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Innocent people don't regularly accept Plea Bargains.

Yes they do:

Plea bargaining and the innocent

Innocent people are pleading guilty

Innocence is irrelevant

Why innocent people plead guilty

How to convince an innocent client to plead guilty

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
John P. A. Ioannidis

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Further reading:

"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias".
- Dr John Ioannidis (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”) August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosm...

"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine".
- Dr. Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books January 15, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/article...

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness".
- Richard Horton, Editor, “The Lancet” April 11th 2015 http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/...

"Scientists these days, especially but not only in such blatantly corrupt fields as pharmaceutical research, face a lose-lose choice between basing their own investigations on invalid studies, on the one hand, or having to distrust any experimental results they don’t replicate themselves, on the other. Meanwhile the consumers of the products of scientific research—yes, that would be all of us—have to contend with the fact that we have no way of knowing whether any given claim about the result of research is the product of valid science or not".
- John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blog...

Having an FCC to regulate communications is Fascism

Yes, having government control interactions between private entities is an element of Fascism. Not surprising, the FCC happened, when Fascism was hot, introduced by an authoritarian President beloved by contemporary Fascists.

Sure thing bud

I'm not your "bud" — you should not even dream about any kind of familiar affiliation, or you may be overcome by suicidal disappointment upon waking up...

It's also interesting that the equations could be changed that way.

Interesting doesn't begin to cover it.

Missed Opportunities by Freeman Dyson (1972) ... in which Dyson slags on Gibbs.

See numbered page 644 (document page 10).

I do not know how many pure mathematicians heard or read Gibbs' lecture. If they had studied it carefully, they would soon have noticed that Gibbs had not really succeeded in unifying the notions of quaternion and vector. On the contrary, by putting the two notions side by side he had made explicit the lack of any real compatibility between them

His lecture ought to have suggested to any attentive mathematician the question, "How can it happen that the properties of three-dimensional space are represented equally well by two quite different and incompatible algebraic structures?"

If this question had once been clearly asked, the answer would almost certainly have been forthcoming. And the answer would have led inevitably to a complete theory of the single-valued and double-valued representations of the three-dimensional rotation group. The vectors are the simplest nontrivial single-valued representation, and the quaternions are the simplest double-valued representation.

Also, the quaternions are the prototype of what later were called spinor representations. The development of the theory of spinor representations, which was actually begun by Elie Cartan in 1913 and completed during the 1930's with substantial help from the physicists Pauli and Dirac, might have been accelerated by approximately 40 years.

It is impossible to say what effects such an accelerated development would have had on other branches of pure mathematics, but the effects could hardly have failed to be substantial.

I commented on Slashdot for a long time, because there's a certain utility in mastering Defense Against the Dim Bulbs.

And here's this long, geeky Slashdot thread with everyone stumbling around looked for the entry point into the higher plane of comprehension, and turns out it was completely covered on Reddit back in 1972.

* Freeman Dyson "I kept quiet for thirty years, maybe it's time to speak." — 15 June 2018

It happens that I corresponded with two heretics on the subject of evolution. Motoo Kimura who was a Japanese biologist and Ursula Goodenough, an American biologist. Both of them had heretical ideas about evolution which I think were probably correct.

I'm preparing a talk which discusses the idea that Darwin was correct up to a point but he didn't tell us the whole story.

Because the biologists are very defensive about Darwin. If you say anything critical about Darwin you're regarded as an enemy. It's a very dangerous subject to tread on. I kept quiet for thirty years so maybe it's time to speak.

* The Key to Everything — 10 May 2018

The explanation lies in the peculiar behavior of gravity in the physical world. On the balance sheet of energy accounting, gravitational energy is a deficit. When you are close to a massive object, your gravitational energy is minus the amount of energy it would take to get away from the mass all the way to infinity. When you walk up a hill on the earth, your gravitational energy is becoming less negative, but never gets up to zero.

Any object whose motions are dominated by gravity will have energy decreasing as temperature increases and energy increasing as temperature decreases. As a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, when energy f

Sure, leave it to Democrats to further entrench the Fascism.

That's a kind of bullshit definition of fascism, though in fairnes, the link you posted points out how it's a much a Republican thing as democrat. Though given your blind, hyper-partisan zeal it's not really surprising you pick out th eother tribe.

Anyone interested in a better description of facism (not you, since youre impervious to anything that you don't believe is "rah rah republicans") should go here:

https://www.nybooks.com/articl...

Your question seems to be rhetorical and you already believe you know what fascism is, but for those who really wonder, I've personally found Umberto Eco's article on Ur-Fascism revealing.

I also want to address your last question, because I believe the way you ask it is very counter-productive. Left-wing authoritarianism and totalitarianism share many traits with fascism and some with nazism, of course, but in other respects these traditions are very distinct from each other. It's not a good idea to mix those historical enemies of each other together, especially since radical left-wing thinking is based on much more sophisticated justifications and a long-standing intellectual tradition, whereas radical right wing has always been populist and anti-intellectual. By brushing totalitarian left-wing positions off as fascist you'd make it too easy for people who have actually read the relevant authors to make you look like a fool and win their argument.

Instead of mixing them up it's better to address any of these positions by arguing for representative democracy and against any forms of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. If you need arguments against communism, read Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Why innocent people plead guilty

...of course the begged question is if inequality is ACTUALLY bad, or if it's bad, is it even avoidable?

(Setting aside that this exact phraseology was used by Krugman in 2014 http://www.nybooks.com/article...)

Picketty, probably the modern Patron Saint of Inequality Demonization, failed spectacularly to demonstrate it. His "Capital" essentially said that the system trends toward inequality regardless of context; the only instances he could point to where it hadn't were after regional or global cataclysms. Even the most ardent of 'levelers' would have to admit that WW2 in total was a worse thing than having a few more billionaires, certainly?

His third section simply asserts, "...since inequality is bad, then we should do X..." but never bothers to prove why this is so. Even Adam Smith - who was in fact very concerned about poverty - really only managed to complain about very subjective impacts of inequality: that people would admire the wealthy, who were not generally particularly admirable people. (Personally, in what amounts to at-least-the-closest-thing-on-Earth-to-a-capitalist-meritocracy, I'd rather admire a successful asshole than a moronic failure who is JUST AS LIKELY to be an asshole, just nobody cares...)

Serious economists have savaged Piketty, as from The Journal of Political Economy: âoeCapital is, nonetheless, unpersuasive when it turns from description to analysis. . . . Both of us are very liberal (in the contemporary as opposed to classical sense), and we regard ourselves as egalitarians. We are therefore disturbed that Piketty has undermined the egalitarian case with weak empirical, analytical, and ethical arguments."

If you can't gin up actual reasons that inequality is inherently bad in an 800+ page magnum opus, it's not there.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2... "But the intelligence report does nothing to clarify the abnormalities of Trump’s campaign and election. Instead, it risks perpetuating the fallacy that Trump is some sort of a foreign agent rather than a home-grown demagogue, while doing further damage to our faith in the electoral system. It also suggests that the US intelligence agencies’ Russia expertise is weak and throws into question their ability to process and present information..."

I've read an interesting opinion piece by a Russian opponent:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/06/trump-russia-conspiracy-trap/.

Basically, the messages are: first, yes, Russia has meddled in, and there are links between them and Trump. But it's nothing new, Russia's always tried to destabilize Western democracies and undermine their credibility, including by supporting political crackpots there. This time the crackpots won the election.

There are a few differences this time:
1) Russia seems to have had significant influence with several people in the crackpot's administration, and that influence seems to have been translated into proposed policy.

2) Several members of the crackpot's campaign were having unusual communications with the Russians, and may have been colluding in Russian interference.

3) Russia may have significant leverage over the main crackpot himself.

None of these may be true, but there's more than enough evidence to warrant investigation.

Second, the media frenzy about this is being played up because it's seemingly the only scandal that riles people enough that the Republican majority in Congress might have to take notice, instead of looking the other way as they did with all the other documented lies. So Trump opponents are playing this specific card.

Russia having direct influence in the White House is a pretty damn big deal. I don't think the media is going overboard with its focus.

But, third, there's probably nothing concrete enough there to warrant a successful impeachment. And this is beginning to border on speculation and conspiracy-theory thinking, in other words using some of Trump's foul tactics against him in the unlikely hope of getting rid of him. Bad precedent.

As I said, there's a lot of real evidence in play. And being a lying incompetent President isn't an impeachable offence, conspiring with Russia is.

So, fourth, not only it won't work, it's drowning out more urgent and serious issues: dismantling healthcare, crippling budget cuts everywhere but in the military, hurting government agencies. If more attention was focused on them instead, sure, it would be even less likely to cause Trump's demise, but it would mitigate the damage, as it did for the Muslim travel ban.

This is a very valid point, the focus on Trump's scandals allow the rest of his administration (and the GOP legislators) to get away with some astoundingly outrageous things. I'm honestly not sure what their plan is in some cases, I mean WTF are they thinking with health care? Have they even considered what would happen if their bill became law?

I've read an interesting opinion piece by a Russian opponent: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/06/trump-russia-conspiracy-trap/.

Basically, the messages are: first, yes, Russia has meddled in, and there are links between them and Trump. But it's nothing new, Russia's always tried to destabilize Western democracies and undermine their credibility, including by supporting political crackpots there. This time the crackpots won the election.

Second, the media frenzy about this is being played up because it's seemingly the only scandal that riles people enough that the Republican majority in Congress might have to take notice, instead of looking the other way as they did with all the other documented lies. So Trump opponents are playing this specific card.

But, third, there's probably nothing concrete enough there to warrant a successful impeachment. And this is beginning to border on speculation and conspiracy-theory thinking, in other words using some of Trump's foul tactics against him in the unlikely hope of getting rid of him. Bad precedent.

So, fourth, not only it won't work, it's drowning out more urgent and serious issues: dismantling healthcare, crippling budget cuts everywhere but in the military, hurting government agencies. If more attention was focused on them instead, sure, it would be even less likely to cause Trump's demise, but it would mitigate the damage, as it did for the Muslim travel ban.

As the name should tell you, the "Front National" is a neo-Fascist party which was funded by a bunch of Nazis and antisemites and has a long history of glorifying the Vichy regime that collaborated with Hitler and of instigating violence and racism. The FN is not just a populist party like the German AfD or Geert Wilders' pet project (actually, Macron's movement is the populist party), they are genuine fascists who could and would destroy their own country if they ever got into power. The FN has rightly been ridiculed in France since the 70s when they were founded, and the fact that some people apparently deem them electable nowadays gives real cause for concern and is the biggest political scandal since the Vichy days when France was occupied. You should read Umberto Eco's essay on Ur-fascism, you could learn something from it.

I though about this for three minutes, when I discovered all the shit dripping off the fan the morning after.

A simple photograph (or gallery) of person (or people) expected to mount the stage would be the best sanity check. Our visual systems are way better equipped to get a slice of primary this-can't-be-right cognition for a celebrity in the hot light feeling watched by a hundred million people.

Yes, you could still end up with the same visual on two different cards, say an actor or actress nominated in two different categories (e.g. lead/supporting). That would require a rare double mix up.

For director/voice actor they could add the image of one of those spindly little chairs or a microphone. They could also tuck a photo of last year's winner (already holding their damn trophies) at the bottom—or even better, a manic caricature of same.

These would be about right as a cue for LAST YEAR'S winner of same category (drawn in a slightly more minimalist style, with Oscar added):

Caricatures drawn for The New York Review by four artists

Wallace
Kubrick
Shostakovich

(Baring a recount, you have a whole year to book this art before the next gala shindig.)

You would need to use stock images for THIS YEAR'S winner, or you'd risk letting the cat out of the bag. Probably stock images from the actual production (which I'm sure all nominees have available if you ask nicely).

Obviously, the inner staff of whatever agency takes this over in future years prepares a winner card for every nominee in every category, and the newly-scared-shitless MC of final card selection would manually winnow the field—stamping each selected card "official"—and then immediately burning all cards not selected.

Bonus: you also get a one-of-a-kind souvenir for the lucky winner to pass along to favoured family or friend (ideally signed by hand by the caricature artist). There are probably other PR/monetization strategies available in conjunction with this, not that anyone in Hollywood would notice another shake of the purse.

Fake news is likely to be on both sides.

That is, things are always NOT simple as black and white, as MSM, and some people here try to paint.
Recently, the Poles nationalists shouted slogans against Ukrainians, and a day later Poland quickly blamed Russia for this.
So, Yushchenko pro-Western president in 2004, granted Bandera "Hero of Ukraine", and Poroshenko pro-Western president in 2016, renamed "Moscow Avenue" to "Bandera Avenue", which more or less have raised the long, hidden conflicts between Ukraine-Poland are also Russian hybridwar?

Note: for another perspective, the difference between Time magazine 2016 and 1996?
1996: Yanks to the rescue. The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win

For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's campaign. Here is the inside story of how these advisers helped Yeltsin achieve the victory that will keep reform in Russia alive.

2016: Russia Wants to Undermine Faith in the US Election Don't Fall for It

> It fits into a broader narrative in which Trump represents the second coming of Hitler, and everyone who does not unconditionally reject him is a neo-nazi.

A narative that is absolutely and objectively true on every single metric. Though, just like with the first coming of Hitler, most of the NAZIs don't yet know they are NAZIs.

Here is the list of things Trump and Hitler do NOT have in common:
1) Trump has no mustashe
2) The Drumpf family is German, The Hitler family was from Austria (it no longer exists, all the Hitlers in Germany and Austria changed their names after the war).
3) Hitler could paint.

That is it. Every other thing is EXACTLY the same. Hell this very topic is about the creation of a registry to track people of a particular faith: one of the very first Nuremberg laws.
If you think that there is any way that Trump is NOT EXACTLY like Hitler and his election is not a prime example of how a formerly free nation succumbs to fascism - then you are quite ignorant about at least one of these three things.

http://www.nybooks.com/article...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

I can't list all the things Trump and Hitler have in common in a slashdot post- I don't have the several hours it would take to type it all out. But I've provided a complete list of the things they don't have in common, a valuable reference on what fascism actually is (and Trump meets all the requirements) and a nice article that does list the most critical similarities, including in the behaviour of both the right and leftwing right now. The GOP behaviour right now mirrors EXACTLY the behaviour of the German conservative party after Hitler's strong election showing, the behavior of the democrats mirror the behaviour of the German socialist party to the letter. And the journalists and the people - they too are saying and doing exactly what they did.

But don't take MY word for it. The countries that have the most experience of fascism, that know exactly what it looks like when it begins - Spain, Germany and Italy have roundly and universally been warning you - we know this man, we know those speeches, they are the same ones, we know where they lead - do not fall for it.
America didn't listen... America has doomed itself to repeat the same pattern. For 8 years the right have lived in a panicked fear that Obama would declare Martial Law as a precept to becoming a Tyrant... quite a weird little fantasy to have about a politician who has governed on a centrist platform of non-controversial policies - and of whom the worst you can say is that he refused to do any radical things at all, yet you just voted in the first ever American president of whom it must be said that doing so would not only be believable but EXTREMELY likely.
Indeed, only a complete ignoramus at this point doubts that this was his plan all along.

One things that history has taught us is - when the politician says he'll do something terrible, ALWAYS believe him. Even a politician who lies about everything NEVER lies when he promises to be evil. Those are the promises they always keep and exceed. Do not trust your institutions to keep him in check.

There is only one, tiny, sliver of hope. The people marching against him in the street. The people protesting his ideas before he is even sworn in. Nobody did that in Germany when Hitler took office. That's new. That's different. It might change the outcome - but that is a hope, not a guarantee, and the best thing you can do to increase that hope is to get out there and join them. Those people have paid attention.

Isn't it interesting that comparing Trump to Hitler, and his movement to the NAZIs does not even violate Godwin's law ? Andrew Godwin himself has stated that it's an apt comparison. Simply put -the REASON we have Godwin's law - is so that when the tim

Here is the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and it's connection to US anti-Communist groups.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2...

Trump doesn't even begin to fit that description,

Yes he does. Here's what fascism looks like:

http://www.nybooks.com/article...

And here's how Trump fits:

http://www.wehuntedthemammoth....

I think a couple of those are a bit of a stretch, but 12 out of 14 is pretty close.

You need to actually study fascism as written about by people who were actually there. Trump is textbook Musolini.

Here - educate yourself: http://www.nybooks.com/article...

14 elements make fascism - and Trump meets every one of them.

“I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” - Franklin Delano Rooseveldt (you know - the president who actually fought a war with fascists). That is what happened here.
Trumpism meets every requirement for the definition of a fascist movement. http://www.nybooks.com/article... He meets them in spades.

And as for his flip-flopping, that's actually a standard practise with fascists, Terry Pratchett described it another way:
"You told them a lie and when it was no longer useful you told them a different lie and told them they were progressing on the path to wisdom and they followed believing that at the center of all the lies they would find truth. And little by little they accept the unacceptable" - Guards, Guards.

They are NEITHER protests nor riots. They are insurrection.

http://www.nybooks.com/article...

#4 on the facism list: disagreement is treason.

fascist noun Any public official I personally disagree with politically.

Umberto Eco wrote about fascism in 1995, after living through it:

http://www.nybooks.com/article...

Trump passes all 14 of the tests of fascism. Now, it would be non sensical to claim this was biased against Trump since it was written 20 years before Trump had any political aspirations.

What the hell is it with Trump supporters and this persecution/plot mentality.

Oh right fascism, #7 on the list if you're interested.

It's just alt-right fantasies that have been proven to be bullshit,

It's #7 (obsession with plot) on Umberto Eco's tests of ur-facism. Trump actually fits all 14 tests remarkably well.

The list of tests was written in 1995 when Trump was an unsuccessful business man, burning through daddy's money with a succession of bankruptcies.

"I came from China, I know how terrible fascism is, and unfortunately I am seeing the same thing happens here, more and more"

The U.S. government has killed an estimated 11,000,000 people since the end of the 2nd world war. Often contractor companies do the violence, or arrange more violence so that they can make more money and so the managers can get promotions. It's killing for profit.

Why the Vietnam war? The CIA and Vietnam. "... from June, 1954 to June, 1963, that is, until two years after Dulles left office (August, 1961) the CIA was absolutely and exclusively dominant in creating and carrying out the policies which led eventually to the Vietnam War."

"To the CIA too must go the credit for the creation of the secret police forces of Diemâ(TM)s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu which prevented dissent within Vietnam until it was too late to change things."

The intention of the U.S. financial community to profit from corrupt practices was well known long before the crash in 2008. In the Berkshire Hathaway 2002 Annual Report (PDF), Warren Buffett said this on page 14: "I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almost invariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEO who wanted to report impressive 'earnings' (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited from his options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings were a sham."

The Iraq war made huge amounts of money for the Bush family and Dick Cheney: Cheney's Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion on Iraq War. That destruction will continue for decades: The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.

There is another state religion that denies evolution. This religion is being taught in all public schools. This is so because it is also uniformly taught in higher education. It forms the central dogma of what are called "the social sciences". As anti-science, this religion is far more damaging than the "dinosaurs and man walked side by side" theocrats because it actually informs most of what we call "public policy" at the Federal level. It is exemplified by (though hardly limited to) the widely praised writings of Harvard professors Richard "Dick" Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould who, together with other fellow travelers, attempted to get Edward O. Wilson ejected from Harvard because Wilson dared posit evolution might apply to signiicant aspects of human social behavior, as well as to that of other organisms.

Those who weren't around in the late 1970's watching all this might not be aware of exactly how virulent and organized -- let alone wrong-headed -- the attacks were.

But one thing is for certain: The dogma that human biodiversity is an insignificant consideration in the social sciences is under increasing attack by the scientific evidence and, at the same time, it is ever more influential on public policy.

So-called "creationism" as theocratic anti-science threat is a red-herring.

This was true before that Russian airliner went down in the Sinai, and ISIS so helpfully claimed responsibility.

Putin has staged terrorist acts against his own citizens before. I would not put too much credence into that airliner's disaster...

but now, w/ this Russian plane going down, ISIS kicked themselves up in the scheduler list.

Yes, and suddenly Putin no longer seems like such a bad guy, does he? I mean, invasion of a peaceful neighbor is soooo last year, we need to cooperate with Russia now, do we not?

230 Russian lives are a small price to pay for such a turn in the world's public opinion. Glory be to Mother Russia...

You do realize that the Texas Board of Education decides what go into the textbooks not only for Texas but pretty much the rest of the country?

No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.

When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is both similar to other states and totally different. It's hardly the only one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/

NSA-provided data has not been — and can not be, not by itself, anyway — used to frame an innocent person.

You say that like innocent people aren't coerced into taking plea bargains or coerced into becoming government informants all the time.

An innocent person who has the means to get good lawyers can't be sent to prison based on NSA-provided data by itself. If you're willing to spend the time and lose a large chunk of your life in the process, you can probably make it go away eventually. Being sent to prison is hardly the only way that a government agency can harass you.

Remember the FBI's hamfisted attempt to blackmail MLK? He wasn't guilty of a crime, but that didn't matter.

http://www.nybooks.com/article...
The Myth of Charter Schools
Diane Ravitch
November 11, 2010

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.

I hate that movie. I haven't seen it, but the advertising has put me off. The man is so important, but not once during any of the ads I saw for it, did they mention his name.

There are many possible reasons to not like the movie, but this isn't one of them. The movie itself doesn't in any way hide his name.

This, for example http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/n... or this http://www.slate.com/blogs/bro...
might be reasonable excuses to not want to see the movie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"The Flexner Report[1] is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.
The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. Colleges in electrotherapy were closed. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women's and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College. ...
Flexner viewed blacks as inferior and advocated closing all but 2 of the historically black medical schools. His opinions were followed and only Howard and Meharry were left open, while 5 other schools were closed. His perspective was that black doctors should only treat black patients and should serve roles subservient to white physicians. The closure of these schools and the fact that black students were not admitted to many medical schools in the USA for 50 years after Flexner has contributed to the low numbers of American born physicians of color and the ramifications are still felt more than a 100 years later. ..."

What has happened recently though to address the shortage of doctors in the USA is that Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants are doing more of the hands-on work, and new careers like health coaches are showing up, knowledge about nutrition (the basis of health) is spreading through a variety of sources and practitioners from chefs to nutritionists to writers and movie makers, and we are all turning to the internet more for health care advice...

Doctors are becoming more and more like technicians controlling a prescription pad in the process -- which is sad for a bunch of reasons. As Dr. Fuhrman says, many prescriptions are just "permission slips" for continuing bad behavior including eating poorly.

And some specific specialties like oncology and cardiology are being called scams...
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Exposing the fraud and mythology of conventional cancer treatments"
http://www.naturalnews.com/033...

Meanwhile: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs

Interesting thoughts, Michael(?). I agree that some trends in Japan may foreshadow things the USA does (even the Japanese banking crisis decades ago related to rel estate bubbles leading to stagnation).

Thanks for your book link, which also has a link to a related site which includes connecting current challenges with historical developments:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...
"I have spent a couple decades writing a book about human ecology, because it is drastically changing, which presents great danger and great potential. The idea is to describe both so that we can avoid the disasters and take advantage of the potentials. The problems I describe could end human civilization, but the only way to avoid the disasters is to adapt to a new ecology, like the title of the book says. About 10,000 years or so ago, we started leaving the ecology we had grown up in for millions of years. Right now we are in an ecology that is one transient ecology of many that we have been moving through. We need to find one that is stable and that we can live in long term or we are, well, a specie without an ecology is in trouble. If we do not create a stable ecology that is some form of civilization, well, it is going to look like one of those "Post Apocalyptic" movies. It will not be pleasant and it will be hard for humans to ever really be much more than animals. The thing is that it is not just about finding a new ecology, it is also about adapting to survive and be comfortable in it. We are still mostly adapted to the old ecology when we lived in tribes and we need to change to adapt to the new ecology. It is a lot of things. We need to be smarter and more comfortable in a civilization than we are. That is what the books are about. In the mean time, this web site is supposed to serve a few other purposes and offer other resources. It is especially to present discussions about how different points of view can be understood."

Just spending a few minutes so far looking at your site and book blurb, in scope, it reminds me of "Beyond Civilization" by Daniel Quinn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

It also reminds me a bit of "A New Way Of Thinking" which you may find of interest:
http://www.anwot.org/

You have a synopsis here that mentions genetic issues:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...

Certainly evolutionary pressures need to be understood (I was in a PHD program in ecology and evolution for a time). But in the time scale of a transition to some new economy full of AI and robots as capable as most humans for most economic activities (twenty years?) these seem to me to not be pressing issues, whatever the long term may hold. You might also find of interest Freeman Dyson's speculations about genetic engineering as far as possible long term trends in designer biology.
http://www.nybooks.com/article...

On genetics and health, while mutations and birth defects are serious issues, it seems to me the most pressing current health issues relate to vitamin D deficiency, diet lacking in enough vegetables and fruits and with too many refined carbohydrates and artificial additives, too much bad stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of community, problematical infrastructure, and so on (see "Blue Zones" for example).

You also wrote on your site: "In my broad studies, I had to examine the Philosophy of Science. One interesting point is about how science is advanced. Is it by a team of researchers or by individuals. It is a contested point, but I think it is clear that it is by both. Still, in the balance, the contributions by individuals like Newton and Einstein show the power of individual inspiration. That is the path I have taken. "

I certainly appreciate the

It's not the excessive tracking you should be afraid of. What you should worry about is the usage of incomplete data.
As has been covered on slashdot before NSA kills people based on metadata

Now add that together with some accidental killing of a person with the same name

A Reprieve team investigating on the ground in Pakistan turned up what it believes to be a confirmed case of mistaken identity. Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administration’s “kill list” was killed on the third attempt by US drones.

What this tells me is that what I really should worry about is to accidentally having metadata that correlates with someone that the government wants dead.

It must've been around 2007, since googling for 'freeman dyson genetics' brings me to these articles.

Anyway, his argument might best be summed up with his own words:
"I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized."

Exactly. See here for some ideas as to what factors could influence or have definitely influenced prosperity and culture:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...

An article in today's NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html) documents the dismal status of the middle class in the US. It looks like all of the gains in productivity in the past 20 years have gone to the "elites" whose income has increase dramatically while the middle class in the US has stagnated.
In the US, median income has only increased by 0.3% since 2000 while other countries (Britain, Canada, Ireland, Netherlands, for example) have increased 15% to 20%.
This is the problem with capitalism which Piketty documents in his book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". The US is getting there first as Krugman points out: http://www.nybooks.com/article...

You mean they don't weigh the stuff, tell me more, provide citations ...

-- "CIA’s conclusion at about the same time that Israel previously stole bomb-grade uranium from a US naval fuel plant" ref

See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
----
About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...

"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"."
From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...

"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
From the Atlantic from a few years ago:
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...

"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies..."
Also from the Atlantic, just recently:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science"
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
---

Or where US medicine began to go greatly wrong a century ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy.[11] Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors."

Article has been gutted somewhat like many Wikipedia medicine articles. It used to have stuff on how women and minorities had also been disenfranchised by that takeover, so that only rich white guys who could afford college could practice medicine.

Anyway, I may not agree 100% with all your points, an

What you guys are missing is that you're decoding the words on the screen right now. Reading just doesn't feel like decoding, especially if you're any good at it at all.

Right, but decoding is just the translation from one symbology into another, it doesn't create a semantic relationship, decoding can't create meaning, not in the sense we mean here. I can read your for loop, I can tell you it'll run node->count times, but you are the only one that actually can relate node->count to something in the real world, or to the abstract concept, and only humans will be able to give the effect of the loop final meaning. All the program can do is keep juggling symbols back and forth according to what can be reduced to automatic production rules.

Kurzweil's last book was basically premised on the idea that human mind is nothing but an iterative pattern recognition machine, decoding stimuli, and the problem is that this account is totally incomplete and he has to constantly smuggle in consciousness without arguing that it exists, because positing it completely breaks his mechanistic conceit, the idea that the brain is a discrete computing machine and thoughts are symbols and operations on symbols.

I keep thinking of the Matrix programmers. "I only see blondes, brunettes, redheads..."

It was a movie, written by two guys who learned everything they know about computers from AKIRA and 2001 A Space Odyssey...

well, Texas determines school books for the US. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/ (of course..."bad"...is only the headline writer's opinion)

The problem is that he also followed the advice of the corporate right wing. He was part of what Diane Ravitch called the "billionaire boy's club" of school "reformers" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/school-reform-failing-grade/ [nybooks.com] who wanted to privatize public schools, humiliate the teachers, destroy their union...

While I largely agree with most of your post, I don't see what the problem is with this part.

I mean, the current US system, with its overload of money sucking administration and teachers unions that are far more interested in themselves than the kids they are supposed to be teaching, likely does need to be thrown out the window.

What we have now clearly is NOT working...and pretty much any new approach at this point is worth exploring.

Actually up until the point of the gates foundation, Bill Gates was the ultimate Scrooge. He gae away not one penny, it wasn't until he was called out on that very fact that the Gates foudration was formed.

Even much of the supposedly altruistic efforts also seem to have an angle

That's right. Gates was hated, and he wanted to do something about it before Congress held any more hearings and found something (like antitrust) to prosecute him for.

The philanthropy thing was created by his PR agency, and they did a good job. At their advice, he did fund some important projects, like international disease programs that were exactly what all the public health people knew would give tremendous returns for only a relatively few (billion) dollars.

He was like John D. Rockefeller, the other billionaire (after inflation) who was also hated, and hired a PR firm to improve his image. They had him give away shiny dimes to little children. He also did some good things, like his medical research. Fortunately cancer is a favorite rich folks' cause (along with opera).

The problem is that he also followed the advice of the corporate right wing. He was part of what Diane Ravitch called the "billionaire boy's club" of school "reformers" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/school-reform-failing-grade/ who wanted to privatize public schools, humiliate the teachers, destroy their union, rate them with high-stakes testing, and turn education into an assembly line of short-answer questions.

We've turned this country over to the billionaires. It shows you the benefits and problems of letting dictators run things. Gates did some good things (world epidemics) and some bad things (charter schools).

When he gets involved in (tax-deductible) charities that bring his own interests into conflict with the interests of others, like immigration "reform", you know whose side he's going to be on.

I personally don't think this would be a very good country if we turned it into a billionaire's playground rather than the imperfect democracy it used to be.

Is this close enough?

"One kind of jellyfish, which might be termed the zombie jelly, is quite literally immortal. When Turritopsis dohrnii “dies” it begins to disintegrate, which is pretty much what you expect from a corpse. But then something strange happens. A number of cells escape the rotting body. These cells somehow find each other, and reaggregate to form a polyp. All of this happens within five days of the jellyfish’s “death,” and weirdly, it’s the norm for the species."

or this?

"One of the fastest breeders of all is Mnemiopsis. Biologists characterize it as a “self-fertilizing simultaneous hermaphrodite,” which means that it doesn’t need a partner to reproduce, nor does it need to switch from one sex to the other, but can be both sexes at once. It begins laying eggs when just thirteen days old, and is soon laying 10,000 per day. Even cutting these prolific breeders into pieces doesn’t slow them down. If quartered, the bits will regenerate and resume normal life as whole adults in two to three days."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?page=2

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?pagination=false

Consider the case where you're guilty but if you answer all the cop's questions, they'll ask the judge for leniency. If you refuse to talk until you get a lawyer, and then "cooperate" through your lawyer, are the cops just as likely to recommend leniency?

Remember in general police don't ask for or against leniency, they just testify. About the only "asking for leniency" a typical judge would give serious weight too(in part because it's a case of having CYA) would be if it came from the prosecutor. Prosecutors and police are generally on the same side, but any deal made by one isn't binding on the other and the only one who really matters is what the prosecutor agrees too. So as in any other field, don't give away leverage until you get something for it. Remember the prosecutor isn't after "justice" as one would normally think of it, but rather punitive convictions that will allow for re-elections and advancement. On that topic I recommend the book "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" or at least the short review of it here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/our-broken-system-criminal-justice/?pagination=false

One possibility is that if you talk to the police, for example, to help them catch a criminal, that may benefit you (insofar as it makes your neighborhood safer) and perhaps you might sincerely care about making your society safer as well. However, that doesn't benefit the lawyer, so they don't care.

I don't know what kind of answer this is, but it isn't an answer to the question I asked.

What I meant was: You asked, "Why would a lawyer not advise a person to speak to the police?" One possible answer is that if there are benefits to speaking to speaking to the police. However those benefits don't accrue to the lawyer, so they may not take it into account when telling you never to talk to the cops.

Consider the case where you're guilty but if you answer all the cop's questions, they'll ask the judge for leniency. If you refuse to talk until you get a lawyer, and then "cooperate" through your lawyer, are the cops just as likely to recommend leniency?

Remember in general police don't ask for or against leniency, they just testify. About the only "asking for leniency" a typical judge would give serious weight too(in part because it's a case of having CYA) would be if it came from the prosecutor. Prosecutors and police are generally on the same side, but any deal made by one isn't binding on the other and the only one who really matters is what the prosecutor agrees too. So as in any other field, don't give away leverage until you get something for it. Remember the prosecutor isn't after "justice" as one would normally think of it, but rather punitive convictions that will allow for re-elections and advancement. On that topic I recommend the book "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" or at least the short review of it here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/our-broken-system-criminal-justice/?pagination=false

One possibility is that if you talk to the police, for example, to help them catch a criminal, that may benefit you (insofar as it makes your neighborhood safer) and perhaps you might sincerely care about making your society safer as well. However, that doesn't benefit the lawyer, so they don't care.

I don't know what kind of answer this is, but it isn't an answer to the question I asked. It seems you took the opportunity to construct a response that would make your position tenable on maybe some kind of righteous quest. Who says that whatever law was broken is actually a moral and just law? Or are you saying that because a law exists it's moral and just?

You REALLY don't want to read the third paragraph of this article then.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?page=2

It'll scare the crap out of you. Seriously.

Here's a sample:

One of the fastest breeders of all is Mnemiopsis. Biologists characterize it as a “self-fertilizing simultaneous hermaphrodite,” which means that it doesn’t need a partner to reproduce, nor does it need to switch from one sex to the other, but can be both sexes at once. It begins laying eggs when just thirteen days old, and is soon laying 10,000 per day.

Jellyfish are voracious feeders. Mnemiopsis is able to eat over ten times its own body weight in food, and to double in size, each day.

Unintended consequences.

We hunt the predators ie fish. Their prey take over the ocean. Literally.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?page=1

It's estimated that now over 50% of the biomass of the world's oceans is jellyfish, in some cases completely displacing all other biosystems. One other human activity vector that has impacted jellyfish populations is shipping, transporting species globally to locations with no predators. The warming of waters by nuclear power may locally cause phenomenon which encourage jellyfish growth also. If you could avoid destroying other marine life, maybe the answer to the cooling intakes is "will it blend?".

Japan’s nuclear power plants have been under attack by jellyfish since the 1960s, with up to 150 tons per day having to be removed from the cooling system of just one power plant.

...

That’s just what happened when the Mnemiopsis jellyfish (a kind of comb jelly) invaded the Black Sea. The creatures arrived from the east coast of the US in seawater ballast (seawater a ship takes into its hold once it has discharged its cargo to retain its stability), and by the 1980s they were taking over. Prior to their arrival, Bulgaria, Romania, and Georgia had robust fisheries, with anchovies and sturgeon being important resources. As the jellyfish increased, the anchovies and other valuable fish vanished, and along with them went the sturgeon, the long-beloved source of blini toppings.

By 2002 the total weight of Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea had grown so prodigiously that it was estimated to be ten times greater than the weight of all fish caught throughout the entire world in a year. The Black Sea had become effectively jellified. Nobody knows precisely how or why the jellyfish replaced the valuable fish species, but four hypotheses have been put forward.

from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?pagination=false

Interesting article, YOU READ NOW.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?pagination=false