on one foot with hands gracefully extended appears to be doing Yoga, performing an asana midway between the Tree and Warrior poses.   This is one of the simpler forms and perhaps I shouldn't read too much into it.   Is there a Turing Test for Yogis and Yoginas?  If you can't tell the difference between a posing human and a posing robot, are robots entering into nirvana?

Source

Russian news from the Russian spigot. It all makes sense in a weird kind of way.

Katsenelson grew up hating America, but became an American.  He immersed himself in a week of Russian news to see the way Russians get it delivered.  Read all about it. You won't find Russians agreeing with your opinion any time soon unless the collapse in oil prices cuts back their living standard.  It's unsettling, a wall-to-wall mixture of emotion, lies and omissions with a small dose of truth.  Russians wouldn't consider relying on other news. Vitaliy's wife couldn't wait for him to finish the project and be cheerful again..

The link to Vitaliy Katsenelson's report at Institutional Investor:

"Ukraine was destabilized by the U.S., which spent $5 billion on this project.  As proof, TV news showed a video of Senator John McCain giving a speech to anti-government protesters in Kiev's Maidan Square.  It was followed by a video of Vice President Joe Biden visiting Ukraine during the tumult.  I wasn't sure what his role was, but it was implied that he had something to do with the unrest.  Speaking of Joe Biden, I learned that his son just joined the board of Ukraine's largest natural gas company, which will benefit significantly from a destabilized Ukraine".  

And so on and then on some more.

Predict my vote from my name.

Verdant Labs sorted hundreds of first names by voter registration lists to produce this chart.   Look way, way left to find "Abigail", "Naomi" and "Willie" and scroll far, far to the right to see "Dwayne", "Brent" and "Billy".   Many names are not predictive but it's a cluster of girls names that are predictive to the left and a cluster of mostly boys names clustered to the right.  How did our parents know?

ht Ace of Spades.

Click the link

Democracy doesn't depend on informed voters, it depends on voters.  If our parents pointed us towards being little Libs, Dippers, Tories and Greens, so be it.   Power in quantity always corrupts and any mechanism that creates regular turnover in the leadership is a good  mechanism.

Chopping heads off may save us from ourselves.

Revulsion to the ISIS Muslim butchery may cure us of believing that making nice will end war. Fretting about committing microagressions or saying "negro" or wearing shirts with bare naked ladies is looking a little fluffy.  It's one thing to crowd onto the Victim Train to gain money and attention in America and something quite else to be a victim, fleeing for your life from barbarians with knives, barbarians who cheer in the streets when you die.

As Samuel Johnson said, "When a man knows he is to be hanged.. it concentrates his mind wonderfully."   When we get bloody proof that all religions are not the same and only one, Islam, is producing a strain of beheaders who revel in their butchery, it concentrates the mind. It will change who gets elected.   Politicians will see advantage pandering to shock-concentrated citizens instead of to Occupy types.


Before leaving the topic, remember with sorrow that Americans live under a president who says after Muslim assassins murder praying Jews in Jerusalem:

"Islamic State’s “actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own”"  

Lucky break in the weather - Cold snap just when we need it.

It's getting easy to laugh at climate alarmists despite their money-raising skills.  This is because the weather has taken some cold spells in places near you.  If weather was a tad nicer or we were having a couple hot years instead of 18 years without warming, the big-NGO people would be insufferable. The politicians would shamelessly be stripping us of choice and wealth to fund climate programs with them in charge.  It's happening anyway but slowingly.   Hallelujah cold snap!

US including Hawaii, overnight forecast in Fahrenheit for Nov. 17th.

Remember when "32" meant frost?

Some of the other voices:
“Over the years, the IPCC has changed from a scientific institution that tries to be policy relevant to a political institution that pretends to be scientific. I regret that. There are already more than enough climate activists, while there are too few solid and neutral bodies that make down-to-earth and well-founded statements about climate change and climate policy.” Economist Richard Tol, in a prepared statement for the Dutch parliament.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” John Theon wrote to the Minority Office at theEnvironment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon is former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA

“We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” — UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] since 2004.

And a Canadian viewpoint: “I am a skeptic on climate change. I know the climate is changing, and it always has been. I've studied this intensively over many years. I started what I call the Carbon Project here in British Columbia back in 1989 in order to bring everybody together to discuss this subject and figure out the facts behind it. Since then, I have watched as hysteria has grown, as if the whole world is going to come to an end and civilization is going to die because of humans causing this climate change. I don't buy that, and I certainly know we don't have any proof of it. I'm not denying that we might be playing some role, but the natural factors that have always caused climate change have not suddenly disappeared. I'm very skeptical of the alarmist nature of climate campaigning.” – Patrick Moore, co-founder of
Greenpeace.

And for perspective, the long view.  The rise to 400 ppm CO2 observed recently is a tiny blip at the bottom right corner of the graph.  Give me a gigantic break.  Don't tell me the world will drown with doubled C02. Notice the average world temperature seems to have natural upper and lower limits (25C and 10C), some kind of internal governor, and it DOES NOT vary in step with CO2.