Creating the lone wolf terrorist

The investigative public television series Frontline has partnered with the investigative journalists at ProPublica on a series that they have called Documenting Hate where they chart the recent actions of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Their first episode Documenting Hate: Charlottesville premiered in August and I reviewed it here. Yesterday they showed the second episode Documenting Hate: New American Nazis and you can see the full episode online here.
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The never-ending election

It is now two weeks since election day and four Congressional seats are still undecided as votes are still being counted. Perhaps the most turbulent one is in Utah where Republican incumbent Mia Love is locked in a tight race with Democrat Ben McAdams. The lead kept switching as votes came in from various districts and the latest reversal has McAdams up by just 739 votes out of nearly 270,000 cast. He seems to feel confident enough that this lead will hold up to declare victory when the final votes are certified later today.
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What makes up the mass of the universe?

Most of the known visible mass in the universe (i.e., excluding dark matter) is made up of protons and neutrons. We know that protons and neutrons are themselves made up of yet smaller particles called quarks and gluons. The gluons are massless so you would think that most of the mass of the universe would be quark mass. But that is not the case. In fact, quark masses are a small fraction of the total mass of each proton and neutron. So where does the rest of the mass come from?
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That’s pretty impressive speed work

I knew that in Formula One car racing the pit crews can do things incredibly fast but I was not aware that they could remove all four tires and replace them with new ones in less than two seconds. Watch.

This made me curious about what holds the tires in place that enables such a quick turnaround. Magnetism? Or is there a single clasp that holds each tire in place?

(Via David Pescovitz.)

Backsliding democracies

Authoritarian governments are bad enough but it is disturbing when we have ‘backsliding democracies’ where countries actually choose authoritarian leaders in elections, as John Oliver points out in a survey of the current trend around the globe. He looks at the characteristics of authoritarian societies before getting to the issue of whether the US is one or heading towards becoming one.

Serial Saudi admissions of lying about Khashoggi murder

Can anyone trust anything that the Saudi Arabian government says about the death of Jamal Khashoggi? Their lies have been so shameless that it is no wonder Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman are so close because they are both cut from the same cloth, using one lie to cover up earlier lies and never bothering to explain why they uttered the earlier lies. Take the latest concessions by the Saudi government.
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The guilt and shame of killing someone

Life is such a precious gift that unless one is a sociopath, killing someone is such a horrific thing that one shies away from it. It takes extraordinary circumstances for someone to lose control of themselves sufficiently to kill another human being. So governments have elaborate methods by which they encourage ordinary people to join their military and then turn them into killers. These involve training them to unquestioningly follow orders and to dehumanize those perceive as the enemy, by portraying them as less than human or so outlandishly evil that they deserve to die, and to shower the killers with medals and honors upon their return in order to make them feel like heroes.
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Inside the world of social media personalities

The BBC has produced a very absorbing 22-minute documentary titled Fake Me: Living For Likes (below) about the life of people who live for likes on Instagram and other social media platforms. They follow an extremely thoughtful young woman named Joey who is a college student and aspiring fashion designer in Nairobi, Kenya. Joey hated social media and did not have any presence on it at all because of what she saw it doing to her friends who had become so addicted to that online world that they would ignore the real people around them.

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