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September 29, 2015

How to cover political races

Yesterday during my daily obsessive searching the news for Bernie Sanders articles, i noticed a bunch of headlines along the lines of Bernie Sanders' Supreme Court litmus test: Overturn Citizens United. Odd, i thought. That's been his position since he announced. Why is it getting headlines now? The answer seems to be that he's doing better in the polls and he mentioned it in his speech to Chicago university yesterday (as he always does). But it's still odd to see it reported as "news". Not that i mind articles getting Sanders' positions out, at all.

Today, David Weigel, the political reporter at the Washington Post assigned to Bernie's campaign (who i have no complaints about), notices the same thing, but explains what's going on. When you have consistent policies and a consistent stump speech, there really isn't any new "news" to report about a candidate, except the horserace "he's up, he's down in the polls" stuff. This is really a problem for any candidate. Every supporter complains that their candidate gets bad coverage, whether it's no coverage, or just coverage exclusively about gaffs, scandals, and horse race stuff. What we really want is to see our candidates' issues getting publicized. And i think that's a public service of real value that the media should provide. But unless someone flip-flops, it's not really "news" once the candidate has already come out with a platform (although, as Weigel points out, Sanders has been rolling out new proposals since his campaign got started, to little media interest).

For websites, that's not really a problem. They should have sections devoted to the issues of each candidate. But for the daily news format (televison and newspapers), it's a little odd to just have an article out about something the candidate has been saying for months. On the other hand, people that weren't paying any attention at all to Bernie Sanders in June may be interested now in reading in their morning paper what his positions are. And again in February before the primary season actually starts and people really start paying attention. So even though it had me scratching my head, maybe this approach is the right one.


By fnord12 | September 29, 2015, 1:36 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link



The World Will Be Watching and So Will NSA!

A super long article that boils down to the NSA got the Greek government to secretly agree to the installation of bugging malware on their phone systems ostensibly to protect against "terrorism" during the 2004 Olympics in Athens. When the Olympics were over, the NSA didn't remove their equipment and also turned it back on so that they could listen in on Greek government officials. To hush it up, they may have also been responsible for the death of a Vodafone employee.


A decade later, Costas' death is caught up in an investigation into what now appears to have been a U.S. covert operation in Greece. Last February, Greek authorities took the extraordinary step of issuing an international arrest warrant for a CIA official the Greeks believe was a key figure in the operation while based in Athens. Unnoticed by the U.S. press, the warrant was a nearly unprecedented action by an allied country. The intelligence official, identified as William George Basil, was accused of espionage and eavesdropping. But by then he had already left the country, and the U.S. government, as it has done for the past 10 years, continues to stonewall Greek authorities on the agency's involvement.
...
According to a former senior U.S. intelligence official involved with the operation, there was close cooperation between NSA and the Greek government. "The Greeks identified terrorist nets, so NSA put these devices in there and they told the Greeks, OK, when it's done we'll turn it off," said the source. "They put them in the Athens communications system, with the knowledge and approval of the Greek government. This was to help with security during the Olympics."

The Olympic Games ran smoothly -- there were no serious terrorist threats and Greece had its best medal tally in more than a century. On August 29, 16 days after the games began, closing ceremonies were held at the Athens Olympic Stadium. As 70,000 people watched, Greek performers displayed traditional dances, a symbolic lantern was lit with the Olympic Flame, and Dr. Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympics Committee, gave a short speech and then officially closed the games.

Two weeks later, the Paralympics ended, and at that point, keeping their promise to the Greek government, the NSA employees should have quietly disconnected their hardware and deleted their software from the local telecommunications systems, packed up their bugging equipment, and boarded a plane for Fort Meade. The problem was, they didn't. Instead, they secretly kept the spying operation active, but instead of terrorists, they targeted top Greek officials. According to the former U.S. intelligence official involved with the operation, the NSA began conducting the operation secretly, without the approval or authorization of the CIA chief of station in Athens, the U.S. ambassador, or the Greek government.

"We had a huge problem right after the Greek Olympics," the source said. "They [NSA] said when the Olympics is over, we'll turn it off and take it away. And after the Olympics they turned it off but they didn't take it away and they turned it back on and the Greeks discovered it. They triangulated some signals, anonymous signals, and it all pointed back to the embassy."

At that point, the source said, someone from the Greek government called Richard Eric Pound, the CIA chief of station at the embassy in Athens and the person officially responsible for all intelligence operations in the country. Pound had arrived in May 2004, replacing Michael F. Walker, the agency's former deputy director of the paramilitary Special Activities Division, as chief of station in Athens. Describing himself as "a small town boy from Indiana who set off to see the world," Pound had joined the agency in 1976. Hefty and mustachioed, he was a veteran of the agency's backwater posts in Africa.

Pound, according to the source, knew nothing about the operation having been turned back on, so he called his boss at CIA headquarters to ask about it. "He says, 'What in God's name is this all about?'" said the source (Pound declined to speak to The Intercept). Pound's boss then immediately called his NSA counterpart. "Oh, yeah, we were going to tell you about that," the NSA official told Pound's CIA boss, according to the source. "They didn't take it out and they turned it back on."

When the eavesdropping was made public, the Greek citizens were obviously not happy. However, Greece and the U.S. governments wanted to maintain good relations and staged some public lunches to show that.

For some, however, the cozy relations only seemed to increase the anger. In May, a Greek terrorist organization, "Revolutionary Struggle," attempted to assassinate Voulgarakis with a remote-controlled bomb. Pointing to the wiretapping scandal and weakening Greek sovereignty as a key reason for the attack, the group said it opposed state-sponsored "terrorism of mass surveillance." At the U.S. Embassy, the deputy chief of mission sent a classified cable to Washington, released by WikiLeaks, with a warning. "This group is to be taken seriously," he said. "While there is no mention thus far of targeting foreign 'capitalist-imperialists,' it would not be a leap of faith for RS to focus its attention on the U.S. presence in Greece." Ten months later, the group fired a rocket at the embassy.

After 10 years, an arrest warrant has been issued for the CIA agent linked to the operation.

It is extremely unlikely the Obama administration will ever allow Basil, or any other intelligence official, to be extradited. Nor is it likely that Basil will return to Greece voluntarily with an arrest warrant waiting for him.
...
As for the NSA, a classified review of the Greek Olympics asked the now ironic question, "After this year's gold medal performance, what comes next?" Next will certainly be the Olympics scheduled for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, next summer. According to a previously published top-secret NSA slide, the agency has already planted malware throughout the country's telecommunications system. And, if history is any guide, in the weeks leading up to the start of the games, teams from the SCS, SSO, TAO, and other organizations will arrive once again to begin 24/7 eavesdropping. And as in Greece, they may just happen to leave some of their monitoring equipment behind.


By min | September 29, 2015, 9:36 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link



September 27, 2015

Guardians - Russian Superhero Movie

No release date announced and please please please let there be an English subtitled version.

It looks awesome, right? The story's got to be awesome, too. I hope it's awesome. I have hopes now. Don't dash them, unknown Russian filmmakers! This is all Wikipedia has to say about it.

How am i supposed to remember to look for this when it eventually becomes available? Gah!


By min | September 27, 2015, 9:32 PM | Movies | Comments (5) | Link



Another Gift Idea for Min

My sister sent this lovely link, rightly declaring she must have it. Clearly, so must i.


By min | September 27, 2015, 9:18 PM | Boooooks & Cute Things | Comments (1) | Link



September 25, 2015

Cute Animal Picture


By fnord12 | September 25, 2015, 6:23 PM | Cute Things & Godzilla & My stupid life | Comments (4) | Link



Accepting Gifts from Lobbyists is Freedom of Speech

It's a banner day for me and the Intercept.

Link

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Republican Kentucky state Sen. John Schickel, along with two Libertarian political candidates, are suing to overturn state ethics laws, claiming that the campaign contribution limit of $1,000 and a ban on gifts from lobbyists and their employers are a violation of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The lawsuit notes that lobbyists and the employers of lobbyists are prohibited by Kentucky law from inviting legislators to parties, offering gifts, or paying for food for legislators. "This infringes on the legislator's, lobbyist's, and employer of lobbyist's right to freedom of association, and freedom of speech," Schickel claims in the suit.

Happy Friday. If you're lucky, fnord12 will post some cute animal pictures later today.


By min | September 25, 2015, 9:23 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link



From Torture in Gitmo to Torture in a Moroccan Prison

I just can't imagine why anyone would be angry with the United States.

Two more prisoners have left Guantanamo Bay in the last week, a sign of the Obama administration's piecemeal efforts to empty the prison before the end of his presidency.

But one of those men, a 47-year-old named Younous Chekkouri, has not received a warm welcome in his native Morocco. On arrival he was detained by Moroccan authorities and now may face terrorism-related charges. Last night, Chekkouri's lawyers learned he had been moved to Salé prison, a facility that has been singled out by human rights groups for torture of detainees.

...

In federal habeas corpus proceedings, the government ended up withdrawing many of its claims against Chekkouri, and in 2010, an interagency review recommended him for transfer out of Guantanamo. But much of the material from the habeas proceedings is still secret, under seal in the District Court in Washington D.C.
...

"What my client is now potentially facing is some kind of Groundhog Day from hell," said Crider. "He faces a 'trial' in Morocco on the basis of the selfsame allegations that, when tested in federal court in his Gitmo habeas case, collapsed."
...

In an emergency motion filed today, Reprieve asked the federal district court to order the government to immediately release three pleadings and produce another seven by October 1st. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on the motion.

Link


By min | September 25, 2015, 9:18 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link



You Can Try to Put Cops on Wall St.

But they'll just find a way to replace them with their own people.

We just saw Elizabeth Warren on Colbert's new show. One of her solutions to keeping big business and the super wealthy in check is regulatory agencies that watch over them. It doesn't work so well if the people in charge of regulating things don't really want the watchdogs doing a good job.

Link

The battle over an obscure yet important regulatory agency heated up on Wednesday as the progressive activist organization Credo demanded that SEC Chair Mary Jo White recuse herself from selecting the next head of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).

The oversight board was created after the Enron debacle, and charged with policing the big accounting firms whose audits are supposed to keep public companies honest. Its current chair, James Doty, has turned into one of the most persistent regulatory reformers in Washington.

White is considering ousting Doty in favor of someone more amenable to corporate sensibilities. White's husband, John White, a partner with the corporate law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, sits on the PCAOB's Standing Advisory Group. And Credo says that he and his Wall Street clients may be influencing her decision-making.

The PCAOB regulates auditors, who are supposed to independently assess whether public companies are delivering accurate financial information to investors -- or cooking their books. Timely auditing can ferret out financial fraud, protecting investors and the broader economy.

But just four firms -- Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG -- control virtually all the auditing of public companies in the United States. And they often have lucrative business consulting relationships with the firms they audit. With only self-policing, auditors have every incentive to put their future profits ahead of the truth.

After Enron -- when its auditor, the now-defunct Arthur Andersen firm, was convicted and driven out of business for shredding audit documents -- Congress believed that the watchmen had to be watched as well. They passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which inaugurated the PCAOB, a non-profit corporation that sets auditing standards. Its five-member board gets appointed by the five SEC commissioners.

The worst part is this article says the SEC's Chief Accountant office is constantly undermining the PCAOB out of petty jealousy. Grow up. Do your job.

Here's a link to Credo's petition for those interested in signing it.


By min | September 25, 2015, 8:16 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2) | Link



September 24, 2015

One step behind

I've complained before about ads where a Hulk obviously drawn to be the green Hulk was colored grey because that's how he was appearing at the time. Here's the opposite scenario. By the time this ad was running, the Hulk was green again (albeit in his merged form), but this is clearly the grey Hulk from his trip to Madripoor. Can't fool me!


By fnord12 | September 24, 2015, 1:00 PM | Comics| Link



Recap 69

The Hospitality of Nilbog


By min | September 24, 2015, 12:37 PM | D&D| Link



Is U.S. Foreign Policy Just Colonialism By Another Name?

This is for fnord12 and Banana Larry and the rest of you people who actually paid attention in history and civics class.

And what Francis is saying is that capitalism and our growing environmental disasters are rooted in an even older, larger problem: centuries of European colonialism. Moreover, he suggests this colonialism has never really ended, but merely changed forms -- and much of U.S. foreign policy that's purportedly about terrorism, or drugs, or corruption, or "free trade," is actually colonialism in disguise.

That's a perspective that no one in Congress -- from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders or anyone in between -- is going to get behind.

The Pope's most extensive denunciation of colonialism is probably his speech last June at the World Meeting of Popular Movements (an event nurtured by the Vatican at the Pope's initiative) in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It's genuinely startling. Read this and try to imagine what would happen if it were spoken at the U.S. Capitol:

The Earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called "the dung of the devil." ... Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women ...

Let us always have at heart the Virgin Mary, a humble girl from small people lost on the fringes of a great empire. ... Mary is a sign of hope for peoples suffering the birth pangs of justice. ...

[W]e see the rise of new forms of colonialism which seriously prejudice the possibility of peace and justice. ... The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain "free trade" treaties, and the imposition of measures of "austerity" which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor. ... At other times, under the noble guise of battling corruption, the narcotics trade and terrorism -- grave evils of our time which call for coordinated international action -- we see states being saddled with measures which have little to do with the resolution of these problems and which not infrequently worsen matters.


...

More recently, in a faint echo of Potosí, the International Monetary Fund tried to force the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to lease its water system to a consortium of international investors. Enormous, successful protests helped make then-Congressman Evo Morales famous -- enough so that he went on to become Bolivia's first-ever indigenous president.
...

And whether white people are ready to hear it or not, Bolivia's experience is the norm across the planet, not the exception. It's why President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina said what happened to Morales' plane was "the vestiges of a colonialism that we thought was completely overcome." Or why most of the world sees the Israel-Palestine conflict as not about democracy vs. terrorism, but about colonialism. Or why it sees the Trans-Pacific Partership as not about free trade vs. protectionism, but about colonialism. Or why it saw the invasion of Iraq as not about weapons of mass destruction, but colonialism.

Based on the current presidential race, I'd estimate that the U.S. political system will have the maturity and grace to hear this in maybe 300 years. And if the Pope brings any of this up at the Capitol, it's safe to say he's not going to be invited back.


By min | September 24, 2015, 8:38 AM | | Comments (2) | Link



September 20, 2015

The Day After

Rough night for the Wookies, who we found face down on the floor this morning. And no wonder, after all the partying they'd been doing. Plus Maru Maru was still recovering from being repeatedly elbow slammed by a two year old.

At least they didn't mess up the puzzle we put together.


Click to jumbo-size.

Confirmed today that it is Patty Cockrum art, and that it is Tamara Rahn standing next to Namor, and not Her/Kismet.


By fnord12 | September 20, 2015, 3:21 PM | Comics & My stupid life & Star Wars | Comments (7) | Link



September 18, 2015

SuperMegaSpeed Reviews

Daredevil #18 - Nice wrap-up to a great run. I'm disappointed that the Shroud turned out to be really psychotic and not just faking it. And maybe Foggy's "Yay, complete remission!" is a bit pat, although it's not like a later writer couldn't bring his cancer back if they wanted to. But the resolution to the Kingpin story was done well and the ending, showing Daredevil's human side and acknowledging that he's a character that makes bad decisions, was great.

Ms. Marvel #18 - I said last issue that from the point of view of the Carol Danvers that i know, her appearance here seemed a little generic. But in this issue especially, from Kamala's perspective it worked perfectly. Her hero shows up and accepts her as part of the Ms. Marvel legacy. The fact that it was done in the bleak backdrop of Carol thinking that the current crisis isn't going to go away kept it from being too sappy. The situation with Kamala's brother was also fun, with the tender moment quickly getting replaced by normal sibling friction. And looking forward to what i assume is the final issue i'll be getting, after the ending here with mom saying that she knows that Kamala is Ms. Marvel.


By fnord12 | September 18, 2015, 12:26 PM | Comics| Link



Past Time to Get Off Facebook?

Link

It's well established that joining a social network means trading privacy for information. Your Facebook friends, for example, get to see that picture of you looking like you might be stoned, and you get to "like" their posts celebrating the legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado. Or, perhaps you simply post about your 50th birthday party or celebrating Ramadan. Potential employers get to see all that stuff too, depending on your privacy settings, and there is evidence that some of them discriminate on the basis of age and against Muslims. Facebook, meanwhile, gets to target ads at you.

What's not as well appreciated, but becoming increasingly clear, is that users of social networks in general, and of social networking kingpin Facebook in particular, are ill-equipped to evaluate the price they're paying in this trade -- to determine just how much privacy they'll lose over time in exchange for status updates from their friends, and what that loss will eventually mean for themselves and their loved ones.

...

Facebook's data hoard is being mined in ever more inventive ways. To take just a few examples: information uploaded to Facebook was sought by the Manhattan DA in a recent social security fraud case; Facebook earlier this year announced research on new techniques for performing facial recognition on partial digital images; and the company last month defended a patent acquired while purchasing a company that could be used to evaluate a person's loan application based on the credit of his or her friends.

I started off on FB to manage the band's page. Then friends and family found me so now that the band's defunct, i'm on it so that i can pretend to keep in touch with said friends and family without actually doing so. I don't post pictures of myself, but i have been tagged, so i might as well have put them up.

Fnord12's always admonishing me for being paranoid about posting pics of us on the blog and such. "What are they going to do with your picture?", he says to me. Apparently, they're going to use it to decide if I qualify for a loan. O.o

In today's world of social media, blogging, and the internet, it's pretty much impossible not to have an online presence, so i should prolly not waste energy being paranoid because, really, what can you do? Even if you avoid social media, your friends are on it, posting pictures you're in. And email. How can we live without email, even though i know right now Microsoft is prolly mining everything it can from my account (NO! i'm not using your stupid cloud services for saving photos! stop telling me about them every time i log in!!!).

I vacillate between being completely paranoid and considering encryptying everything to being too lazy to actually implement anything the Electronic Frontier Foundation might suggest to "protect my data". Mostly, i swing to the "too lazy" side. It's just in my nature.

But, while i might not be able to give up email or this blog, i do think FB is a horrible hell hole that sucks you in and devours your time and energy, so mebbe i should quit it altogether. Find some other way to pretend i care what's going on in the lives of people i don't see on a daily/weekly basis, bring back the tradition of mailing of Christmas cards that include the obligatory write-up of "what happened in the last year that i can complain about". Who doesn't love getting those?

Of course, people can always leave Facebook. But you don't even have to be on Facebook to be on Facebook. When I entered Doctorow's name into Facebook's search engine, I got a page that included a neatly formatted teaser link to his Wikipedia entry, plus a section titled, "Photos of my friends and Cory Doctorow." He turns up in two pictures, uploaded and tagged by people who I'm friends with on the platform. At the bottom it reads, "This Page is automatically generated based on what Facebook users are interested in, and not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with the topic."

By min | September 18, 2015, 9:24 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1) | Link



September 16, 2015

Beware the Jabberhorde, my son

When i re-started my comic project with 1991, i intended to stop painting miniatures. But with all the miniatures i've been painting i've developed some new techniques, and i wanted to try one of them on some older minis that i have. In addition to the Bones minis that i got from the Kickstarter, i have pile of very basic plastic miniatures from an old game. Just some generic skeletons, orcs, and one-eyed lizard men. I've already painted a lot of them and at this point they are kind of boring to do, so i force myself to do a couple every so often. But this time i thought it would be interesting to try that new technique. So i took three skeletons and painted them black, and then drybrushed them. I did a white one and also just for a fun a red one and a gold one. And i really like how they came out.

So with that, i did the same thing with a lizard man, painting him black and then using a hideous florescent green that was in my pack of paints but which i never thought i'd use with swords & sorcery miniatures. But dry-brushed on top of the black, it came out really well.

So then i decided to go a step further and, instead of base-coating in black, trying a dark red. I thought i could get some interesting shading with that. So i did that with an orc and a lizard man. But it didn't work out at all. The drybrushed paint ended up being barely visible until i used a color that was way too light, and i didn't like how that looked. So i ended up undoing the dry brushing and just painting them the traditional way.

But while i was painting them, i wound up spilling a lot of the red paint. Luckily it all landed on my palette. I wasn't going to get it back in the paint jar, but i could use it all right away and not let it go to waste. So i went to the Bones box, looking for a large figure that wanted to be base coated in red. I found the jabberwocky. I originally intended to "research" (i.e. google) and see if the jabberwocky is traditionally a certain color, but with the red paint sitting there i decided red would be fine. Luckily, red turns out to be a good choice.

One problem with the jabberwocky, like with a lot of the Bones, is that he's all flimsy and unstable. Normally i identify when that's a problem ahead of time, and (*sigh*) put the figure in boiling water, pose it so that it will stand, and then put it in a bowl of ice to stabilize it in that new position. But since my paint was drying up i didn't have time to do any of that. So after i painted him, he just kept falling over. I left some stuff laying on him over night, hoping that would bend him in a better position, but no dice. So i ended up microwaving him in 15 second intervals until he was malleable (but before he melted/exploded). Then i positioned him and stuck him in the freezer. Madness, but it seems to have worked. He's still kind of wobbly but he doesn't fall unless you bang on the table pretty hard.


By fnord12 | September 16, 2015, 4:07 PM | D&D | Comments (8) | Link



Pays for itself and everything else

Sorry if i'm beating a dead horse. But this is the economist that the Wall Street Journal cited in their scary 'Bernie's plan would cost $18 trillion dollars' article, $15 trillion of which was for a single payer system (which wasn't actually Bernie's proposal, but never mind that for now):

The Journal correctly puts the additional federal spending for health care under HR 676 (a single payer health plan) at $15 trillion over ten years. It neglects to add, however, that by spending these vast sums, we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation.

By fnord12 | September 16, 2015, 3:05 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link



Golden Dawn on the Rise

This could be really bad.

Four short weeks of campaigning before a snap poll called by the leftist leader and former prime minister Alexis Tsipras have gone surprisingly well. In successive opinion surveys, the virulently anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-EU party has emerged as Greece's third-biggest political force - the sole certainty in an election that has defied expectation in almost every other way.

Under the banner of being "the only nationalist choice", the far-rightists have persistently polled between 5.5% and 7%. Tsipras's Syriza has been shown to be neck and neck with its main challenger, the conservative New Democracy, quashing hopes of an easy victory.

...

Touring Kos and other Aegean islands most affected by the influx, Golden Dawn MPs brazenly played on locals' fears. "Elections are approaching," Ilias Kasidiaris, the party's swastika-tattooed spokesman, told residents. "Kos has a choice. If [inhabitants] choose to vote Syriza it will turn into Pakistan. If they choose Golden Dawn and Golden Dawn governs the land, then Kos will become Greece again. And that is our goal."

Michaloliakos, who like other party leaders was released from prison after serving the pre-trial maximum of 18 months, is accused of overseeing offences that range from money laundering to murder and armed attack. The hearing began this year. The accused deny the charges.


By min | September 16, 2015, 11:09 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link



Step Away From the Anti-Bacterial Soap

I can't believe we're still talking about this. How is it not common knowledge by now that anti-bacterial soaps do not make you less bacterial-ful than regular soaps? All you're doing is creating colonies of antibiotic resistant super germs. Please, just stop. Use regular soap and friction. That's how you get rid of the germs.

Triclosan has long been one of the most common ingredients in antibacterial soaps, which are used by millions of people and generate billions in sales every year, experts say.

But studies have linked it to antibiotic resistance and hormone problems, prompting a safety review by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Now a study in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy reports that when it comes to normal hand-washing there is "no significant difference" between plain soap and antibacterial soap in terms of killing bacteria.

Triclosan became effective only after microbes had been steeped in it for nine hours, the authors found.

And i know nobody's steeping their hands in soapy water for 9 hours. I doubt many of you are even reaching the 20 seconds the World Health Organization recommends.


By min | September 16, 2015, 10:50 AM | Science| Link



September 15, 2015

Everybody wins

Bernie Sanders must have crossed some kind of threshold and suddenly he's getting media attention beyond "hey, here's this kooky guy that can't win". This is good. We get to talk policy. The latest is from the Washington Post's Editorial Board and at first glance it seems to be criticizing Bernie from the left:

Bernie Sanders isn't as progressive as you think.

If you read the article, you'll see their complaint is that the programs that he's proposing would be available to all people, not just the poor. And they're absolutely wrong about this. It's actually interesting that they chose to use the world "progressive". Labels mean different things to different people, but one distinction i've seen between liberals and progressives is that liberals want programs that help the poor, and progressives want programs that benefit everyone. Both are good. But the reason the latter are "progressive" is that they actually move the country forward. Programs for the poor are easy to cut; they don't have a strong and vocal base of support. Programs that benefit everyone become a "third rail"; untouchable. Compare Medicaid to Medicare, or welfare to Social Security. Medicaid struggles for funding. Bill Clinton was able to dismantle welfare. But try to mess with Medicare and Social Security and everyone will scream.

With the things Bernie is proposing, it's about becoming a different society. Public university should be available to everyone. Simple. That's very different than going through some kind of means-testing to prove you're poor enough to get subsidies to go to school. Means-testing is humiliating, bureaucratic, it requires additional administrators to be paid, and it would be so easy to start cutting the subsidies the next time someone wanted to give rich people a tax cut.

Since they wrote this editorial, i am sure the Washington Post Editorial Board is very concerned about the wealthy getting too many benefits. But we can satisfy them by balancing it out with increased taxes on upper income brackets. Everybody wins!


By fnord12 | September 15, 2015, 6:15 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2) | Link



More on that $18 trillion

A good write-up from the Washington Post's Paul Waldman.


By fnord12 | September 15, 2015, 2:05 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link



"Correcting" the record

A Super PAC called Correct The Record, supposedly designed to push back on right wing lies against Hillary Clinton, has instead decided to attack Bernie Sanders. They sent an email to Huffington Post trying to convince them to put out an article tying Sanders to some of the more controversial statements made by the UK Labor Party's Jeremy Corbyn. But HuffPo never promised that they were off the record or anything, so instead of publishing their proposed article, they published an article exposing Correct The Record.

I don't even think that Corbyn's statements are bad (ooh, he thought Osama Bin Laden should be brought to trial, what a fifth columnist just like those traitors at Nuremberg!). But the point is that a Hillary group had pivoted from "correcting" the record to distorting it, and (i guess the good news) they are realizing they have to take Bernie seriously and targeting him instead of the Republicans. And that they can't win on the merits. (Correct The Record, which is owned by the same people that run Media Matters, has a contact form here. Just in case you had something to say.)

Separately, if you hear from the Wall Street Journal that Bernie Sander's proposals will cost $18 trillion dollars, realize that $15 trillion of that is for converting to Single Payer, and they calculated the cost over 10 years (so it would be $1.5 trillion a year) and, most importantly, the study that they got the numbers from (which wasn't Sanders' proposal specifically) also explains how it would mostly pay for itself (PDF) with no new taxes.


By fnord12 | September 15, 2015, 7:41 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link



September 10, 2015

New Human: H. Naledi

Link

The fossils exhibit a combination of primitive features that bring to mind our ancient australopithecine predecessors (including Lucy and her ilk) and features that are associated with Homo. For instance, the pelvis has a flared shape like that seen in Australopithecus, whereas the leg and foot resemble those of Homo sapiens. Likewise, the skull combines a small braincase with a cranium that is otherwise built like that of early Homo. The teeth, meanwhile, are small like those of modern humans, yet the third molar is larger than the other molars--a pattern associated with australopithecines. And the upper limb pairs an Australopithecus-like shoulder and fingers with a Homo-like wrist and palm. "All that combined leaves us with a really, really strange creature," Berger remarks.

Are they sure they didn't just mix up the bones? Remember when they put the iguanodon's thumb on its nose by mistake?

The mix-and-match anatomy of the H. naledi bones is not the only puzzling aspect of this discovery, however. At other fossil sites in the Cradle of Humankind, fossils are encased in sediment and animal bones are found mixed in with the human remains. The bones of humans and animals alike accumulate in the caves there through catastrophic events such as falling down a hole in the ground into an underground cave and getting trapped, or becoming dinner for the large carnivores that denned in the caves. But the Rising Star bones are not encased in sediment, nor do any remains of any vertebrate animals, apart from a few rodents and birds, accompany them. Given the absence of any evidence to indicate that Homo naledi fell or washed into the underground chamber or was transported there by a predator, the discovery team suggests that this small-brained human deliberately disposed of its dead. Furthermore, the location of the H. naledi bones in a chamber that appears to have always been lightless and difficult to access suggests that the humans went to great lengths to deliver the bodies there, and possibly needed an artificial light source (perhaps a simple torch) to do so. The behavior is important because it implies that H. naledi had, as Hawks puts is, "a shared cultural knowledge of mortality."

Not every paleoanthropologist is ready to believe the burial ground theory just yet. And they still haven't managed to date the bones, so that's a mystery.

For his part, Hawks notes that the behavioral insights from Rising Star hint at an interesting parallel to the anatomical story. "We have all these things we think of as human. From an anatomy point of view walking upright is human, a large brain is human, tool-making hands are human. But all of these things happened at different times in different ancestors. The package we think of as human did not appear simultaneously," he observes. "I don't know why we would think behavior is any different--a package evolved and different parts appeared at different times."

By min | September 10, 2015, 8:46 AM | Science| Link



September 8, 2015

1991

Just an announcement that my break is over and i'm back to work on 1991 on the Marvel Timeline. And yes, this post was really just an excuse to show this image:


By fnord12 | September 8, 2015, 5:43 PM | Comics| Link



September 4, 2015

All Horde all the time

Just some more quickies this time. Some skeletons, rat swarms, spiders, a lizard man, and a guy that seemed just a little too chiseled to be a real person, so i painted him like a golem. I also did a pair of vampires who are a little more detailed. But just wanted this to be a quickie, so no close-up pics.


By fnord12 | September 4, 2015, 2:50 PM | D&D | Comments (1) | Link



September 3, 2015

Grunt Horde

Lo, i am Fnord, Destroyer of Paint Brushes. There comes a time in every paint project where you decide you need to use your detail brush for drybrushing and after that you can just forget about using it for eyeballs, and pretty soon even belts are impossible. So while i'm waiting for a new set of brushes to come from Amazon, i decided to crank out some grunt monsters that don't require as much precision.

First up are four hobgoblins. I call them hobgoblins, anyway. They are too small to be ogres, and they've got faces like goblins but they are bigger, so hobgoblins it is.

Next up a pair of undead to be used as zombies, ghouls, ghasts, or wights as necessary. Can always use more wights.


By fnord12 | September 3, 2015, 12:24 PM | D&D| Link



September 2, 2015

Graveyard Horde

A wizard, a dwarf warrior, and some more giant rats. If i was really awesome i would have free-handed some runes on the wizard's scroll; i don't know why they didn't carve anything onto that.

A barbarian and a warrior. I started off thinking that the barbarian was just going to be a regular warrior in armor, but as i started painting her i realized that she had a lot of straps (even on her sword) and that she had bone claws on her gauntlet and other such stuff. Then i sadly realized she had a bare midriff and was semi-barefoot. So, another figure that my female players will never want to actually use, but she'll still be useful as an NPC. I also wound up accidentally giving her Crazy Eyebrows which i kind of like if she's a barbarian. The warrior's sword is permanently bent at a dumb angle. I did try the "put it in boiling water, straighten it, put it in ice water" trick but the sword was really stubborn. #@#@$! plastic miniatures.

A grave digger, a swarm of bats, and a skeleton grave digger. FWIW, i find that players react very badly to the word "swarm". The skeleton grave digger is actually the manufacturer Reaper's mascot, i think (or one of them). I gave him a Skeletor color scheme.


By fnord12 | September 2, 2015, 2:22 PM | D&D| Link



Prune Cream Salad

With gelatin!

The pictures alone are disgusting. It's worse knowing what the ingredients are. Just to give you an idea - prunes, mayonnaise, and chili sauce are involved. I laughed aloud when i read the exchange between Retro Ruth and her husband.

"How is it?"

"Oh it's....it's great."

"What?!?"

"Yeah, great....best thing I've ever had. You should try some."

"You're lying aren't you?"

"A little. This is the worst thing ever."

"That's what I thought. You can stop making that face now."

"I can't, I'm trying not to cry."

*CACKLE*


By min | September 2, 2015, 8:30 AM | Ummm... Other?| Link



September 1, 2015

For Min

If you make it past the opening segment, you are probably on drugs. Or else drugs would do you no good.


By fnord12 | September 1, 2015, 9:36 AM | TeeVee | Comments (4) | Link



First Amendment Rights for Corporations

If you want the government to protect you, become a corporation. It's better than being people.

A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a decision on Tuesday supporting a deeply cherished belief of many huge corporations: that the First Amendment shields them from government requirements to provide information about their products.

The case involved a provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act ordering corporations to disclose their use of "conflict minerals" from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC is rich in minerals used in cell phones, laptops and many other gadgets, and demand for them has helped fuel what's been called "Africa's World War."

In finding for the National Association of Manufacturers, the D.C. Circuit judges declared that to be unconstitutional compelled speech.

Yeah. We wouldn't want people to be able to make informed decisions about their purchases or anything. It shouldn't matter if other people were harmed by the manufacturing of these products. It only matters if corporate sales are dinged by people knowing about it. Thanks, government.

What's most noticeable about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals conflict minerals decision -- written by George H.W. Bush appointee Raymond Randolph and joined by Reagan appointee David Sentelle -- is that it reads less like a dispassionate legal treatise and more like an extremely long, nicely typeset right-wing blog post.

For instance, Reynolds muses, "If the government required labels on all internal combustion engines stating that 'USE OF THIS PRODUCT CONTRIBUTES TO GLOBAL WARMING' would that be fact or opinion?" Of course, that would be a fact, but to Reynolds it's merely "the opinion of many scientists."

But best of all are his quotations from both 1984 and Darkness at Noon -- perhaps the two most famous anti-totalitarian novels ever written. The citations don't make much sense wedged into the decision, but the implication is clear: Forcing Apple to tell you whether there's tantalum from Congo in your iPad is the kind of thing Joseph Stalin would do.

...

The ruling is yet more evidence that the current extremist ideology of corporate America and its judicial allies is not going to moderate itself.

They have a specific future in mind for us -- one in which the Constitution protects all huge corporations and no actual humans -- and they're doing everything they possibly can to make it happen.


By min | September 1, 2015, 9:05 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link



TV for kids

With the news about Sesame Street going into HBO-first mode and the new Muppet Show, the question i keep bringing up is why do they have to keep making new episodes? I don't mean this (only) in a cranky old man way. But why aren't the Sesame Street and Muppet Show episodes that my generation watched as a kid appropriate for kids today? If Sesame Street is having budget issues, surely making a few edits and cuts to the old episodes is cheaper than producing new ones and would prevent them from having to go to HBO. And if the new voice actors can't get the goddamn voice of Sam the Eagle right (ok, now i'm a cranky old man), why not play the episodes with the original iconic cast?

I've been told that there are Reasons relating to changes in educational theory and that the Muppet Show human guest-actors are out of date, but i'm pretty sure the alphabet is still the alphabet and that kids don't care if they're seeing Mark Hamill and Alice Cooper or Oscar Isaac and Lady Gaga. I can tell you that we just watched the Lord of the Rings cartoons from the late 70s, and they were awful, but when i was a kid they were the most awesome things ever.

Interestingly (and the instigation for this post), Paul O'Brien starts a new topic today to say that they have essentially been doing what i'm suggesting with children's programs in the UK for years.


By fnord12 | September 1, 2015, 9:02 AM | TeeVee | Comments (5) | Link



Where there's a whip, there's a way!

Min and i tortured ourselves by watching all three Lord of the Ring cartoons this weekend. And actually it spilled into Monday because Min could not take all the singing in Return of the King and needed to take a break. The cartoons are... flawed, but one thing that i was looking forward to that turned out to be even better than i remembered was this song:


By fnord12 | September 1, 2015, 7:33 AM | Movies | Comments (5) | Link



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