Slashdot Mirror

Nkoloso, at least from the evidence we have to go on, was something closer to a cargo cult leader than a scientist. What remains fascinating to us today is that he drew on the sublimity of space travel -- not religious sentiment -- to win friends and influence people. It's a reminder of the power that space travel had in the popular imagination of the 1960s.

( Old, Weird Tech: The Zambian Space Cult of the 1960s
Edward Makuka Nkoloso )
Though I seriously wonder about the mentioned cats ;) ... if we ever seriously venture into space, what other cuddly pet could be possibly better? ;p (not only agility or hygiene, also the theme of them being chosen already when the space is scarce and conditions hard ... )

These new features are a response to an attempt by Tunisian Internet censors tried to steal the Facebook passwords of everyone in the country to disrupt the protests against the government.

You're just relating the most recent news you heard to what has now been announced.

Just because you lack information it doesn't mean that you have to force whatever tiny bit you know to explain everything else.

Check this out:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2011/01/the-inside-story-of-how-facebook-responded-to-tunisian-hacks/70044/

Today, history has been made. A social networking site actually listened to its users and implemented a bit of security. *astonished*

Nope, looks like this is the reason that FB implemented https: across their site:

The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks

They also mention the identification of photos in your account as another measure they used to prevent password hijacking by Tunisian censors.

The evidence that accounts were being hacked remained anecdotal. Facebook's security team couldn't prove something was wrong in the data. It wasn't until after the new year that the shocking truth emerged: Ammar was in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords. [...] Sullivan's team rapidly coded a two-step response to the problem. First, all Tunisian requests for Facebook were routed to an https server. [...] The second technical solution they implemented was a "roadblock" for anyone who had logged out and then back in during the time when the malicious code was running. Like Facebook's version of a "mother's maiden name" question to get access to your old password, it asks you to identify your friends in photos to complete an account login.

The probably dropped him as CEO because he just comes off as creepy and not giving a damn about privacy; and this from the CEO of a company that's collecting information about everything and everyone. His insights and abilities are probably appreciated, but when he's in front of a camera he ends up saying something stupid that makes Google look evil. Here's an example from the WSJ. Here's another from the Atlantic. The crap he says makes him sound like someone who's Google's enemy and trying to scaremonger the public.

According to a U.S. diplomatic cable recently published by WikiLeaks, Ahmadinejad, despite all of his tough talk and heated speeches about Iran's right to a nuclear program, fervently supported the Geneva arrangement, which would have left Iran without enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon. But, inside the often opaque Tehran government, he was thwarted from pursuing the deal by politicians on both the right and the left who saw the agreement as a "defeat" for the country and who viewed Ahmadinejad as, in the words of Ali Larijani, the conservative Speaker of the Majles, "fooled by the Westerners."

The expression "wipe from the map" means "destroy" in English but not in Farsi. In Farsi, it means not that Israel should be eliminated but that the existing political borders should literally be wiped from a literal map and replaced with those of historic Palestine. That's still not something likely to win him cheers in U.S. policy circles, but the distinction, which has been largely lost from the West's understanding of the Iranian president, is important.

Every time I post on this, I get modded toll by somebody with an agenda, but I think it's important so I try again.

Assange is a narcissist. He isn't doing anything honorable by dumping all this classified stuff. Leaking information which reveals wrongdoing is noble, wholesale dumping of classified material is chaos. Some secrets are secret for good reasons. For example:

What good comes from leaking the cables of a diplomat clandestinely investigating human rights abuses? It simultaneously gave the oppressive regime a reason to be more oppressive and the names of people to go after, but Assange knows best - people have a right to know! See WikiLeaks just made the world more repressive

How about undermining a democratic reformer in Zimbabwe? Did that do any good? I have a good friend in Zimbabwe, he's in enough danger already just for supporting the MDC. Now a cleptocratic tyrant has the excuse he needs to hold on to power, prolonging the misery of an entire country, and my friend might end up in jail, or dead. But I suppose the death and deprivation of faceless Africans won't keep Julian up at night.

Oddly, one case where Mr. Assange saw fit to withhold information was the "Collateral Murder" video. Not because it could endanger somebody, but because it didn't fit with the narrative he constructed. Rather than objectively present the video with the relevant context, he purposefully left out any mention of the convoy that was approaching or the attacks that had recently occurred that same day, implying that the helicopter was just randomly firing at a group of people. He implies that the pilot's identification of weapons was incorrect, but fails to provide a copy or even a link to the report (which was released, though names are redacted), which details fun facts like the RPGs and AKs they found on and around the "civilians". He doesn't mention that the Reuters employees had not told anyone where they were going to be, and were not wearing ANY press identification. I could go on...

The point is that Assange has always had an agenda, and it certainly isn't exposing government wrongdoing, or even presenting the uncolored, unfiltered truth (if it doesn't suit him). I don't know why so many people here idolize him.

Have you seen this?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/

Nor is it exactly new. After the last strange dip in the stock exchange a lot of research was done into this, and it basically comes down to inserting bullshit data into the stream so that competitors have to process the data while the injector does not.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/

http://www.naturalnews.com/z030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096/rankin-on-thursday-where-communism-succeeded.htm
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-26/glaxo-said-to-settle-u-s-drug-manufacturing-lawsuit-for-750-million.html

Wired on the orginal article:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/the-truth-wears-off/

Anyway, this New Yorker article once again underscores the folly of going to extremes against common sense or long standing cultural traditions, based on some new scientific report or another, without looking at the broad big picture on overall weight of all the evidence we have from a variety of perspectives.

But even when there is a wide variety of good science, often policy ignores it.
Problems with the recent timid vitamin D recommendation:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Dr. Joel Fuhrman on how much money the USA spends on sick care for very poor outcomes:
http://vimeo.com/16682935

http://www.naturalnews.com/z030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096/rankin-on-thursday-where-communism-succeeded.htm
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-26/glaxo-said-to-settle-u-s-drug-manufacturing-lawsuit-for-750-million.html

Wired on the orginal article:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/the-truth-wears-off/

Anyway, this New Yorker article once again underscores the folly of going to extremes against common sense or long standing cultural traditions, based on some new scientific report or another, without looking at the broad big picture on overall weight of all the evidence we have from a variety of perspectives.

But even when there is a wide variety of good science, often policy ignores it.
Problems with the recent timid vitamin D recommendation:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Dr. Joel Fuhrman on how much money the USA spends on sick care for very poor outcomes:
http://vimeo.com/16682935

I just last week had a frank discussion with a former surgeon general about the predecessor article referenced on Slashdot, from the Atlantic Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.

He noted that there was a lot of truth to the article. We discussed a few bases for this phenomenon, most notably:

1. The money: Researchers need funding, but funding is often effectively conditional on a finding of conclusions favourable to the funder (which funders are often either big pharmaceuticals or big governments);

2. The stigma: A "failure" to "prove" a hypothesis looks poorly on a researcher, so they often choose topics that are:
    (a) irrelevant and so unlikely to ever be tested in the future; or
    (b) trite and so unlikely to fail.

We have created a self-perpetuating system of "research" that leads to few useful results in the form of valuable hypotheticals being tested. Where potentially valuable hypotheses are being "tested" the methods used are often contrived so as to reach a specific conclusion, and unconcerned with the truth. These facades of research designed so as to reach specific conclusions allow companies and governments to market product and policy decisions, respectively, which they consider favourable.

All to say, the finding of a useful truth, although supposedly the object of scientific research and generally considered to be at least an incidental consequence of our economic system through e.g. the market's invisible hand, is in practice in the Western world at best irrelevant and at worst heavily counter-incentivized.

The absence of consequence – the curse of affluence – serves to perpetuate an increasing disconnect between reality and the publications that peddle the results of research.

How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe Are their anonymous fans trying to compensate for that?

How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe, The Atlantic, December 28, 2010

Interesting. I notice first of all the biased headline. Why not "How the PENTAGON just set back..." or "How Bradly Manning just set back.."
And how exactly is it Wikileaks fault, as opposed to the Pentagon (for their piss-poor security) or Manning (the guy who actually stole and passed on the data)?

Really, I'd like to hear your logic. You give the Pentagon a free pass, ignore the outright Traitorous activity of Manning, and blame the Messenger instead. Nice. Which branch of the government or conservative media outlet do you shill for?

I also notice you, and the other Wikileaks-bashers, don't bother to even mention the fact that the NY Times has printed unredacted copies of cables which WERE redacted by Wikileaks. So unless you're claiming that they were in League with Manning, you're blaming the wrong people.

But looking at the story, we have even more to consider. So the way that Wikileaks "set back democracy" is that they published a cable which was stolen by someone from a place it should never have been in the first place. The contents of the cable revealed that a politician secretly supported something he publicly opposed. The logic as to how democracy was "set back" is that this discredits him, and now he has political egg on his face. Well good, he SHOULD be discredited, he's not being honest in the first place!! But nooooo, let's ignore that. Let's also make some wild speculations as to the possible eventually fallout from this political embarrassment.

How about this. Show me something that Wikileaks has done which caused or will cause any harm.

Taken as a whole, however, a leak of this elephantine magnitude, which appears to demonstrate no misconduct by the U.S., is difficult to defend on any basis other than WikiLeaks' general disdain for any secrecy at all.

See... It is all about the USA.

It is A-OK to leak Pentagon Papers as they show how American people were fooled by their government - even if the secrets they held were FAR more sinister and serious than 99% of stuff in the Wikileaks cables.
But that is THE RIGHT of Americans to stand up to their corrupt government. That's democracy at its finest.

But should the rest of the world get a taste of being aware they are being fooled by their leaders (or by other countries) - well shit, that can only destroy democracy.
The same thing that is "defending democracy" in USA, makes no sense outside of USA - it must be the "general disdain for any secrecy at all".

And the last paragraph is simply disgusting.

Mr. Assange is no boon to American journalists.
His activities have already doomed proposed federal shield-law legislation protecting journalists' use of confidential sources in the just-adjourned Congress.
An indictment of him could be followed by the judicial articulation of far more speech-limiting legal principles than currently exist with respect to even the most responsible reporting about both diplomacy and defense.
If he is not charged or is acquitted of whatever charges may be made, that may well lead to the adoption of new and dangerously restrictive legislation.
In more than one way, Mr. Assange may yet have much to answer for.

We're doooomed!

The witch has turned the evildoers against us and we are powerless to defend ourselves against them.
If we could only voice our disagreement with what the evildoers want to do to us, maybe they would be stopped somehow. Alas, we are mute.

So burn the witch for dooming us either way - if the witch floats we are doomed, if he sinks we are doomed.
Doomed! DOOMED I SAY! DOOOOOOMED!!!

 
 
Also, as a FUCKING LAWYER Floyd (he doesn't mind when people call him that) should have SOME idea of who holds the actual culpability for the leaks or at least some common sense regarding the whole thing.
Honestly, are we really supposed to believe that anyone would chase Assange across half the globe on supposed sexual harassment charges if anyone (else) anywhere in the world had anything bigger to pin on him?

How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe, The Atlantic, December 28, 2010

So again the US is interfering in other countries - they get caught and a tyrant continues to be a tyrant, but somehow the exposure is the problem?

I'd suggest you save your outrage. There is likely more about blood diamond money, oil, and attempted government overthrows in the wind. It wasn't just the British that put Mugabe in power.

How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe, The Atlantic, December 28, 2010

Woz wrote a beautiful article on net neutrality that was posted today.

well, to your first point, I agree. In fact, I sort of alluded to that type of activity when I mentioned the black ops funding and pointed to some examples of funding directed in ways to obscure it's original intent or value to military weapons.

As these are not simply things dictated by the republicans and have to be placed into a bill to become law, if and when something like this crops up, other committees in the house and senate should be able to stop it from being detrimental as well as from being railed on by those leaders looking at it. You know, like the $400 step ladders that navy was buying when a step ladder as Sears could be purchased for $40. After some members of congress wanted heads on a plate, they found out that those $400 step ladders had special cleats that locked it into place on small cutters and other navy vessels with safety lanyard attachments on it to protect sailors from the rolling and other motions of the nature of the boat being in the water. I guess before those step ladders came about, you almost had to dry-dock some of the smaller crafts in order to do simple repairs (some of which might need done when in action) in rough seas or risk loosing the crew overboard.

For your second point, I don't think you are understanding it as it is presented. That or I'm not, one or the other. It appears to me that this is just a starting point where the public points to things to take a look at and then once that is identified, deeper inspection and discussion comes about. After community discussion, it gets presented as a bill and goes through congress requiring congress to discuss and vote on it before anything is actually done.

And BTW, Death Panels is something that the left has more or less admitted to. In fact, they are talking about it as the means of savings on the Obama care legislation. You can find Paul Krugman saying it here in which he clarified what he meant here You can find Peter R. Orszag talking about it here too. Now granted, they don't come out and call it a death panel, but they validate Palin's definition of a death panel "

I was about laughed out of town for bringing to light what I call death panels, because there's going to be faceless bureaucrats who will — based on cost analysis and some subjective idea on somebody's level of productivity in life.... call the shots as to whether your loved one will be able to receive health care or not. To me, death panel. I called it like I saw it, and people didn't like it

".

Please, skip past the bias of the pages they are hosted on and look at the statements made. Also, Orszag's comments seem to be edited together, I have not attempted to pursue a complete segment from him as I did a simple google search for "democrats admit to death panels" to get the examples. And while the actual term death panel isn't used in those comments, I'm reminded of Shakespeare in that a rose by any other name would smell as sweat the same.

Recall that some wanted to make Washington King of America, but he bared his wooden teeth at them and refused.

And went home to his sumptuous estate (dude was worth half a billion in today's dollars) and his hundreds of slaves. It's not like he was retiring to the simple life...he was fabulously wealthy, and he had helped set running a federal government that was strong enough to protect the wealthy and powerful. Why should he bother with the stress of being a king?

I do not know much of anything about centrifuges or uranium, but I know I have seen a number of articles claiming that this was designed to speed up centrifuges to the point that the uranium was rendered useless.

Here are two examples I found with a quick google search, not necessarily the most credible sources, but there are plenty of people claiming it:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/wikileaks_stuxnet_cyberwar_and.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/stuxnet-worm-did-likely-target-iranian-nuclear-facilities/66604/

You can't be for locking a man up without first being absolutely sure which laws he has broken.

Yes I can. That's what prosecutors and investigating LEOs are for. To lock people suspected of committing crimes up while awaiting trial. Society has been on board with this idea for quite some time too.

No, I mean the specific laws. You can't just point in the vague direction of a foreign document and say it might have something in it about the case.

This leaked document provided by wikileaks violates the Espionage act carrying a severe penalty. All of the documents that are marked secrete continue to violate the espionage act and simply possessing them can carry 10 years in prison.

I haven't read all the documents released, I don't care to. But from reports, I can reasonably see a couple specific statutes that a violation occurred on. There are probably more depending on the contents of the information in possession or the effects of the releases. It was not my intention to specifically accuse wikileaks of anything nor was it my intention to argue the merits of it. It was my intention to state that there are limits to what can be published in the name of journalism and there can be serious repercussions if you cross those limits.

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11921220
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/05/julian-assange-lawyers-being-watched
• http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/wikileaks-reveals-ugly-truth-about-iran-appeasers/story-fn59niix-1225966020409
• http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16762752?source=rss&nclick_check=1
• http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/must-read-nyt-wikileaks-on-china-and-google/67499/
• http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Wikileaks+indictment+diplomacy/3927123/story.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_GDP

GDP of the EU is $33,052
GDP of the US is $46,442

Or is 33,000 higher than 46,000 now?

As to American Exceptionalism, it is the idea that the United States is unique and different, not that everything we do is better and we as a nation are always right.

For example, in 1974 when political rivals and the courts finally drove Nixon out of office, something that in many nations would have lead to outright revolution how many guns were in sight? Just those on the traffic cops.

The only people I've ever seen claim that American Exceptionalism is "we are better" are Howard Zinn and Chomsky, and sorry but Zinn and Chomsky don't get to decide what is and what isn't.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/americanexceptionalism.htm

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/why-american-exceptionalism-rules/67118/

They don't do cavity searches, that's part of the bizarre theatre of it all. Part of the point of this article was that most people hide illicit things in areas which would require a cavity search and they just feel you up. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-first-time-the-tsa-meets-resistance/65390/

I don't know why we are relying on a Google translated article when Xinhua News Agency (state run) offers their own English translations (second copy) of this exact news release. And they're much more readable. Such news sites often offer me periodic enjoyment.

Patent and innovation discourse aside, it should be noted there's an interesting piece comparing the locality of populations in the US vs China. Let's face it, China (and the Southeast Asia region this connects them with) have a higher population density and a greater need for this high speed lengthy rail. It's also going to bring much needed economic development via freight shipments to very poor areas that the United States probably wouldn't experience on a corresponding scale.

Oh, also, there's some pretty entertaining rail-envy springing up.

And before you call it outright theft, consider the history of the "technology transfer" program that seeded all this. It sounds like there's going to be lengthy lawsuits lasting a decade or more and that the companies have reason to sue -- good reason. I wonder how this is going to affect future "technology transfer" programs to China. Also, one last bit of praise: NPR's radio coverage of this has been top notch.

Is this because somebody, somewhere thought these frisking methods would be more effective, or is it a means of discouraging people from "opting out" of AIT?

I don't know, but I suspect the latter.

According to an article in the Atlantic, a TSA employee said that is exactly the reason for the policy.

I asked him if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs. "Nobody's going to do it," he said, "once they find out that we're going to do."

In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? "That's what we're hoping for. We're trying to get everyone into the machine." He called over a colleague. "Tell him what you call the back-scatter," he said. "The Dick-Measuring Device," I said. "That's the truth," the other officer responded.

This article by Jeffrey Goldberg is both sad, hilarious, and informative. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-first-time-the-tsa-meets-resistance/65390/ "We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance," he explained. "Resistance?" I asked. "Your testicles," he explained. "That's funny," I said, "because 'The Resistance' is the actual name I've given to my testicles."

I sense confirmation bias. Doesn't make it true or not true.

Hard to know what is true: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269

Personally my health noticeably deteriorates when I don't include some dead animal in my diet. It might be possible to substitute insects but is raising and killing a bunch of insects less morally objectionable to raising and killing chickens, rabbits or cows? If so, why?

Either way your "general consensus" is debatable at best and delusional at worst.

With a watered-down representation of a niche, minority, or extreme viewpoint, apparently.

With a watered-down representation of a niche, minority, or extreme viewpoint, apparently.

With a watered-down representation of a niche, minority, or extreme viewpoint, apparently.

With a watered-down representation of a niche, minority, or extreme viewpoint, apparently.

Except... unemployment using the same models was predicted to be lower without the bailouts than it got to with the bailouts. They plugged the same numbers into the same models and got the same results... proving nothing since their models were proven wrong already.

Except the USA has lots of nukes, plagues, military robots, computer viruses, and who knows what else that stand ready to defend US elite privileged scarcity-based litigious world view until the end -- or even after the end. So, no matter where you go in the world, US socioeconomic dogmatic religious policies (backed by the force of law) can have a big "impact". And since the USA's elite-tilted market economy is essentially though of as "God" by many (ignoring "the love of money is the root of all evil"?), whatever the USA does to promote or defend its version of "the market" and related laws is, by definition, "supremely good", even were it to mean the end of humanity. The USA has inched a little closer to that by reelecting a lot of economic conservatives just now.

By a Harvard University professor of Divinity:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar. Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. ..."

The slogan "Better dead than Red" is another example of this thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. So "Better dead than live in a world of prosperity for all" could perhaps be a new mantra of the USA in the 21st century when 3D printing and shared information make widespread abundance possible, but everyone does not want to accept the shift to a new paradigm? See also James P. Hogan's prescient sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" about this theme.

3D printing might totally reshape our socioeconomic landscape in the next couple of decades. So, essentially, producing a car with 3D printing is a *religious* threat to the US social paradigm built around scarcity. And religious threats can cause all sorts of crazy things to happen. I can hope that saner heads prevail and that the scarcity ideologues eventually give in gracefully when they think about the benefits to their children and children's children of a world that works for everyone.

From Einstein, on religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source."

An interesting essay by someon

Yeah, we need to eliminate mathematics from education because the economist's wet dream of Homo economicus is already working too well. What's sad is to see a statistician write this. For shame, for absolute shame. Statistics are quoted in every newspaper and on every TV station every day, mostly to the befuddlement of the general public.

The problem is that we don't want an educated public who regards the following paper as common sense:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Or course what I'm saying is not original to me. Dweebs everywhere are catching on.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education

Although I would say that the principle of calculus is important. The problem with calculus is that we can't resist testing ugly mechanics. I guess we have our grade three spelling teacher to thank for that. Great literature, but can't spell during a flood of inspiration? Go to the back of the class.

Jane Austen's famous prose may not be hers after all

Regurgitating trig identities as evidence of grasping calculus has an electric chair utility function in the non-engineering population. But seriously, 16% of American GDP spent on health care, largely at the mercy of corporate observational studies, and a statistician is arguing that math education is overrated. Oh, the humanity! How about the general population having the vaguest clue about long tails and concentration of risk?

What Alan Greenspan got wrong is that while heads-up poker is a zero sum game and self interest carries the day, multiparty poker is subject to implicit collusion. You just need one weak player at the table bleeding a big stack for the poker sharks at the table to lick their chops collectively and organize for a division of spoils.

In the world of Goldman Sachs, the chump at the table is the average wage slave trying to save for retirement with no mathematical tools whatsoever. "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker." So, after one viewing of Fox News, you're expected to know the score. If the general public wasn't trained by public education to play over their heads, the financial elite might be subject to the market discipline of having to play at a table of equals. The horror! The horror!

Williard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your market discipline was unsound.
Goldman: Is my market discipline unsound?
Williard: I don't see any market discipline at all, sir.
Goldman: Who needs discipline when education is bliss?
Williard: These savages have K12?
Photographer: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions.
Williard: Are you giving up America for a Playmate of the Month?
Goldman: Playmate of the Year, chief, Playmate of the Year.
Williard: What's in it for the crew?
Goldman: Would you believe 'sloppy seconds'?
Willard: You're the asshole of the world, major!

Playmate of the Year: Who are you?
Cleaned out: I'm next, ma'am.
Playmate: Are you crazy, Goddammit? Don't you think it's a little risky for your 401(k)?

Willard: Charlie Brown didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or bleeding too fast. His idea of great retirement was cold grits and a little bush meat. He had only two ways home: death, or bingo, the largest risk his education had trained him to comprehend.

Overt plutocracy is so very vulgar, and might get the proles worked up....

It is interesting to note exactly how little people know about the actual American wealth distribution...

It seems that there is no real connection between this group and Tehran. It's important to remember that when there is real discussion going on about conflict with Iran. That being said, this group does seem to be motivated by some sort of Iranian nationalism. It's just a further reminder of how small groups and individuals can inflame international imbroglios, leaving state actors in a bind. Think the Netanyahu and Obama administrations' paralysis over how to handle the settlers in the West Bank.

Except, you know, the Iranian president doesn't like anyone who isn't a Muslim.

As for how to deal with the West Bank "settlers", move 'em out (same with the Gaza Strip folks). That is Israeli territory. Period. They have a legitimate claim to that land as it was legally bought by Jewish settlers a long time ago at more than fair prices and NO ONE was forced to sell their property.

It seems that there is no real connection between this group and Tehran. It's important to remember that when there is real discussion going on about conflict with Iran. That being said, this group does seem to be motivated by some sort of Iranian nationalism. It's just a further reminder of how small groups and individuals can inflame international imbroglios, leaving state actors in a bind. Think the Netanyahu and Obama administrations' paralysis over how to handle the settlers in the West Bank.

Nuke all those Arabs.

America, Fuck Yeah!

It seems that there is no real connection between this group and Tehran. It's important to remember that when there is real discussion going on about conflict with Iran. That being said, this group does seem to be motivated by some sort of Iranian nationalism. It's just a further reminder of how small groups and individuals can inflame international imbroglios, leaving state actors in a bind. Think the Netanyahu and Obama administrations' paralysis over how to handle the settlers in the West Bank.

I don't think that's the problem at all. It's more like we don't punish success because it leads to less people becoming successful. And it's not that they think the 250k and up crowd can't afford to pay the taxes, it's that they shouldn't be singled out to pay for the demands of less successful people.

250k is an arbitrary number anyways. It's not even in the original bush tax cuts. All it seems to be doing is creating conflicts that shouldn't exist. According to the WSJ, the top tax payers are paying more with the cuts then they did in 1990. The interesting part is that with the enactments of the bush tax cuts outside of the first years it was in place, growth in income tax revenue increased at a pace as good as or better then in Clinton's term until the start of the recession and more taxes were collected then the costs of the tax cuts.

Whenever I dig deep enough into one of these alternative medicine type ideas it invariably becomes clear to me that their proponents are accepting a pretty low level of evidence...

"A pretty low level of evidence" is par for the course in medical research. Slashdot had a story about this last Friday. I like this quote from the fine article:

... This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

-Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Research

Anyway, I think you are wrong about Linus Pauling being concerned with unhealthy individuals

I'm in the middle of a move, and ran across a copy of Cancer and Vitamin C. While Pauling did recommend Vitamin C for everyone, various types of diseases were focused on.

I just haven't really seen good evidence that any supplement use (even just multivitamins) is superior to diet and lifestyle modification.

Suppose that supplements were instead compared to pharmaceuticals - would this change the equation at all? Most of the people I know are incapable of performing diet and lifestyle modifications, not even to save their life.

My step father had a heart attack some 15 years ago. He has no interest in changing his diet, or adopting a rigorous exercise program. It'd be nice if there was some research to compare Plavix to Vitamin C + Magnesium + B-Complex...

But the real problem with research is that we're all so incredibly different. If you want to look into the 'gold standard' of a holistic approach to health, you need to consider what Cayce said on a given condition. Or rather, what he said about specific people who had a condition. The recommendations given were always unique, but there were common themes...

Read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97jan/borlaug/borlaug.htm
Thanks to people like Norman Borlaugh, developing countries like India have actually slowed down the rate of green cover destruction. In the last 60 years, India went from a "basket case" to a net exporter of food, with an increase of just 1% of its farming area.
Short answer, stop worrying! Really!

It says somewhere on the CIA public website (or used to) essentially that if you are applying for a job there, you should not tell anyone. I guess, the first rule of the CIA is no one works there, except Valery Plame. :-) But the CIA suggests that in part for the reasons you imply, as it can presumably make people a target (although it also would complicated covert things). Of course, who is not a target in some way in this world? Things become an issue of "risk management", like so much in life. It's unfortunate that the US has such an organization that mixes up sensemaking, spying, and covert operations. I think a "COIA" (Central Open Intelligence Agency?) that just worked in public would be much more effective for US security. :-) Maybe to complement the "Department of Peace" Dennis Kucinich and others have worked towards? :-) Although various different agencies and parts of agencies all do part of that task, but there may be poor integration of all that. And, of course, nothing is going to work right as long as our economic religion is so messed up (and a top priority has to be rethinking economics for the 21st century so it stops being primarily a faith-based dogmatic religion that denies it is a religion. :-) Related:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm

As to me and my funding, under our current socioeconomic paradigm, I'm right now mostly one step above Kryten as a toilet-scrubbing homeschooling stay-at-home Dad, supported by a wife doing data-analysis consulting for "civilian" corporations these days, where my hobbies include developing FOSS software, writing long essays like this that hardly anyone reads, taking care of three elderly chickens, and taking part in a global "Blessed Unrest" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ towards saving a world that, way more often than not, is uninterested in being saved from its own internal contradictions and ironies. A world going mad from simple things like vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and legumes:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

Best job I ever had. :-)

But if the CIA came along and offered me a big grant to do publicly available FOSS Intelligence software and related content, would I ask my wife to do even more of the homeschooling and chicken care than she does already, or maybe even hire a multilingual tutor for some of the time and/or buy a toilet scrubbing robot? Probably. :-) How's that for ethics? :-) Would I rather such work was funded some other way? Sure. We tried a bit and failed with the NSF and NASA:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe we did not try hard enough perhaps... I have to admire these Concord people for their success and doing stuff mostly the right way (at least, as right as you can be if focused mostly on the needs of compulsory schools):
http://www.concord.org/

Politics and FOSS can make strange bedfellows. A few years ago there was a slashdot story on someone doing FOSS who lost a military-related contract after he said he took military money because it meant one less cruise missile or something. But he was right in a way. Imagine what some FOSS developers could do with the time otherwise made available by the money tied up in just one Tomahawk cruise missile (US$6

Because it is the principled thing to do? Because it would net trillions of dollars in savings? Because it wasn't sunny enough to play basketball that day???

BUT IT WON'T END THE WAR. All of his replacements in the Republican party are pledged to continue it. And spread it to Iran, for that matter.

Now this right here is total BS. I'm only illustrating how the Executive has control over his own branch of government. I'm not discussing anything covered by Congressional powers at all.

Read this slowly: The cabinet departments are created and sustained by Acts of Congress. The president is not a CEO, he cannot recreate his organization; he's bound by law.

Which is all I'm proposing. Let's elect someone who exhibits the leadership to give us what we want - smaller, less expensive government.

Nobody really wants that. They want government smaller, except for every program from which they derive benefit. No political actor in our system, Republican, Democrat, Tea Partier, Green or Religious Rightist has proposed a specific plan for spending reductions that could win majority support. People like their wars and social security and medicare just fine, and when you propose something that reduces the deficit, it's a "death panel" or it "hurts seniors" or it "hurts the troops." The Tea Party campaigns for lower deficits in the abstract, but no Tea Party candidate or group (while they're not dressing like SS officers or gaybashing or lying on their resume) has committed to a budget, and those that have, like Paul Ryan, have been marginalized and their proposals spiked, because the Tea Party is demographically loaded with Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, and their leadership in the Republican Party is institutionally committed to the security state.

Because it is the principled thing to do? Because it would net trillions of dollars in savings? Because it wasn't sunny enough to play basketball that day???

BUT IT WON'T END THE WAR. All of his replacements in the Republican party are pledged to continue it. And spread it to Iran, for that matter.

Now this right here is total BS. I'm only illustrating how the Executive has control over his own branch of government. I'm not discussing anything covered by Congressional powers at all.

Read this slowly: The cabinet departments are created and sustained by Acts of Congress. The president is not a CEO, he cannot recreate his organization; he's bound by law.

Which is all I'm proposing. Let's elect someone who exhibits the leadership to give us what we want - smaller, less expensive government.

Nobody really wants that. They want government smaller, except for every program from which they derive benefit. No political actor in our system, Republican, Democrat, Tea Partier, Green or Religious Rightist has proposed a specific plan for spending reductions that could win majority support. People like their wars and social security and medicare just fine, and when you propose something that reduces the deficit, it's a "death panel" or it "hurts seniors" or it "hurts the troops." The Tea Party campaigns for lower deficits in the abstract, but no Tea Party candidate or group (while they're not dressing like SS officers or gaybashing or lying on their resume) has committed to a budget, and those that have, like Paul Ryan, have been marginalized and their proposals spiked, because the Tea Party is demographically loaded with Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, and their leadership in the Republican Party is institutionally committed to the security state.

No; no, they would have. It would have been a good thing, long term, for the automotive industry and transportation in general. They'd have had restructuring - firings, in part, but also re-examination of their design processes and the like to try to save money/improve the designs. The "brand" would suffer, as would their bottom line, as they went from 'shiney crap at inflated prices' to 'well made dull stuff at cheaper prices'

Restructuring? Well golly! It sounds like you're talking about a bankruptcy. Gee. If only they thought of that. Well fuck. they did!

1) While the private sector will frequently lie, it tends to result in nothing but negative outcomes for the company in question (long term).

Good thing Philip Morris, err I mean Altria, is out of business. Oh wait. they're not. How about Union Carbide, I mean Dow Chemical? Gee. They're doing just fine too. How about AIG? They're still around, as are all the rating agencies and the investment firms. At least BP came clean about about how bad the oil leak was. But, wait they didn't did they? Well I'm sure someone lied and didn't make a handsome profit doing so!

Seriously dude, you've asserted this, but history just doesn't back you up.

It is financially not in their interest to lie to frequently, as this creates long-term brand distrust

No. It's not in their interest to get caught, and even then market share, substantial cash reserves, and quick rebranding campaign, and everything is back to as it was. The public has a very short attention span when it comes to scandals. At worse what happens is some the "few bad apples" are spun off along with all their liabilities, while the "independent" parent company keeps the profits since the bad apples had to buy themselves out of the parent.

Furthermore, the government is there to keep them in check, and is constantly busting knuckles due to private sector lies (unless there is money involved for them, of course).

Wow. You really haven't been paying attention have you? When is money not involved?

2) The point is that government rarely doesn't lie.

Again an assertion.

You can't have a bunch of potheads running the country.. legally.

but ex-with fundamentalist Christian anti-masturbation activists like Christine O'Donnel who lied about going to Oxford and who didn't pay her tuition bills until this election cycle are okay?

Then there is this congressional candidate from Ohio who likes to dress up in the appropriate uniform for Nazi reeenactments:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/why-is-this-gop-house-candidate-dressed-as-a-nazi/64319/

Please, bring on the potheads

Not a, uh, user - but here's an interesting background article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/prison-without-walls/8195/