when the stupid go to stunting it can't end well...,

newyorker |  The Indiana law is the product of a G.O.P. search for a respectable way to oppose same-sex marriage and to rally the base around it. There are two problems with this plan, however. First, not everyone in the party, even in its most conservative precincts, wants to make gay marriage an issue, even a stealth one—or opposes gay marriage to begin with. As the unhappy reaction in Indiana shows, plenty of Republicans find the anti-marriage position embarrassing, as do some business interests that are normally aligned with the party. Second, the law is not an empty rhetorical device but one that has been made strangely powerful, in ways that haven’t yet been fully tested, by the Supreme Court decision last year in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. That ruling allowed the Christian owners of a chain of craft stores to use the federal version of the RFRA to ignore parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, argued strongly that the majority was turning that RFRA into a protean tool for all sorts of evasions. As Jeffrey Toobin has noted, she was proved right even before the Indiana controversy.

Both of those factors have combined to produce real confusion about the Indiana law. Some people are not being straightforward about its implications, whether because they are calculating, mortified, or—in the case of opponents, some of whom have also been unclear about what the law means—alarmed, but it also inhabits novel legal territory, so it is genuinely hard to know what those implications would be.  Governor Pence has done much to muddle things even more. On Sunday, on “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos asked Pence “a yes-or-no question” about whether “a florist in Indiana can now refuse to serve a gay couple without fear of punishment.” He asked half a dozen times, but never got an answer:

Pence: This is not about discrimination, this is about …

Stephanopoulos: But …

Pence: … empowering people …

Stephanopoulos: But let me try to pin you …

Pence: … government overreach here.

Stephanopoulos: … down here though. … It’s just a question, sir. Question, sir. Yes or no?

Pence: Well—well, this—there’s been shameless rhetoric about my state and about this law and about its intention all over the Internet. People are trying to make it about one particular issue. And now you’re doing that as well.

hustling up a little darren wilson $$$...,

WaPo |  The pizza shop in Walkerton, Ind. — a small town of about 2,200 people about 20 miles south of South Bend — doesn’t look like the epicenter of a national controversy. The black-and-white linoleum and red booths are unassuming — the decor of any take-out joint anywhere in America. A Triple XXX Root Beer will set you back $2. It even has a piano — and a prayer suggestion box.

“Every day before we open the store, we gather and pray together,” reads a sign posted in the store, which also boasts numerous crosses, including one that says “Glorify the Lord.” “If there is something you would like us to pray for, just write it down and drop it in the box.”

But Memories Pizza — “a Walkerton mainstay,” according to local media, for more than a decade — is feeling the heat of a great debate about religious freedom and gay rights. Memories has been billed by a local ABC affiliate as the “first business to publicly deny same-sex service” after Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law. Many feel the law, which advocates say is intended to protect religious freedom, will result in discrimination against homosexuals.

The affiliate was looking for reactions to RFRA — and it made some memories at Memories.

David Brooks: politely respect being refused service or risk bloody war of all against all...,

NYTimes |  The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was supported by Senator Ted Kennedy and a wide posse of progressives, sidestepped the abstract and polarizing theological argument. It focused on the concrete facts of specific cases. The act basically holds that government sometimes has to infringe on religious freedom in order to pursue equality and other goods, but, when it does, it should have a compelling reason and should infringe in the least intrusive way possible.

This moderate, grounded, incremental strategy has produced amazing results. Fewer people have to face the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization and prejudice.

Yet I wonder if this phenomenal achievement is going off the rails. Indiana has passed a state law like the 1993 federal act, and sparked an incredible firestorm.

If the opponents of that law were arguing that the Indiana statute tightens the federal standards a notch too far, that would be compelling. But that’s not the argument the opponents are making.

Instead, the argument seems to be that the federal act’s concrete case-by-case approach is wrong. The opponents seem to be saying there is no valid tension between religious pluralism and equality. Claims of religious liberty are covers for anti-gay bigotry.

This deviation seems unwise both as a matter of pragmatics and as a matter of principle. In the first place, if there is no attempt to balance religious liberty and civil rights, the cause of gay rights will be associated with coercion, not liberation. Some people have lost their jobs for expressing opposition to gay marriage. There are too many stories like the Oregon bakery that may have to pay a $150,000 fine because it preferred not to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony. A movement that stands for tolerance does not want to be on the side of a government that compels a photographer who is an evangelical Christian to shoot a same-sex wedding that he would rather avoid.

Furthermore, the evangelical movement is evolving. Many young evangelicals understand that their faith should not be defined by this issue. If orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all.

As a matter of principle, it is simply the case that religious liberty is a value deserving our deepest respect, even in cases where it leads to disagreements as fundamental as the definition of marriage.

Morality is a politeness of the soul. Deep politeness means we make accommodations.

RFRA: Indiana's First Church of Cannabis

rawstory |   In a classic case of “unintended consequences,” the recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in Indiana may have opened the door for the establishment of the First Church of Cannabis in the Hoosier State.

While Governor Mike Pence (R) was holding a signing ceremony for the bill allowing businesses and individuals to deny services to gays on religious grounds or values, paperwork for the First Church of Cannabis Inc. was being filed with the Secretary of State’s office, reports RTV6.

Church founder Bill Levin announced on his Facebook page that the church’s registration has been approved, writing, “Status: Approved by Secretary of State of Indiana – “Congratulations your registration has been approved!” Now we begin to accomplish our goals of Love, Understanding, and Good Health.”

Levin is currently seeking $4.20 donations towards his non-profit church.

According to Indiana attorney and political commentator Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Indiana legislators, in their haste to protect the religious values and practices of their constituents, may have unwittingly put the state in an awkward position with those who profess to smoke pot as a religious sacrament.

Shabazz pointed out that it is still illegal to smoke pot in Indiana, but wrote, “I would argue that under RFRA, as long as you can show that reefer is part of your religious practices, you got a pretty good shot of getting off scot-free.”

man-up dumbasses - MUCH more respect for old bessinger than for these fruity-assed conservatard creepers...,

theatlantic |  There’s a factual dispute about the new Indiana law. It is called a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993.* Thus a number of its defenders have claimed it is really the same law. Here, for example, is the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack: “Is there any difference between Indiana's law and the federal law? Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack was thinking; but even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarz wrote, linking to this map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes.  If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs. 

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage. 

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”

Remarkably enough, soon after, language found its way into the Indiana statute to make sure that no Indiana court could ever make a similar decision. 

how can you tell if a ruhtarded hoosier is lying?

NYTimes |  The state laws were not used to protect minorities, these critics say, but to allow some religious groups to undermine the rights of women, gays and lesbians or other groups.

“The coalition broke apart over the civil rights issues,” said Eunice Rho, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. The organization, which initially supported the measures, now opposes them unless they include language ensuring that they will not be used to permit discrimination or harm.

In the 1990s, for example, in the kind of case that raised red flags for civil rights advocates, landlords cited religious beliefs, sometimes with success in court, after refusing to rent to unmarried heterosexual couples.

The clash of values erupted again after Indiana adopted its own version of a “religious freedom” act last week. Arkansas is expected to approve a similar law this week.

The furor has put Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, who is considered a possible Republican presidential candidate, under national scrutiny. On Monday, Republican legislators in Indiana said they were searching with the governor for a possible amendment to the law to “clarify” that it does not permit discrimination against gays and lesbians.

“It is not the intent of the law to discriminate against anyone, and it will not be allowed to discriminate against anyone,” David. C. Long, president pro tem of the State Senate, said on Monday at a news conference with Brian C. Bosma, speaker of the State House of Representatives.

a scientific ranking of subreddits liable to trigger intersectional allies and others...,

   
   

idibon |  In any community there’s bound to be friction, but some… take it further than others. Reddit is a platform for thousands of online communities (known as “subreddits”), where community members can submit content, and upvote, downvote, or comment on content that others have submitted. Topics of discussion on Reddit run the gamut of human interest, but one of Reddit’s favorite topics to talk about is, unsurprisingly, Reddit itself.

A recent post on AskReddit posing the question – “What popular subreddit has a really toxic community?” – surged to the top of the front page with 4,000 upvotes and over 10,000 comments as Redditors voiced their opinions on which Reddit communities they found to be the most abhorrent (the “/r/” prefix denotes a subreddit):

• /r/parenting: “there are a TON of sanctimommies in there”
• /r/MakeUpAddiction: “[has] cult-like tendencies” encouraging a “race to be the palest and most translucent snowflake”
• /r/leagueoflegends: “[we] made professional players quit the game, that’s how lovely we are”

As I sifted through the thread, my data geek sensibilities tingled as I wondered “Why must we rely upon opinion for such a question? Shouldn’t there be an objective way to measure toxicity?”

With this in mind, I set out to scientifically measure toxicity and supportiveness in Reddit comments and communities. I then compared Reddit’s own evaluation of its subreddits to see where they were right, where they were wrong, and what they may have missed. While this post is specific to Reddit, our methodology here could be applied to offer an objective score of community health for any data set featuring user comments.

Defining Toxicity and Supportiveness

So what is Toxicity? Before we could do any analysis around which subreddits were the most Toxic, we needed to define what we would be measuring. At a high level, Toxic comments are ones that would make someone who disagrees with the viewpoint of the commenter feel uncomfortable and less likely to want to participate in that Reddit community. To be more specific, we defined a comment as Toxic if it met either of the following criteria:

1. Ad hominem attack: a comment that directly attacks another Redditor (e.g. “your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”) or otherwise shows contempt/disagrees in a completely non-constructive manner (e.g. “GASP are they trying CENSOR your FREE SPEECH??? I weep for you /s”)
2. Overt bigotry:  the use of bigoted (racist/sexist/homophobic etc.) language, whether targeting any particular individual or more generally, which would make members of the referenced group feel highly uncomfortable

However, the problem with only measuring Toxic comments is it biases against subreddits that simply tend to be more polarizing and evoke more emotional responses generally. In order to account for this, we also measured Supportiveness in comments – defined as language that is directly addressing another Redditor in a supportive (e.g. “We’re rooting for you!”) or appreciative (e.g. “Thanks for the awesome post!”) manner.

By measuring both Toxicity and Supportiveness we are able to get a holistic view of community health that can be used to more fairly compare and contrast subreddit communities.

An Anonymous, Online, Geo-Tagged System to Report Microaggressions at College!

reason |  So remember, kids, you don't go to college to learn new things and feed your head. You go to college to be subjected to an anonymous system of collecting information about the bad thoughts you have and the misstatements you make, some of which you might not even have intended to be hurtful.

But rest easy, because if you are in fact accused of microaggressing, your accuser "would likely have to reveal their identity" if any charges are pressed (emphasis added). Because we know how well colleges do at handling legal-style proceedings.

The system would allow individuals reporting microaggressions to remain anonymous. However, junior Kyle James, vice president of communications and co-sponsor of the bill, said those reporting a microaggression would likely have to reveal their identity if they wanted to pursue any legal action.
James said in addition to a space to report the particular incident, the online system would track the demographics of those reporting microaggressions as well as those accused of committing them.

More here and here.

I would like to believe that awfulness of imposing such a system is self-evident, especially at a university, which is supposed to be about the free and open exchange of ideas and the production of knowledge (at least in the few spare moments between football games and re-education seminars). In an astonishingly short half-century, we have cycled from a demand for "free speech" on college campuses to the condemnation of speech via anonymous, online, geo-tagged systems that may or may not accord the accused any ability to speak up in their own defense.

Unless your goal is to chill or control speech and thought, this sort of program is a complete anathema to everything that higher education is supposed to promote and cherish. But there you are, another year older and deeper in debt.  Fist tap Big Don.

how much economic pain can the intersectional allies inflict and how much can the hoosier bibtards take?

dailysignal |  As Ryan T. Anderson and I explained Thursday, the Indiana law is good policy. Like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Indiana’s new law prohibits substantial government burdens on religious exercise unless the government can show a compelling interest in burdening religious liberty and does so through the least restrictive means.

These protections for religious freedom provide a commonsense way to balance the fundamental right to religious liberty with compelling government interests.

backchannel private security and intelligence-gathering sounds a lot like crime to me

gawker |  Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal's account.

The emails, which were posted on the internet in 2013, also show that Blumenthal and another close Clinton associate discussed contracting with a retired Army special operations commander to put operatives on the ground near the Libya-Tunisia border while Libya's civil war raged in 2011.

Blumenthal's emails to Clinton, which were directed to her private email account, include at least a dozen detailed reports on events on the deteriorating political and security climate in Libya as well as events in other nations. They came to light after a hacker broke into Blumenthal's account and have taken on new significance in light of the disclosure that she conducted State Department and personal business exclusively over an email server that she controlled and kept secret from State Department officials and which only recently was discovered by congressional investigators.

The contents of that account are now being sought by a congressional inquiry into the Benghazi attacks. Clinton has handed over more than 30,000 pages of her emails to the State Department, after unilaterally deciding which ones involved government business; the State Department has so far handed almost 900 pages of those over to the committee. A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica (which are collaborating on this story) that she has turned over all the emails Blumenthal sent to Hillary.

The dispatches from Blumenthal to Clinton's private email address were posted online after Blumenthal's account was hacked in 2013 by Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went by the name Guccifer. Lazar also broke into accounts belonging to George W. Bush's sister, Colin Powell, and others. He's now serving a seven-year sentence in his home country and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year.

The contents of the memos, which have recently become the subject of speculation in the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back channel for information on Libya's crisis and other foreign policy matters.

indicative of the way lawyers in power act wrt the rule of law?

firstlook |  One of the earliest and most intense grievances of civil libertarians during the Bush presidency was its radical abuse of the “state secrets privilege.” That doctrine began as a narrowly crafted evidentiary rule whereby parties to litigation would be barred from using specific documents that could reveal sensitive national security secrets. But it morphed into the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb whereby the U.S. government could literally demand not that specific documents be excluded but that U.S. courts dismiss entire lawsuits before they began — even when those lawsuits alleged criminal behavior by top U.S. officials — on the ground that the subject matter of the lawsuit was too sensitive to be safely adjudicated.

The Bush Justice Department used this weapon to prevent its torture, detention, rendition and surveillance victims — even those everyone acknowledged were completely innocent — from having a day in court. They would simply say that the treatment of the plaintiffs was classified, and that disclosure would risk harm to national security, and subservient U.S. federal judges (an almost redundant term) would dutifully dismiss the lawsuits before they even began. It literally removed high U.S. government officials from the rule of law: if you commit crimes or brutally abuse people, you will be immunized from legal accountability if you did it in a classified setting.

When Obama was in the Senate and then running for President in 2007, he was highly critical of the Bush use of the “state secrets privilege” to get rid of troublesome lawsuits. His official campaign website cited Bush’s abuse of the privilege as a hallmark of excessive secrecy.

But like so many of his purported views, this concern about the use of the “state secrets privilege” was abandoned almost immediately upon his inauguration. His DOJ invoked the privilege to demand victims of Bush programs of torture, rendition, detention, and surveillance be denied any opportunity to be heard in court even when the U.S. government itself acknowledged they were innocent. Obama lawyers even invoked secrecy to argue that a lawsuit challenging the legality of their own targeted assassination program against a U.S. citizen could not be heard in court. As an early headline in the Obama-supporting TPM site recognized: “Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets. And it worked in virtually every case.

indicative of the way a lot of people in power behave?

nypost |  In 2012, Forbes magazine ranked Brunei the fifth-richest nation in the world. Yet there is little fun to be had: Alcohol is banned and there is virtually no nightlife or culture.

“I’m trying to think of a place that’s duller,” Australian writer Charles James told Fortune in 1999. “Maybe a British village in midwinter.”

In one way, the brothers adhere to Islamic law: As prescribed, each has several wives and families. But everything else they do is in defiance of the Koran and the law they’ve just imposed.

“It’s a radical double standard,” says Jillian Lauren, who wrote about her life as a member of Jefri’s harem in her memoir, “Some Girls.” “They have more money than anyone else. I know that they both have been married and divorced multiple times. It’s really hypocritical.”

“With their money, they could have cured diseases,” an adviser to Jefri told Fortune. “But they have little interest in the rest of humanity.”

Another described Jefri and his brother as incredibly dim. “They don’t have a lot of thoughts,” he said. “If you were a fly on the wall and heard their conversations, they’d take you to Bellevue.”

A third brother, Mohamed, was reported to loathe his brothers’ wantonness and profligacy. But when the Sultan tasked him with rebuilding the economy that he and Jefri had so badly damaged, he took more than $2 billion for himself and was promptly fired.

cut and run

radiolab |  At the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City, Kipchoge Keino overcame a gall bladder infection to win gold in the 1500 meter race. Since then, one particular group of Kenyans - the Kalenjin - has produced an astonishing number of great long-distance runners. Gregory Warner - NPR's East Africa correspondent - takes Jad and Robert down a rabbit hole of theories about what exactly is going on in Kalenjin country.  

David Epstein and John Manners help Greg untangle a web of potential factors - from something in the cornmeal to simple economics. And, after talking to a young Kalenjin runner named Elly Kipgogei, Greg discovers a somewhat disturbing explanation for Kalenjin running prowess that actually makes him want to get on the treadmill and push himself just a little harder.

peak casinos

newyorker |  In the summer of 2010, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie travelled by helicopter to Atlantic City for what the local media described as a historic press conference. The news out of the city had been growing steadily worse, and by the time of Christie’s appearance it was clear that, nearly four decades after it had legalized gambling in an attempt to avoid economic ruin, Atlantic City was back where it had started. Standing in front of Boardwalk Hall, next to the mayor and members of the city council, Christie declared, “Atlantic City is dying.” The city, once known as the World’s Playground, had become unclean and unsafe. The number of visitors had fallen, and casino revenues were plummeting. Christie then announced a plan to return Atlantic City to its rightful place as the East Coast’s premier entertainment destination. There would be a sparkling new tourist district, with more conventions, restaurants, retail outlets, and non-gambling attractions. Also in development were bold new marketing plans and nonstop air routes to deliver fresh gamblers. Atlantic City, the Governor promised, would become “Las Vegas East.”

Four years later, Christie’s plan has failed. Four of Atlantic City’s twelve casinos have gone out of business this year, including Revel, an estimated $2.3-billion jewel that opened just two years ago; another, the Trump Taj Mahal, has announced that it could close within weeks. An estimated eight thousand jobs have already been lost, and thousands more seem likely to follow. Since Christie’s 2010 press conference, the assessed value of all the property in the city has declined by nearly half.

While it would be easy to conclude that Atlantic City’s demise is the predictable result of decades of well-documented greed, corruption, and incompetent leadership, the city is in fact one of the first casualties of a nationwide casino arms race. Eager for new jobs and new revenues that don’t require raising taxes, states from coast to coast have turned to gambling: in 1978, only Nevada and New Jersey had commercial casinos; today, twenty-four states do. Atlantic City once had the densely populated Northeast all to itself, but now nearly every state in the region is home to casinos. And with both New York and Massachusetts poised to open massive new gambling resorts, the competition for the fixed number of gamblers there will only get tougher. “It’s a war,” Father Richard McGowan, a professor of management at Boston College who studies the gambling industry, said. “It’s remarkable to me how the states are fighting each other for gambling revenue.”

these humans....,

American gladiator...

sfist | At a news conference today, Public Defender Jeff Adachi alleged that San Francisco sheriff's deputies have been forcing county jail inmates to fight one another while the duties gamble on the outcomes of the gladiatorial-style matches.

The Chronicle reports that revelations of the illegal behavior were going to wait until the informing inmates were out of jail, but according to Adachi, another fight was planned for next week and they chose to act now.

According to the Examiner, four deputies at one SoMa jail have been threatening violence to inmates if they refuse to fight each other. Three inmates represented by the public defender’s office spoke up, saying that they were scared for their lives and threatened with handcuffs, pepper spray, and beatings for non-participation.

One deputy reportedly selected an overweight inmate to be his "prize fighter," forcing him to work out in front of his fellows who would be punished if he didn't complete tasks.

According to Adachi, the ringleader was Deputy Scott Neu, accused in 2006 of forcing inmates to engage in sexual acts with him in a case settled out of court. The Public Defender’s Office hired a private investigator to corroborate the claims.

I, for one, welcome our cytobot overlords...

Nature Scientific Reports | The nanoarchitecture and micromachinery of a cell can be leveraged to fabricate sophisticated cell-driven devices. This requires a coherent strategy to derive cell's mechanistic abilities, microconstruct, and chemical-texture towards such microtechnologies. For example, a microorganism's hydrophobic membrane encapsulating hygroscopic constituents allows it to sustainably withhold a high aquatic pressure. Further, it provides a rich surface chemistry available for nano-interfacing and a strong mechanical response to humidity. Here we demonstrate a route to incorporate a complex cellular structure into microelectromechanics by interfacing compatible graphene quantum dots (GQDs) with a highly responsive single spore microstructure. A sensitive and reproducible electron-tunneling width modulation of 1.63 nm within a network of GQDs chemically-secured on a spore was achieved via sporal hydraulics with a driving force of 299.75 Torrs (21.7% water at GQD junctions). The electron-transport activation energy and the Coulomb blockade threshold for the GQD network were 35 meV and 31 meV, respectively; while the inter-GQD capacitance increased by 1.12 folds at maximum hydraulic force. This is the first example of nano/bio interfacing with spores and will lead to the evolution of next-generation bio-derived microarchitectures, probes for cellular/biochemical processes, biomicrorobotic-mechanisms, and membranes for micromechanical actuation.

dominance/prestige: our nature our future...,

cluborlov |  Once upon a time—and a fairly long time it was—most of the thickly settled parts of the world had something called feudalism. It was a way of organizing society hierarchically. Typically, at the very top there was a sovereign (king, prince, emperor, pharaoh, along with some high priests). Below the sovereign were several ranks of noblemen, with hereditary titles. Below the noblemen were commoners, who likewise inherited their stations in life, be it by being bound to a piece of land upon which they toiled, or by being granted the right to engage in a certain type of production or trade, in case of craftsmen and merchants. Everybody was locked into position through permanent relationships of allegiance, tribute and customary duties: tribute and customary duties flowed up through the ranks, while favors, privileges and protection flowed down.

It was a remarkably resilient, self-perpetuating system, based largely on the use of land and other renewable resources, all ultimately powered by sunlight. Wealth was primarily derived from land and the various uses of land. Here is a simplified org chart showing the pecking order of a medieval society.

Feudalism was essentially a steady-state system. Population pressures were relieved primarily through emigration, war, pestilence and, failing all of the above, periodic famine. Wars of conquest sometimes opened up temporary new venues for economic growth, but since land and sunlight are finite, this amounted to a zero-sum game.

But all of that changed when feudalism was replaced with capitalism. What made the change possible was the exploitation of nonrenewable resources, the most important of which was energy from burning fossilized hydrocarbons: first peat and coal, then oil and natural gas. Suddenly, productive capacity was decoupled from the availability of land and sunlight, and could be ramped up almost, but not quite, ad infinitum, simply by burning more hydrocarbons. Energy use, industry and population all started going up exponentially. A new system of economic relations was brought into being, based on money that could be generated at will, in the form of debt, which could be repaid with interest using the products of ever-increasing future production. Compared with the previous, steady-state system, the change amounted to a new assumption: that the future will always be bigger and richer—rich enough to afford to pay back both principal and interest.
 

let that co-pilot have been named ahmed and this would already be called terrorism

nbcnews |  The co-pilot of the crashed Germanwings plane appears to have "intentionally" brought the plane down while his captain was locked out of the cockpit and banging to be let back in, prosecutors said Thursday. 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the revelations added a "new, simply incomprehensible dimension" to the tragedy, adding that "something like this goes beyond anything we can imagine."

First Officer Andreas Lubitz, 27, was alone at the controls of the Airbus A320 as it began its rapid descent, Marseille Prosecutor Brice Robin told a news conference. 

Passengers' cries were heard on the plane's cockpit voice recorder in the moments just before the plane slammed into the French Alps, Brice said. 

"Banging" sounds also were audible, he said, suggesting the captain was trying to force his way back into the cockpit. However, the reinforced cockpit door was locked from the inside and could not be overridden, even with a coded entry panel. 

"If he had been able to open this door, the captain would have done it," Brice said. 

Lubitz, a German national from the town of Montabaur, "didn't say a word" during the descent, according to Brice, who said no distress signal or radio call was made. 

"There was no reason to put the plane into a descent, nor to not respond to… air traffic controllers," he said. "Was it suicide? I'm not using the word, I don't know. Given the information I have at this time … I can tell you that he deliberately made possible the loss of altitude of the aircraft."

it's harder to change a man's diet than to change his religion...,

commondreams |  The bold headline of a recent Los Angeles Times editorial by the hydrologist Jay Famiglietti starkly warned: “California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?” The write-up quickly made the social media rounds, prompting both panic and the usual blame game: It’s because of the meat eaters or the vegan almond-milk drinkers or the bottled-water guzzlers or the Southern California lawn soakers.

California’s water loss has been terrifying. But people everywhere should be scared, not just Californians, because this story goes far beyond state lines. It is a story of global climate change and industrial agriculture. It is also a saga that began many decades ago—with the early water wars of the 1930s immortalized in the 1974 Roman Polanski film “Chinatown.”

When my family first moved to the Los Angeles area, we spent years adjusting our lifestyle to be more in line with our values. Ten years ago, we stopped watering our lawn and eventually replaced the lawn with plants that were drought-tolerant or native to California. Three years ago, we installed solar panels on our roofs. Last year, we diverted our laundry runoff to our vegetable garden and fruit trees through a graywater system. We have replaced all our toilets with dual-flush systems to take advantage of local rebates, and we practice responsible flushing. We almost never wash our cars, and we shower less often in the winter. We are investigating rainwater barrels in our latest effort to be responsible stewards of our water. Yet none of our efforts to be an example to others have done anything other than make us feel morally self-righteous enough to wag our fingers at water wasters.

California’s water resources are being mismanaged, according to Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank. “The management of water from California’s historic aquifer and snow and rivers and lakes doesn’t match the use right now,” Redman told me in an interview on my show, “Uprising.” It’s a big understatement.

Even though Gov. Jerry Brown just imposed a series of mandatory water-conservation measures in response to the emergency, most of those measures are aimed at individual users and restaurants. While it is crucial for residents to stop wasting water on the utterly useless tasks of car washing and lawn watering, “residential use in California is about 4 percent,” Redman told me. “Eighty percent is for agriculture.”

The truth is that California’s Central Valley, which is where the vast majority of the state’s farming businesses are located, is a desert. That desert is irrigated with enough precious water to artificially sustain the growing of one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, a $40 billion industry.