Meandering Vaguely Around Timnah

Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• The Story of Argo
• Misogyny Behind Attempted Assassination of Congo Man
• The consensus position on military activity is harder to justify every year
  I’m not pretending to have a complete answer. But if we started any analysis of international relations with the assumption that war will end badly for all concerned, and that the threat of war will probably lead to war sooner or later, we would be right most of the time.
• The Smart Money and the Dumb Money in the US Elections
• Green Light to Install UK’s Largest Solar Farm in an Old Airfield

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Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• Lip Service: on sex work, relationships & stigma
  Pretty much a ‘must read’ piece.
• "further corroboration that MPs are bad at making judgments about probability."

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

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Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• Obsolete: Bomber Cameron’s on tour again.
• My Last Column About the Presidential Election (Really) | Warren Ellis
  “My concern is this. The radical elements in the GOP will be able to claim that Romney was never their guy, and will take the next four years to place some genuine nutters, with serious backing, in line for the 2016 candidacy. Not the scrag-ends and barrel-scrapings they slapped on to the stage for this year’s farce. The idea of the Democrats being conscious and organised enough to have a real player in place for 2016 – because there’s no way in hell they can run Joe Biden — is kind of funny. There will be a real temptation to throw 2016 to the GOP, to give the people a reminder of what that’s like, to buy themselves a whole new four years to get their shit together in.”
• Willing Brides and Consenting Homosexuals
• The Democrats’ Dubious Record on the Supreme Court
• Using the threat of cancer to promote chastity is not "pro-life"
• More than just rainbows

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

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Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• Stumbling and Mumbling: Immigration: let’s not be reasonable
• Election predictions from the sub-Christian religious right | slacktivist
• "Ed Miliband twisted the knife but the Tory right held the handle"
  “The most that Labour can do is paint the Tory leadership as weak and dithering, while agreeing with them on the fundamentals of policy.”

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• Hacking presidential genomes for biowarfare
• How Much is Being Attractive Worth?| Smithsonian Magazine
• Blood & Treasure: child labour exposed
• No, really: Joss Whedon’s S.H.I.E.L.D. is really happening, and Ming-Na is in it! – Boing Boing
  nothing about this is anything other than wonderful.
• LENIN’S TOMB: Meme logic
• Hey, remember when evangelicals were pro-choice because of the Bible?
• Real Cost Of A Bounced Check
• Mark Pollock: I won’t just walk again, but run (Wired UK)
• Striking new scientific study shows that scientific studies with striking results are often false – Boing Boing
• ABORTION, MEHDI HASAN, FREE SPEECH AND THE LEFT
  ‘No other leftie’, Hasan tweeted, ‘will dare touch this subject given the ludicrous reaction I got today.’ All I can say is that I’m glad that supporters of abortion rights have thicker skins. Some of the abuse thrown at Hasan might have been unwarranted, but it was exceptionally mild compared to the vitriol (and, indeed, violence) continually directed at abortion activists, and indeed at women wanting abortions. Replacing rational debate with emotional rhetoric has been the hallmark of much pro-life argument. If Hasan really wants to challenge those who aim to stymie free speech and cut down reasoned debate, he might begin by looking more closely at pro-life tactics. Hasan wrote the article to elicit a response. He got the response. Then to play the victim card – that was what was truly ludicrous.

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• The Extraordinary Rarity of Whistleblowing
• PCC Elections: When the facts change, I cover my arse
• Stumbling and Mumbling: Support the undeserving poor
  succinct as ever.
• NYPD officers beat homeless man to a pulp – Boing Boing
• Food Trucks Are Increasingly Serious Terrorism Threat
• 9-Billion-Pixel Photo of Milky Way’s Center Is Full of Stars | Wired
• Portable Wind Turbine Emerges from a Shipping Container | Inhabitat
  The level of surprising innovation in the alt energy field is always fun to watch.
• Blood & Treasure: in other words
  “[David Milliband & Co are] rather in the position of juche study groups in Stoke-on-Trent, except that they’re looking for the radical centre. It may be partially down to the fact that the elder Miliband and co are the part of the Coalition that doesn’t happen to be in the government; that they agree with much of what it is doing but wish they were doing it themselves. They can never actually say this, but they can talk in highly general terms about bold reform of the state, with the usual balancers about compassion and community.”
• In Praise of Apathy | Foreign Policy
• ‘Mother Mary Was Essentially Raped,’ Mourdock Says While Digging Self Into Deeper Hole | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
  At press time, multiple male Senate candidates in their 60s remained divided between those who believe pregnancies resulting from rape are biologically impossible and those who believe they are the divine will of God.
• ProtoHouse: A Cantilevered, Fibrous Home Created With a 3D Printer
• Come on people now, Smile on your banker
  Because to people like Tillman, every slight they suffer is the equivalent of the great injustices of history. If you can’t see that, you’re just a wealthist monster.
• Indian press: Why did nobody mention India during Obama-Romney debate? | FP Passport
• No 5k for the biggest killer, so does anyone really believe it’s a killer?
• "not every person working with drug abusers supports legalization, but I have yet to meet one who would rat out an abuser to the cops."
• "an infantile conception of both governance and citizenship"
• Why Free Markets Accommodate Speculation and Lead to Disequilibrium
  And as this bizarre myth has gathered pace over the past 30 or so years and politicians have worked as hard as they can to turn our world into one dominated by such markets, is it any wonder that we see around us only chaos, instability and disorder? In trying to turn various sectors of the economy into an approximation of the neoclassical market policymakers have merely summoned up the daemonic forces of speculative finance. When you crown anarchy is it any wonder you get a lunatic for a king?
• "There is a trade-off between democracy and good economic policy-making."
• Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent | Greenwald
• New York Court Rules Lap Dances Not Exempt Artistic Performances
  ” The closeness of the decision illustrates just how much it rests on opinions about what is and isn’t art. While there is certainly artistic merit to the performance component of stripping, it clearly falls into the same category of performance as bands in clubs or standup comedy rather than the opera. That is mostly a function of production values (low) and the allowable level of improvisation (high). The tax exemption could be seen as a value judgment, although the language in the tax code isn’t specific enough to infer or clarify one. And that’s precisely what the dissenting opinion asserted: the vagueness of the language means a lot of potential value judgements about which art should be exempt”

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

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Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• Does anyone know who originally made this?
• NASA Simulation Shows a Galaxy’s Entire Life History
• Man girl for skunk, shoots – Boing Boing
  If you’ve got a gun, everything looks like a target.
• Is This the Spaceship That Will Take Us to Mars?
• Sexy Bottle of Sriracha: This Year in Dumb Halloween Costumes
• Non Sex-Worker Has Sad Feelings About Sex Work. Again.
• What stagnation looks like | ToUChstone blog
• Bill Black: The Vampire Squid Morphs into Jilted Valley Girl
  ” The reality, of course… is that the Obama administration has been extraordinarily generous to the largest banks, including Ms. Good in the Sack. The shocking revelation is that this no longer suffices. Ms. Good in the Sack is a mistress who demands unconditional pandering. She demands that she be allowed to grow wealthy by defrauding her own customers with impunity and god forbid that any politician that takes her money ever adopt a regulation without giving her a private opportunity to veto it.”

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• Transforming hexapod robot walks like a spider, rolls like a ball
  This is crazygonuts.
• Cyberdyne Creates Mind-Controlled Robot Exoskeleton
  “A network of sensors monitors electric signals coming from the user’s brain and uses them to activate the robot’s limbs in unison with the worker’s, allowing them to move without supporting the suit’s weight. As such, the 130-pound suit is barely noticeable to those wearing it.”
• How I Fooled the Internet into Thinking This Fake Sony Nexus Phone Was Real
• First horror movie shot in Antarctica (Wired UK)
• Could Panama adopt the euro? | FP Passport

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• Temporary Light Murals Enliven the Streets of Copenhagen
• Yanis Varoufakis: The Euro Crisis as a Spectacular Political Failure
  ” In short, a dreadful monetary design was defended by toxic remedies. For three years now Europe’s response to the discovery that it had created a monster was an all-out assault on reason.”
• It’s Time for a Tax to Kill High Frequency Trading
• This Devilish Alligator Has Not Been Photoshopped
• Sputter and Spittle :: Vanity Fair
  “The commentariat is so snugly, smugly entrenched that it doesn’t need higher-ups to act as enforcers; editors come and go, but the pundits remain in continuous orbit, decoupled from Newsweek to join Huffington Post or Politico or the Atlantic online or Bloomberg, it doesn’t matter, they always end up in the same Green Room where David Gergen is gargling furniture polish to give his opinions a mahogany veneer and Peggy Noonan forever is holding a novena.”
• In defence of the structural deficit :: Stumbling and Mumbling
• Bill Clinton Has One Last Golden Opportunity to Screw America
• More completely unjustifiable police brutality
  ” Calling the cops, who presumably have more training and more authority, was exactly the right thing to do. But what’s amazing about the video is that the only training the cops actually display is the ability to swiftly mete out violence.  I can grab ten dudes off the block to do that. Let’s give them pensions, too.”
• Porn For Teens?
• Privacy | Maggie Mayhem Speaks
• Canadian Sex Work Laws and Indigenous People
  “We know that if you are an Aboriginal woman, you are four or five times more likely to die as a result of violence, you are racially profiled by police, least likely to get bail.” Decriminalisation isn’t just there, as is often asserted by abolitionists, to help white, middle class, “Belle du Jour” style “high class hookers.” It’s there to keep women safe.
• 1 in 3 new jobs "created" last quarter are under 15 hours
  “For millions of people in work the downside of generating jobs in a stagnant economy is therefore low hours at low pay and with little prospect of getting a pay rise big enough to keep pace with price inflation. A surge in low paid mini jobs may be better than no jobs at all but this is not a sign that the economy is experiencing anything like a proper recovery.”

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• On Ruining Violentacrez’ Life
  “I’d suggest that while of course men and women both value their employability (and the ways in which their names appear in Internet searches), only women stand to have their lives ruined in this other manner, which goes unnamed and unrecognized because a) it happens offline (while bad Google results are visible, it’s much more difficult to point to or describe the dissemination of your body and the consequences, b) it involves “social” as opposed to economic ruin to which men are less vulnerable (unless they’re sex offenders) and c) it only involves female “victims” who are quite easy to blame. If your uncle stumbles on a nude photo you sent an ex-lover on one of the sites he visits and forwards it to family and friends, oh well–you were the agent of your own ruination.”
• IMF Suddenly Decides It Might be OK to Loosen Austerity Tourniquets Now that Gangrene is Setting In
  Christine Lagarde has taken too small a step in the right direction far too late to do much good. At the current IMF annual meeting in Tokyo, she’s made dramatic-sounding pronouncements consistent with the rather embarrassing admission in the Fund’s latest quarterly report that austerity is working less well than voodoo (I’ve never tried it myself, but some correspondents give it high marks).
• Rage running out | DAWN.COM
  It’s funny how similarly people can react, at every level, in supposedly disparate cultures.
• A dying star weaves a spiral in the night | Bad Astronomy
• The 3d printed future and its enemies :: Jacobin
  This is where the intensification of the surveillance state, throughout the Bush and Obama administrations and under the rubric of the “war on terror”, becomes important. The post-9/11 security state has gradually rendered itself permanent and disconnected itself from its original justification. We will be told that our purchases and downloads must all be monitored in order to prevent evildoers from printing arsenals in their living rooms, and it will just so happen that this same authoritarian apparatus will be used to enforce copyright claims as well. Meanwhile, the military will of course proceed to use the new technologies to facilitate their pointless wars.
• Misreading Environmentalism
  ” As for the crying wolf nature of environmentalism, it might not make good politics. People don’t want to hear that climate change is going to radically change life on earth. But so what. The problem with criticizing environmentalists for this is that climate change is indeed going to radically change life on earth, and almost entirely for the worse. There is virtually nothing within human existence that is sustainable over a long period of time and very little that is sustainable for the next century. We waste resources with abandon, poor farming practices slowly erode away the breadbaskets of the earth, we have a petroleum based economy with declining petroleum reserves, etc. All of these things are true. It may be against human nature to respond to apocalyptic calls, but when the apocalypse is upon us, what are environmentalists supposed to do? Not tell the truth?”
• If you’ve read the Mail’s climate lies from today, here’s what they didn’t print.
• Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin’
  So plankton remain a force in Southern elections — though not always, not continuously.
• Actress supports Romney, gets slammed by racist Obama voters
  ” But when the 15 seconds of attention this story has received evaporates, let’s try to hang on to the lesson here that being racist and sexist for Obama still makes you racist and sexist, OK?”
• Rescuing a sex slave/worker in a novel: The Darkest Little Room | The Naked Anthropologist
• "The ability to store data in DNA is an important breakthrough because it allows you to back your data up to a gerbil."
• How Quantum Mechanics Was Born From the Need For a Better Lightbulb
• Debunking a Progressive Constitutional Myth; or, How Corporations Became People, Too
• Ministry of Truth :: Deborah Orr and the Abortion Debate
• Denmark Hits 200 Megawatt Solar Capacity Goal 8 Years Ahead of Schedule
• GE’s New Flexible Gas Turbine: All the Power, None of the Waste
• Ministry of Truth :: Maria Miller, Abortion and Common Sense
• No Safe Haven: Shrinking Pool of Affordable Housing Creates Additional Hardship for Survivors of Domestic Abuse | RH Reality Check
  For survivors of domestic violence (DV), the need for affordable housing is dire. According to the 2011 Domestic Violence Counts National Census, lack of housing comprised 64 percent of reported unmet needs for DV survivors. DV has long been cited as a cause of homelessness. And in order to avoid homelessness, many DV survivors choose to stay with abusers because they cannot afford to live on their own.
• Screen Stockport Film Festival brings talent to town | UK news | guardian.co.uk
• Religious Leaders With HIV Fight Multiple Stigmas in Kenya | Global Press Institute
• Illiterate Women Push for Girls Education in Nepal | Global Press Institute
• Mehdi Hassan, man, explains the reasonableness of his opinion.
  Why is is that whenever quasi-liberal men get the need to explain why they should get to tell women what to do they always resort to the same tired arguments and special pleading. You think they genuinely believe they’re the first to come up with them?
• What the US Election is costing, and why
• 83-year-old grandmother calls 911, police arrive and shoot her three times, dead – Detroit liberal | Examiner.com
  Apparently the NRA are still using the rationale that if everyone has guns, everyone is safer. Can’t see that working here.
• Experts Debate Cause of Increased Flooding in Cameroon | Global Press Institute
  People who argue about the costs of dealing with climate change seem blissfully unaware of the much bigger costs of not dealing with it.
• Sex Workers’ Daughters Access Education in India | Global Press Institute
• The clobber verses of slavery & the slavery of clobber verses | slacktivist
• The return of Kony 2012 | FP Passport
• Why I am a liar straight from the pit of hell :: Starts With A Bang

This digest is produced every Mon/Wed/Fri morning. Enjoy it with your coffee!

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