Killing the Messenger

When a mainstream media organization describes someone as their ‘national security reporter’, I immediately pigeonhole them as basically public relations flacks for the agencies they cover because often their main method of ‘news gathering’ is to cultivate sources at high levels within the agencies who will feed them self-serving leaks that these reporters then pass on to us. There are some good reporters on this beat, one being Jane Meyer for the New Yorker magazine and James Bamford who writes for a number of publications, but they tend to be the exception.
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Bolero

There is something deeply hypnotic about listening to Ravel’s Bolero. It is like getting engrossed in a mystery novel and not wanting to stop until you know how it ends. In this performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, we get to see close up the increasing intensity of the musicians at the climax approaches. I wonder how hard it is for the percussionists to keep that steady tempo for 15 minutes, because that is crucial.
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Challenging the 10,000 hour rule for expertise

The nature vs. nurture argument has been around a long time and one area that has been much contested is about what it takes to achieve expertise at something, say at music or games or science or the professions. Is it innate ability or practice? The likely answer is ‘a bit of both’. But how much of each? In 1869, Francis Dalton argued, based on observations that certain kinds of expertise ran in families, that it must be due to something innate and genetic in origin. But others argued that it was due more to practice.
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Watermelon man

The incident of the intruder who recently managed to enter the White House before being captured was obvious fodder for the eternally panic-stricken to call for even more stringent security measures and the use of lethal force because that seems to be the only solution to any problem for those people. But it also provided a field day for humor and one has to merely scan through the collection of editorial cartoons around the nation to see that many cartoonists exploited this event for material. (See here and here for just two of the many cartoons I saw.)
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The oligarchy’s vision of the ideal state

On John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight, he had a hilarious clip (sorry, embedding was disallowed so you will have to follow the link to see it) about Ayn Rand titled Why is Ayn Rand still a thing?, because she is still a big influence on Republicans with presidential ambitions people like Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, who all proudly state that they are fans of her despite her support for abortion rights and her atheism.
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Apple’s warrant canary dies

The US government has the power to issue people with what are known as ‘national security letters’ that require recipients to not only give the government any data it requests even if it is about their clients, but they are forbidden to tell anyone, even their lawyers, that they received such a letter. So for example, they can ask your librarian to tell them what items you check out or your internet provider to hand over any information they have on you. It is an astounding assertion of government power and shows the reach of the national security state.
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Increasing the risk of danger by supposedly reducing it

The events of September 11, 2001 scared the daylights out of the American public. Apart from spawning numerous deadly and endless wars around the globe that have resulted in the number of deaths being many times the original figure of 3,000, it has also spawned a mindset that seems to think that the US government has a duty to create a society where there is zero risk from dying from a terrorist attack.
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Jindal all the way

Stephen Colbert looks at some of the people having ambitions of running for the presidency and their appearance at that reactionary love-fest known as the Values Voters Summit, and what some are saying about science, focusing on Bobby Jindal. I don’t know who will be the Republican nominee in 2016 but I am almost 100% certain it won’t be Jindal however much he panders to ignorance.
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