Luke.stirling

I grew up in Missouri, a state in which a significant part of the population pronounces it “Missourah” for reasons unknown to me. But they can pronounce it however they want. It’s their state too.

They cannot, however, use the word “physical” when what they mean is “fiscal.” That is a different thing, and it is a thing that Rep. Tracy McCreery has had just about enough of. Hence, House Resolution 1220:

McCreery told the Riverfront Times that she didn’t introduce the resolution as a joke, really, “I did it because I hit a wall” and hearing this had become like “nails on a chalkboard.” It isn’t just every now and then, she said. “It happens pretty much daily. It really does.”

Nor is it a question of accent. While an accent might cause someone to drop the middle syllable of “physical,” making it sound like “fiscal,” seems very unlikely it would happen the other way around. Adding or changing a syllable is much more likely to be just a mistake, as in—and this is the worst such example I can think of, one I hesitate to even write—”nu-cu-lar.”

As in “nucular weapons.” Arrrghh!

Talk about nails on a chalkboard.

In the same way, hearing people talk about “physical matters” or the “physical year” coming to a close has apparently been driving McCreery and other similarly situated representatives completely bonkers. So she decided to take action. Non-binding action, but still. You can’t just turn a blind eye to this kind of thing.

“I made it almost an entire quarter” before doing something, she told the Washington Post, “which I think shows great restraint.”

McCreery also told the Post that she would not be taking an official position on how to pronounce “Missouri,” and for good reason. “That would be like the third rail in this state,” she said, which I think is absolutely correct. “So, I will leave that for people to decide on their own.”

Via imgur.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Reporters from Fairfax Media and The Huffington Post obtained a huge trove of email from Unaoil, a business run by a rich Monaco family, that reveal that the family ran a corrupt bribery empire that spanned the world’s oil-producing states, and that they world with companies like Rolls-Royce, Halliburton, Leighton Holding, Samsung and Hyundai, to rig contracts through a system of bribes and kickbacks that looted the national treasuries of some of the world’s poorest countries.

A particular victim of Unaoil’s corruption is Iraq, whose oil fields were drained by giant western companies without meaningful benefit to the war-stricken Iraqis, thanks to Unaoil’s help in bribing top Iraqi officials on behalf of the largest blue-chip companies in the world.

Unaoil also ran bribery rings in Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Kuwait and the UAE, with massive bribes being paid directly to the senior bureaucrats and elected leaders of those countries, from Assad’s top fixer in Syria to the son of Yemen’s former prime minister.

Unaoil is owned by the Ahsani, a jet-setting member of the global elite who sit on the boards of charities and rub shoulders with world leaders and billionaires. They laundered their money through (where else) the City of London.

The first story in the series, “The Bribe Factory,” is out now. It’s explosive as hell, and there’s a lot more to come. Many countries have laws on the books that make executives at firms engaged in bribery personally, criminally liable. Maybe this, finally, will be the moment when we learn how far the impunity of the criminal elites really goes.

http://boingboing.net/2016/03/30/massive-email-leak-reveals-the.html

Donald Trump is probably the most casually dishonest serious candidate for president that this country has ever seen. He lies so easily, so shamelessly, and so regularly that media outlets have largely given up trying to factcheck his more, er, problematic assertions.

Politifact, a site that exposes politicians’ lies, awarded their Lie of the Year prize last year to “the campaign misstatements of Donald Trump.” There were so many they couldn’t pick just one.

Trump is worse than a mere fibber; as more than a few observers have noted of late, he’s also a master gaslighter, as are the political operatives closest to him. Gaslighting is a favorite tactic of abusers who’ve mastered the art of lying so baldly that their victims are led to doubt what they’ve seen and experienced, and begin to think they’re literally going mad.

Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski responded to reporter Michelle Fields’ claim that he had assaulted her at a Trump event by declaring her “delusional” — a favorite ploy of gaslighters everywhere — even though, as footage of the event now conclusively shows, he did in fact grab her and pull her away from Trump, just as she said he had. Lewandowski’s employer, whose own story on the assault has undergone a number of mutations, is now accusing her of changing her story, which has been consistent from the start. Add to this a heaping helping of old-fashioned misogynistic victim-blaming, and you’ve got a nasty smear campaign going.

But Trump’s latest claim about the Lewandowski incident is so over-the-top ludicrous that it transcends mere gaslighting. During a CNN town hall last night, Trump tried to convince the world that Lewandowski’s assault was perfectly justified because the pen she was holding could just maybe have been, you know, some sort of James Bond style pen-bomb.

“She had a pen in her hand,” he declared, “which Secret Service is not liking because they don’t know what it is, whether it’s a little bomb.”

Never mind that there was a Secret Service agent right there, and he didn’t deem Fields to be enough of a threat to intervene.

Oh, and never mind that A PEN BOMB!!? YOU CAN’T BE FREAKING SERIOUS.

And that’s a bit of a clue as to what is going on here. Trump can’t possibly be serious. The pen-bomb claim is almost certainly a bad-faith attempt to derail the discussion and to draw public attention away from the surveillance video showing Lewandowski grabbing Fields.

This is what trolls do. Trump is pulling the same sort of bad-faith nonsense that anti-Semitic trolls do when they declare that they can’t possibly be anti-Semitic because Arabs are Semites too; when a certain far-right fantasy author declares that he can’t possibly be a white supremacist because he has a bit of American Indian blood in his genes, a fact that he discovered only recently and which he gleefully trots out every time he’s accused of racism.

The trouble is that these tactics, however transparent they are to most observers, work.  As David Marcus notes in The Federalist, Trump’s energetic gaslighting has managed to distract the media from the real issues and shroud the Lewandowski incident in doubt.

Now that Lewandowski has been arrested and video shows that his account is patently false, Trump is lowering the lights. Well, he says, she touched me too, can I get her charged? He says, well, how do we know she didn’t already have those bruises (which she photographed the next day). As the lights dim, those most tragic figures, cable news anchors, fall into his frothing sea of who knows what the hell happened?

And when those claims began to wear thin, Trump started talking about pen-bombs.

Donald Trump is a troll. He’s been trolling us all from day one of his campaign. 

So it’s no wonder that the Anime Nazis have embraced Trump so enthusiastically. It isn’t just his racism that’s appealing to them, or his not-so-subtle encouragement of physical violence against protesters, more than a little bit reminiscent of Nazi electoral thuggery.

It’s because he’s one of them, a born troll.

I half expect Trump himself to take up the joke slogan of his trolly followers and promise voters that he will make anime real. After all, that’s a claim no more absurd than Trump’s contention that he will build a wall on our southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

Like most successful trolls — paging Milo Yiannopoulos — Trump has attracted a rabid following of trolls happy to troll and smear on his behalf. However ridiculous their memes get, their support for Trump is sincere, and their attacks still sting.

And that’s the problem with trolls. Their ironic stances have a tendency to calcify into sincerely held beliefs. Cartoon fascism becomes real hatred. Donald Trump the media-trolling buffoon becomes Donald Trump the dangerous demagogue. Some of his more over-the-top pronouncements may be mostly hot air, but his racism and misogyny are real. And to those who bear the brunt of Trump’s (and his followers’) attacks, a smear is a smear, even if the smearer knows he’s spouting bullshit.

But trolls can’t bend reality completely to their liking. Lewandowski’s attempts to smear Fields as an attention-hungry confabulator came up against the hard reality of the surveillance tapes. We need to keep calling out the endless lies. Trump’s fans may believe the lies — or they may find it convenient to pretend that they do — but I don’t think most Americans are quite as gullible as Trump and his troll buddies think they are.

A lot of people are watching the spectacle of Apple vs. the FBI and the Homeland Security Theatre and rubbing their eyes, wondering why Apple (in the person of CEO Tim Cook) is suddenly the knight in shining armour on the side of consumer privacy and civil rights. Apple, after all, is a goliath-sized corporate behemoth with the second largest market cap in US stock market history—what's in it for them?

As is always the case, to understand why Apple has become so fanatical about customer privacy over the past five years that they're taking on the US government, you need to follow the money.

Apple wasn't very good about customer security in the early days of iOS. Early iterations of the iPhone notoriously lied about the security of SSL connections to email servers; my understanding is that this led to them being banned from some corporate and government accounts for a few years. But then they seem to have realized that security wasn't merely a useful feature to pitch to their customers, but a necessity. And the reason it's essential is Apple Pay.

It used to be a truism that General Motors was an insurance company wit a car-manufacturing subsidiary. GM's pension fund had grown so large (over most of a century) that GM had to invest the money somewhere in order to generate a return on investment that would keep the pensioners going: selling cars was simply not a big enough business. And today Apple is sitting on the largest cash stockpile in US corporate history. Its legendary $120-150Bn in cash has attracted the attention of activist investors like Carl Icahn, but even share buy-backs will only get you so far when you're taking 90% of the profits of the entire global smartphone industry. Some analysts have opined that if Apple maintains its current turnover and earnings, and continues to buy back shares at the current rate, by 2024 AAPL will revert to private ownership ... and still be sitting on $100Bn in cash.

Of course, if you have a tenth of a trillion dollars you can't just rock up to a bank and say "please accept this deposit, how much interest do you pay"? For one thing, if you have $0.1Tn, you have enough money to buy several banks. For another thing, money doesn't exist when it's not moving: it's a coefficient of economic velocity. Money needs to be invested and generate a return. Over the past decade Apple leveraged their cash pile to ensure they had a lead over their competitors. Given a five year product roadmap, they could project the need for some critical piece of hardware—synthetic sapphire phone displays, for example, or 5K monitor panels—years in advance. Such components didn't actually exist, but they knew suppliers who could provide them if someone loaned them the cash to build a factory (typically in the high hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars). So Apple would find a company like Sharp and say, "we're going to need a million 27 inch 5 megapixel displays in four years time. We'll front you the money to set up the factory at just 1% over the bank base rate, in return for an exclusive option to buy the first million quality-compliant components to come out of it". Everyone wins: Sharp get a factory that can mass-produce new high resolution display panels, Apple gets an exclusive lead on these panels for consumer sales, and Apple also gets to invest its money in a way that generates far more profit than merely handing it over to an investment house.

But ... Apple has too much money. From roughly 1998, when Steve Jobs returned, Apple began growing like a dot-com startup, at high double-digit annual percentage growth rates—only it started doing so from a billion dollar a year turnover base, not two guys in a garage. By 2008 it was probably clear to Steve Jobs and Tim Cook that if their strategy of becoming the dominant company in the consumer side of the post-PC world succeeded, the problem of where to find enough mattresses to stuff the $500 bills was only going to get worse. When you're making $50-100Bn a year in profit, you can't put the money in a bank: you have to become a bank. And that's what Apple Pay is about, and that's why Apple have become fanatical about customer privacy and electronic civil rights (in one very narrow field).

I'm going to assume you know what Apple Pay is: you use your iPhone, iPad, or Watch as a trusted, authenticated identity token in a shop to pay for stuff. It ties into your bank account and basically your phone swallows your debit and credit card.

Ultimately the banks are going to discover—the hard way—that getting into bed with Apple was a bad idea, about the same way that getting into bed with Amazon over ebooks was a bad idea for the Big Five publishers. Apple is de facto an investment bank, right now: all it needs is a banking license and the right back end and regulatory oversight and risk management and it will be able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Chase or Barclays or HSBC as a consumer bank, too. And Apple has a very good idea of how risky their customers' behavior is because unlike the banks and the credit card settlement network they're not running on incrementally upgraded legacy infrastructure designed in the 1950s. Note those two words a couple of sentences ago: "risk management". Banks are not in the business of holding your money or making loans; they live or die by how well they manage risk. Apple, like Google, has a much richer relationship with their customers than any bank. They can (for example), with a customer's position, know roughly where the customer's phone or watch is moving, and thereby spot faked payment credentials if someone clones the device and tries to use it to buy something a thousand miles away. The CC networks have velocity checking but it's a really crude metric for spotting fraud: Apple can massively improve on it.

But that's not where anti-fraud methods begin and end. For example, Apple have got reasonably good fingerprint readers on their current devices, backed by long PINs and password management. The newer phones have trusted hardware stores for the cryptographic tokens that are used to unscramble the addresses where data is written in the phone's on-board storage: they support (and encourage the use of) two-factor authentication. Some analysts report Apple is working on improving their front-facing cameras to the extent that they can do iris or retina scanning. On the long-term horizon, there are already ultra-compact low-cost DNA sequencers out there; if you really want to authenticate a user via biometrics, about the ultimate trust level is a combination of a shared secret (their password) with a mixture of biometrics tested simultaneously—a fingerprint reader that can quickly confirm a match for their genome while the front camera recognizes the retina of the person holding the device. Their phones are, in many respects, more secure than the ATMs and credit card infrastructure we've used to accessing our bank accounts. And that gives the phone vendors an opportunity to leapfrog over the existing banking infrastructure in the efficiency of their risk management protocols, by reducing fraud while simultaneously knowing much more about their customers' habits and being able to spot potentially risky activity patterns early enough to reduce their exposure.

Here's my theory: Apple see their long term future as including a global secure payments infrastructure that takes over the role of Visa and Mastercard's networks—and ultimately of spawning a retail banking subsidiary to provide financial services directly, backed by some of their cash stockpile.

The FBI thought they were asking for a way to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is myopically focussed on past criminal investigations, not the future of the technology industry, and the FBI did not understand that they were actually asking for a way to tracelessly unlock and mess with every ATM and credit card on the planet circa 2030 (if not via Apple, then via the other phone OSs, once the festering security fleapit that is Android wakes up and smells the money).

If the FBI get what they want, then the back door will be installed and the next-generation payments infrastructure will be just as prone to fraud as the last-generation card infrastructure, with its card skimmers and identity theft.

And this is why Tim Cook is willing to go to the mattresses with the US department of justice over iOS security: if nobody trusts their iPhone, nobody will be willing to trust the next-generation Apple Bank, and Apple is going to lose their best option for securing their cash pile as it climbs towards the stratosphere.

Discuss.

Stephanie Cegielski was in the Trump campaign from the beginning, first serving as communications director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC, then shutting down the PAC "in order to position him as the quintessential non-politician." (more…)

feminismfuckyeah:

just gonna leave this here 

Fuck. This. Bullshit.

I’m really fed up with all the op-eds emerging now, decrying those wimpy college students and political correctness and trigger warnings and safe spaces. They’re all from obnoxious ignoramuses who are really trying to defend their sheltered privilege from criticism, so they’re all playing a game of IKYABWAI. So here are a couple of strong rebuttals.

• “PC Culture” isn’t Killing Higher Ed (But Your Crappy Op-Eds Might Be).

  The last thing higher education needs is one more old white guy bleating about “political correctness run amok,” when it’s just a slightly more genteel phrase for “people not like me getting all uppity.” If you’re upset about other people winning in the marketplace of ideas, maybe it’s because your ideas suck. If you think today’s students are coddled, and don’t have “grit,” you either don’t teach or aren’t paying attention. To see students calling out power inequalities and inequitable behaviors is not some sort of failure, but a triumph of critical thinking and intellectual agency. If you think students calling institutions, their administrations, or other authorities out on bad thinking, institutional inequities, or general bullshit is “silly,” or “killing higher education,” maybe you’re the delicate little flower who can’t abide an intellectual challenge.

• Straw Freshmen: Why the War on Campus PC Culture is Bullshit.

  Take the “trigger warning” as an example. There are still no colleges or universities that mandate trigger warnings as a practice in any field of study. Most cases of them being used have been in teaching sensitive issues of rape, abuse, or assault to classes with young women. The overarching point in “Coddling,” that trigger warnings actually can’t improve mental health, misses the point of the reality of these women. A new study from the Association of American Universities finds that over a fifth of all college women are sexually assaulted at some time in their enrollment. Another 47% have experienced sexual harassment and another 12% have experienced intimate partner violence. This means that any given classroom with any significant amount of women could be composed of up to a third or more of women who are processing rapes, assaults, harassment, or violence. Given the absolutely horrendous state of affairs within colleges (and largely, the country) in handling rape cases and pursuing justice and health for these women, it is likely that most of these survivors have not received or are not receiving the proper therapy and healing in order to be able to process triggering images and words without suffering further damage.

• ‘Coddled’ students and their ‘safe spaces’ aren’t the problem, college official says. Bigots are.

  Therefore, whether one is suspicious of the merits of college as a whole or cynical about the existence of “safe spaces,” the truth of the matter is that “coddled” college students aren’t the problem.

  The real culprits — on campuses and in the real world — are the persistent effects of homophobia, income inequality, misogyny, poverty, racism, sexism, white supremacy and xenophobia.

  When students refuse to accept discrimination on college campuses, they’re learning important lessons about how to fight it everywhere.

That last one makes an excellent point: the anti-PC language does the opposite of what its obnoxious proponents claim. It’s not about advocating for free speech. It’s about using accusations of “PC” and mocking efforts to give minorities a voice to silence critics of the status quo.

New comic!

CONTENT ADVISORY: This comic talks about sexual assault and rape myths.

When I do comics for other publication, they usually have editorial guidelines that require that comics don’t just rant, they also give people tools to chance their perspective or take further action on a topic – to take the next step.

This comic is not that. This comic is not advice, and it is not positive. I am very frustrated this week, and so many of us are hurt and angry. This comic is a reflection of that. I don’t know what the next step is. There’s no perfect next step.

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when you see it…

Gaffes like the one highlighted above occur when a style guide (in this case Reuters news service) requires that references to "the queen" be capitalized and her name given in full, and when a 'bot proceeds to check and autocorrect styles before publication.

A tip of the blogging hat to John Farrier who found this and posted it at Neatorama.

I'm trying to minimize coverage of politics during this election cycle, but I thought this article in The Village Voice offers some insight into both a candidate and a religion:

Commentators who had previously criticized Sanders for downplaying his Judaism were underwhelmed by his mostly secular response. "Sanders may be focused on uniting Americans for a better future," argued the Jewish Telegraphic Agency newswire, "but some Jews would clearly like to hear him acknowledge his past."

Those Jews were eventually given voice through the unlikely agency of Anderson Cooper, who, during a March debate in Michigan, referred to Jewish leaders who were "disappointed" that Sanders keeps his Judaism "in the background." "Look, my father's family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust," came Sanders's reply. "I am very proud of being Jewish, and that is an essential part of who I am as a human being." Finally, Sanders was giving commentators what they seemed to want to hear from a Jewish candidate — a reference to the Holocaust. Vox's Zack Beauchamp said the response "nearly brought me to tears."

We shouldn't be surprised by this insistence that Bernie invoke the Holocaust: Museums, school curricula, and the culture generally have so diligently cultivated the image of Jews as primarily survivors or victims of the Holocaust that we've learned to see this, and not all that solidarity talk, as properly Jewish. But Sanders carries on a Jewish tradition much longer, and more sacred, than merely paying lip service to the Holocaust. His every utterance about universal health care, economic inequality, and social justice relentlessly embraces Judaism; it's just a Judaism many people no longer recognize. Bernie Sanders is a Jew of a different era — the kind of Jew that Zionists would very much like us to forget...

When pundits complain that Sanders is not being publicly Jewish enough, what they are really complaining about is his refusal to fall in line with the philosophy that has come to define Jewish life in America. They are disappointed that Sanders has not aligned himself with Zionism...

And yet it is the non-Zionist Sanders who is criticized for insufficient faith, even as wealthy right-wing Zionists ostentatiously parade their donations to Holocaust Museums and prestigious congregations. These gestures are supposed to fulfill the sort of public obligation Judaism imposes, but next to Bernie Sanders's dogged agitation for universal equality and justice, decade in and decade out, Zionist chest-thumping looks like a cheap substitute.

This contrast was at its starkest when Sanders declined the opportunity to join every other presidential candidate in addressing Zionism's most exalted assembly: the annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Instead, he addressed the question of Israel at a high school in Salt Lake City, Utah, in a speech that included such taboo-breaking observations as "There is too much suffering in Gaza to be ignored."

Such heresy reminds us of an earlier Judaism. When Sanders says, "We are living in a world which worships not love of brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and the sick, but worships the acquisition of money," he is not hiding his religion, but espousing it. He is evangelizing. And if his gospel is going to catch, it will most likely be among the young people who have flocked to his campaign.

More at the link.

The City Hall of Vianen sits within the small historical city of Vianen in the province Utrecht in the Netherlands. Sebastian Arts has managed to capture so many details of this beautiful old building that we simply had to share it. The ancient stonework is very well done and the whole design is accurate to the actual building in Vianen, right down to the position of the bench.

The turret at the rear of the hall is equally impressive, the builder’s use of different bricks and earthy tones has really brought the old stonework to life in LEGO. The windows are cleverly crafted from fences rotated 90°. The rear view also show a nice contrast between the old and new buildings side by side.

oldshowbiz:

midcentury motels. it’s amazing the little pockets of america where signs like this still survive. very few of the motel restaurants or coffee shops still function, but in little desert towns like Lone Pine and Bishop and the dodgy outskirts of Lancaster, California you can still find successions of sketchy motor inns all in a row with rusty signs that look a lot like these.

(via TrollX)

Hovertext: Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure this would work.

New comic!
Today's News:

The Romanian national football team wears special training jackets as an encouragement to their fans. 

Via.

“

How could anyone think that creating a young woman and inviting strangers to interact with her on social media would make Tay ‘smarter’? How can the story of Tay be met with such corporate bafflement, such late apology? Why did no one at Microsoft know right from the start that this would happen, when all of us – female journalists, activists, game developers and engineers who live online every day and could have predicted it – are talking about it all the time?

The answer cannot be anything but outright disdain. The industry wants to use women’s voices but still has no plans to actually listen to them.

”

- Leigh Alexander, “The tech industry wants to use women’s voices – they just won’t listen to them”

The Roaming Ecologist has a few words about lawns.

Lawns – those myopically obsessive (and evil) urban, suburban, and increasingly rural monoculture eyesores that displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day* in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage. And there’s the unbearable ubiquitousness of mowing associated with such a useless cultural practice, which creates a ridiculous amount of noise pollution, air and water pollution, and a bustling busyness that destroys many peaceful Saturday mornings. The American lawn is the epitome of unsustainability.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, and attend your weekly meetings protesting grass, rather than mow my lawn. That season is soon upon us.

But then he also shares this excellent illustration of native prairie plants. They’re all roots! Unlike that scrubby shallow Kentucky bluegrass film on the left, that just forms a superficial mat of roots.

OK, now what can I do to kill the ground hugging parasites covering my yard and replace them with cool plants like that?

Lady & the Tramp


Oliver and Dodger


Sebastian


Scar


Simba


Lady And The Tramp


Kovu


Aristocats


Nala, Zazu And Simba

summerashes:

laysiaprincess:

pr1nceshawn:

Famous Disney Characters As Ethnically Correct Humans by Pugletto.

I love this

Omg

“I would say that arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying that you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. Rights exist and have value for more than just the individual in the current moment. Rights are both individual and collective. And when you think about the value of a free press, we’re not all journalists, but we still derive value from them. Moreover, rights are not really intended, rights are not really designed for use by the elites, for people who are leading our debates, because these are the people who are least threatened with the abrogation of their rights. The system exists to serve and protect these people. Rights are almost always needed on a regular, continual basis by those who are vulnerable, by those who are not protected by the system, by those who are not protected by their communities, by the people who are different, by the people who are ahead of everyone else because of a new idea, or people who are simply minorities, who don’t have access to the same resources, don’t have access to the same ability to compete.”

- Edward Snowden

Over the last few days, there have been some ups and downs in crank medicine. The Tribeca Film Festival scheduled Andrew Wakefield’s anti-vaccine documentary to be shown, and Robert DeNiro defended it as a legitimate contribution to the discussion of the causes of autism. It isn’t. It’s rank nonsense from a discredited quack.But then DeNiro changed his mind and yanked it from the schedule. Good for him!

But now, lest you think the problem is solved, let me remind you that there are bad parents medically abusing their children everywhere.

Well, hey, chiropractors are doctors too, right?

Wait…maybe it’s too complicated. I have a simpler guide: just vote Democrat. The time for thoughtful consideration of policy on a case by case basis is over, until we get an opposition party that hasn’t lost its collective mind.

Speed Champions is a relatively new theme to Lego, and while it has the backing of big car names like Porsche, Ferrari, and Ford, it has yet to gain much traction in fan community. Perhaps this is because there are nice cars but nowhere to go? Builder Brick Knight has built a large race track section for his Speed Champion collection, and in the process has suddenly made the theme far more interesting.

Featuring a pit lane, spectator stands, news crews, and a meticulously polished center field, this is one speedway bound to give everyone a fun day. Not only that, but the entire creation is jam packed with hilarious cameos …as if a high speed race wasn’t exciting enough already.

As I try to detach a pipe on the virtual International Space Station, which I’ve been scrambling across, I’m suddenly thrown backwards into space. I don’t flinch but apparently most people who play the Earthlight [official site] demo do – it then makes sense to me why one of the team had offered to take pictures of me playing. Earthlight is a virtual reality experience which is aiming to recreate experiences aboard the International Space Station, which sits in low Earth orbit and acts as a research laboratory. The developers are working in collaboration with NASA to shape the experience.

I am flagging up the fact I was unfazed by being thrown off into space in case anyone from NASA is reading this and wants to recruit me as a cool astronaut space reporter, but while I still have a terrestrial job I should probably tell you about Earthlight and the conversation I had with its creative lead, Emre Deniz.

… [visit site to read more]

Air, light, work, sports, hygiene, comfort and efficiency: these are the guidelines that governed the design of Villa Cavrois. This massive home in France was built by Robert Mallet-Stevens between 1929 and 1932, and is considered part of the International Style of architecture. The mansion has a storied past: it was occupied by the German Army during World War II, and most of the custom-built furniture was sold off in the 1980s. But now it’s a historical monument, open to the public for viewing. If you can’t make it all the way to northern France, at least you can ogle this model from Swedish builder o0ger, whose rendition is reminiscent of the LEGO Architecture theme.

I’ve been reading Scott Atran to try to figure out what is going on with these attacks in Europe, and he has some important insights. What are their goals? To eliminate the Grey Zone and polarize nations. They win when they isolate immigrant populations.

The core strategy outlined in the ISIS playbook, The Management of Chaos-Savagery (Idarat at-Tawahoush, required reading for every ISIS political, religious and military leader, or amir), is to fill the void wherever chaos already exists, as in much of the Sahel and Sahara, and create chaos that can be filled as in Europe.

In reality, today’s Brussel attacks represented just the latest, ever more effective, installment for fomenting chaos in Europe and thereby “Extinguish the Grey Zone,” along the lines of 12-page editorial published in ISIS’s online magazine Dabiq in early 2015. ‘The Grey ZOne’ describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil – in other words, between the Caliphate and the Infidel, which the ‘blessed operations of September 11’ brought into relief. The editorial quotes Osama bin Laden, for whom ISIS is the true heir: ‘The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”’, with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the Western Crusaders. Now, ‘the time had come for another event to… bring division to the world and destroy the Grayzone.’A welcome to Syrian refugees would clearly represent a winning response to this strategy, whereas wholesale rejection of refugees just as clearly represents a losing response to ISIS. We might wish to celebrate diversity and tolerance in the grayzone, but the general trend in Europe and the majority of the US political establishment and population is to collude in erasing it.

The following are axioms drawn from The Management of Chaos-Savagery (Idarat at-Tawahoush, required reading for every ISIS political, religious and military leader, or amir), and from the February 2015 editorial in Dabiq (online ISIS publication), on “The Extinction of the Gray Zone.” ISIS’s actions have been, and likely will continue to be, consistent with these axioms:

Diversify the strikes and attack soft targets – tourist areas, eating places, places of entertainment, sports events, and so forth — that cannot possibly be defended everywhere. Disperse the infidels’ resources and drain them to the greatest extent possible, and so undermine people’s faith in the ability of their governments to provide security, most basic of all state functions.

· Motivate the masses to fly to regions that we manage, by eliminating the “Gray Zone” between the true believer and the infidel, which most people, including most Muslims, currently inhabit. Use so-called “terror attacks” to help Muslims realize that non-Muslims hate Islam and want to harm all who practice it, to show that peacefulness gains Muslims nothing but pain.

· Use social media to inspire sympathizers abroad to violence. Communicate the message: Do what you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are, whenever possible.

I suspect that ISIS is planning a coordinated attack across multiple cities in Europe to ramp up the process of extinguishing the gray zone, and to also shift the focus of its possible adherents away form its increasingly noteworthy military containment in Syria and Iraq.

He also explains why anyone would join a violent nutbag organization like ISIS. If you’re screwed by the status quo, upheaval at least gives you a chance that your situation will improve.

Unlike Al Qaeda, whose attacks in Europe and elsewhere were largely instigated by inspiration rather than direct command and control, ISIS is able to remotely command as well as inspire with the idea of a Utopian Caliphate in here and now (something Bin Laden earnestly rejected as long as the USA was powerful enough to to contain and thereby delegitimize), and has infiltrated immigrant neighborhoods, ridden piggyback on refugee pipelines, and tapped into the ennui of a society that hasn’t know war or real struggle over values for 70 years and the anomie of a seemingly endless, genderless, culturally indistinct adolescence. The clear red lines of the Islamic State radically terminates all of this with spectacular violence that its foreign adherents experience as breaking their personal chains and those of humanity.

In the absence of a devout alternative of passion and significance, many who join IS seem to say: “Better an end to suffering the status quo, with hope for something better, whatever suffering and horror it takes.” That, of course, is the heart of the apocalyptic mindset: to save this world it may be necessary to destroy it, and postpone hope to the next life. It is an ultimate expression of the power of seemingly preposterous ideas made real: that privilege of absurdity to which no creature but man is subject, but which renders all creatures subject to His whim, including fellow men.

He wrote about the Paris attacks a while back, too, and it summarizes what they’re trying to do.

Isis is reaching out to fill the void wherever a state of “chaos” or “savagery” (at-tawahoush) exists, as in central Asia and Africa. And where there is insufficient chaos in the lands of the infidel, called “The House of War”, it seeks to create it, as in Europe.

It conscientiously exploits the disheartening dynamic between the rise of radical Islamism and the revival of the xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that are beginning to seriously undermine the middle class – the mainstay of stability and democracy – in Europe in ways reminiscent of the hatchet job that the communists and fascists did on European democracy in the 1920s and 30s. The fact that Europe’s reproductive rate is 1.4 children per couple, and so there needs to be considerable immigration to maintain a productive workforce that can sustain the middle class standard of living, is a godsend for Isis, because at the same time there has never been less tolerance for immigration. Therein lies the sort of chaos that Isis is well positioned to exploit.

Create chaos, make Western governments turn in hostility against immigrant populations, thereby eliminating the “Grey Zone”, where those immigrants might aspire to be members in full of their new homeland, and let those nations drive their own people into conflict. It’s a brilliant strategy. It’s clearly working. Look at our own Republican presidential candidates, who are responding to pain and bloodshed abroad by threatening to patrol Muslim neighborhoods in America or promising to do a lot more than waterboarding, basically amplifying the effect of the terrorist act to alienate further disadvantaged populations here.

Cruz and Trump are unthinkingly acting as agents of ISIS.

So what are we to do? I think Arun has it exactly right: do the opposite of what ISIS wants. Rather than polarizing the nation to obliterate the gray zone, embrace our immigrants as full partners in our society. Give them a stake in our country. Rather than chaos and savagery, offer stability and support. And keep in mind that when we send in drones or A-10s or cruise missiles into a foreign country, we are making ISIS very happy by creating the chaos and savagery in which they thrive.

“In 2010, the tea-party wave put Sam Brownback into the Sunflower State’s governor’s mansion and Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature. Together, they implemented the conservative movement’s blueprint for Utopia: They passed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and repealed all income taxes on more than 100,000 businesses. They tightened welfare requirements, privatized the delivery of Medicaid, cut $200 million from the education budget, eliminated four state agencies and 2,000 government employees. In 2012, Brownback helped replace the few remaining moderate Republicans in the legislature with conservative true believers. The following January, after signing the largest tax cut in Kansas history, Brownback told the Wall Street Journal, “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.’ “
 
As you’ve probably guessed, that model collapsed. Like the budget plans of every Republican presidential candidate, Brownback’s “real live experiment” proceeded from the hypothesis that tax cuts for the wealthy are such a boon to economic growth, they actually end up paying for themselves (so long as you kick the undeserving poor out of their welfare hammocks). The Koch-backed Kansas Policy Institute predicted that Brownback’s 2013 tax plan would generate $323 million in new revenue. During its first full year in operation, the plan produced a $688 million loss. Meanwhile, Kansas’s job growth actually trailed that of its neighboring states. With that nearly $700 million deficit, the state had bought itself a 1.1 percent increase in jobs, just below Missouri’s 1.5 percent and Colorado’s 3.3.”

- The GOP Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas