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Palin Ponders the Infinite: Does the Lamestream Media Ever Ask Hillary About Her Favorite Bible Verse?

by Betsey52Rib Posted on August 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Huh. I almost forgot about the Palin-Trump lollapalooza. But it’s all on YouTube, and it was pretty boring. Palin’s word salad was subpar and it was just the same-old-same-old from Trump. My favorite part was this bit from Palin:

So you get hit with these gotchas, like most conservatives do. For instance, asking what’s your favorite Bible verse. And I listen to that going, what? Do they ask Hillary that?

Indeed they do! On August 27, 2007, in a nationally televised debate, Tim Russert asked every Democrat on the stage to share their favorite Bible verse:

RUSSERT: Before we go, there’s been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values. I want to ask you a simple question.

Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?

OBAMA: Well, I think it would have to be the Sermon on the Mount, because it expresses a basic principle that I think we’ve lost over the last six years.

John talked about what we’ve lost. Part of what we’ve lost is a sense of empathy towards each other. We have been governed in fear and division, and you know, we talk about the federal deficit, but we don’t talk enough about the empathy deficit, a sense that I stand in somebody else’s shoes, I see through their eyes. People who are struggling trying to figure out how to pay the gas bill, or try to send their kids to college. We are not thinking about them at the federal level. That’s the reason I’m running for president, because I want to restore that.

RUSSERT: I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds.

Senator Clinton, favorite Bible verse?

CLINTON: The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think it’s a good rule for politics, too.

RUSSERT: Senator Gravel?

GRAVEL: The most important thing in life is love. That’s what empowers courage, and courage implements the rest of our virtues.

RUSSERT: Congressman Kucinich?

KUCINICH: I carry that with me at every debate, this prayer from St. Francis, which says, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, and I believe very strongly that all of us can be instruments of peace. And that’s what I try to bring to public life.

RUSSERT: Senator Edwards?

EDWARDS: It appears many times in the Bible, What you do onto the least of those, you do onto me.

RUSSERT: Governor Richardson?

RICHARDSON: The Sermon on the Mount, because I believe it’s an issue of social justice, equality, brotherly issues reflecting a nation that is deeply torn and needs to be heal and come together.

DODD: The Good Samaritan would be a worthwhile sort of description of who we all ought to be in life.

RUSSERT: Senator Biden?

BIDEN: Christ’s warning of the Pharisees. There are many Pharisees, and it’s part of what has bankrupted some people’s view about religion. And I worry about the Pharisees.

Hillary Clinton’s choice wasn’t very original, I admit, but neither was Obama’s. Biden, as usual, provided the most entertaining answer: “I worry about the Pharisees.” I guess we all do, Joe. In any case, the lamestream media had no problem asking, and the Democrats all had no problem answering. See? It’s not so hard.

What’s your favorite Bible verse? I’d recommend Mark 12:38 “Beware of the scribes.” I think Palin would agree that it’s good advice for any era.

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Palin Ponders the Infinite: Does the Lamestream Media Ever Ask Hillary About Her Favorite Bible Verse?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 28 August 2015

by biletedeavionrezervari Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is how we roll around here in August: stretched out to maximum length for maximum cooling power. Plus it might lure someone over to give Hilbert a tummy rub. Pretty often it does, in fact.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 28 August 2015

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Man Is the Irrational Animal

by MarquisOsby9415 Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mark Kleiman points out that most of us need to hold more or less rational beliefs about our professional lives. “Even people whose stock-in-trade is deception—con artists, stockbrokers, lobbyists—have to observe the rules of arithmetic when it comes to totting up the take.” But that’s only half the story:

Most of the time, though, people aren’t at work, and much of what they think and talk about has little if any relevance to practical decisions in their own non-working lives. Freed of the need to think rationally, most people seem to prefer the alternative.

Yep. This is why, say, it costs nothing to claim that evolution is nonsense and shouldn’t be taught in schools. For the 99.9 percent of us who don’t work in fields that require it, evolution doesn’t affect our daily lives in any way at all. Believing or not believing is affinity politics and nothing more. This explains how Donald Trump gets away with being a buffoon:

The deepest mistake is to regard someone who acts as if he doesn’t give a damn whether anything he says is true, or consistent with what he said yesterday, as stupid….As far as I can tell, Donald Trump simply isn’t bothered by holding and expressing utterly inconsistent beliefs about immigration, or for that matter denying obvious facts in the face of the crowd that witnessed them. And it doesn’t much bother most of his voters, either….And if we deal with it by imagining that Trump, or Trump voters, are “stupid,” we’re going to make some very bad predictions.

We forgive a lot in people we like. Liberals forgive Hillary Clinton for her lawyerly and incompetent defense of her email practices. Trump fans forgive the fact that he makes no sense. But forgiveness is a virtue, right? I guess that makes Trump’s supporters the most virtuous folks on the planet.

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Man Is the Irrational Animal

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The Real Lesson From Emailgate: Maybe the State Department Needs More Secure Email

by CassieRZJyu Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Ignatius talked with “a half-dozen knowledgeable lawyers” and concluded that the Hillary Clinton email affair has been overblown. No big surprise there. Click the link if you want more.

But here’s the curious part. Part of Clinton’s trouble stems from the fact that sensitive information was sent to her via email, which isn’t meant for confidential communications. However, as Ignatius points out, this is a nothingburger. Everyone does this, and has for a long time. But why?

“It’s common knowledge that the classified communications system is impossible and isn’t used,” said one former high-level Justice Department official. Several former prosecutors said flatly that such sloppy, unauthorized practices, although technically violations of law, wouldn’t normally lead to criminal cases.

Why is the classified system so cumbersome? Highly secure encryption is easy to implement on off-the-shelf PCs, and surely some kind of software that plugs into email and restricts the flow of messages wouldn’t be too hard to implement. So why not build more security into email and ditch the old system? What’s the hold-up?

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The Real Lesson From Emailgate: Maybe the State Department Needs More Secure Email

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Clarence Thomas Can’t Catch a Break

by BethanyKORQ Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday the New York Times ran a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hoisted language from briefs submitted to the court “at unusually high rates.” I was curious to see the actual numbers, so I opened up the study itself. Here’s the relevant excerpt from Figure 2:

I dunno. Does that look “unusually high” to you? It looks to me like it’s about the same as Sotomayor, and only a bit higher than Ginsburg, Alito and Roberts. It’s a little hard to see the news here, especially given this:

Since his views on major legal questions can be idiosyncratic and unlikely to command a majority, he is particularly apt to be assigned the inconsequential and technical majority opinions that the justices call dogs. They often involve routine cases involving taxes, bankruptcy, pensions and patents, in which shared wording, including quotations from statutes and earlier decisions, is particularly common.

So at most, Thomas uses language from briefs only slightly more than several other justices, and that’s probably because he gets assigned the kinds of cases where it’s common to do that. Is there even a story here at all?

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Clarence Thomas Can’t Catch a Break

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Joe Biden Not Sure He Has "Emotional Fuel" To Run For President

by AdellAdams Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is the first hard evidence we have that Joe Biden is seriously thinking about a presidential run:

On Wednesday he made his first public comments on his potential 2016 run — though not intentionally. CNN posted audio recorded during what was supposed to be a private conference call for Democratic National Committee members in which the vice-president confirmed that he’s actively considering entering the campaign….“We’re dealing at home with … whether or not there is the emotional fuel at this time to run,” Biden responded.

I’ve got nothing but sympathy for what Biden is going through right now, but the fact remains: If you’re not sure you have the fuel for a grueling presidential campaign, then you don’t.

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Joe Biden Not Sure He Has "Emotional Fuel" To Run For President

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Donald Trump: The Bible Is Great, But, Um, Let’s Not Get Into Specifics

by yX8kD0qE3l Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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As a blogger, it’s hard not to love Donald Trump. Here’s the latest, in an interview with Mark Halperin and John Heilemann:

I’m wondering what one or two of your most favorite Bible verses are and why.

Well, I wouldn’t want to get into it because to me that’s very personal. You know, when I talk about the Bible it’s very personal. So I don’t want to get into verses, I don’t want to get into—the Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.

Even to cite a verse that you like?

No, I don’t want to do that.

Are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy?

Uh, probably….equal. I think it’s just an incredible….the whole Bible is an incredible….I joke….very much so. They always hold up The Art of the Deal, I say it’s my second favorite book of all time. But, uh, I just think the Bible is just something very special.

OK, it’s not only Trump I love. Props also to Heilemann for asking Trump if he’s an OT guy or an NT guy. Who talks about the Bible that way?

We’ve seen this schtick from Trump before, of course. He’s stunningly ignorant, and routinely refuses to answer whenever someone asks about a factual detail more than an inch below the surface. Needless to say, he refuses because he doesn’t know, but he always pretends it’s for some other reason. “I don’t want to insult anyone by naming names,” he’ll say, as if this isn’t his entire stock in trade. Or, in this case, “It’s personal,” as if he’s a guy who leads a deep personal life that he never talks about.

The interesting thing is that this schtick also shows how lazy he is. It’s been evident for several days that someone was eventually going to ask him for his favorite Bible verse, but he couldn’t be bothered to bone up even a little bit in order to have one on tap. Ditto for everything else. Even when he says something that’s going to raise obvious questions the next day, he never bothers to learn anything about the subject. I guess he figures he’s got people for that.

Of course, there is an advantage to handling things this way. By shutting down the Bible talk completely, he guarantees he’ll never have to talk about it again. I mean, today it’s Bible verses, tomorrow somebody might want him to name the Ten Commandments. And since it’s pretty obvious that he hasn’t cracked open the Bible in decades, that could get hairy pretty fast. Better to shut it down right away.

POSTSCRIPT: So which is Trump? OT or NT? I expect that he admires the OT God more. That’s a deity who knows what he wants and doesn’t put up with any PC nonsense about it. Plus they built a lot of stuff in the Old Testament: towers, walls, arks, temples, etc. That would appeal to Trump. On the other hand, the New Testament has all those annoying lessons about the meek inheriting the earth, rich men and needles, turning the other cheek, and a bunch of other advice that Trump has no time for.

So: Old Testament. Definitely Old Testament.

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Donald Trump: The Bible Is Great, But, Um, Let’s Not Get Into Specifics

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

by IsabellASV Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Roberts has a long post at Vox about tech nerds and their disdain for politics. He highlights one particular tech nerd who describes both major parties as “a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things,” and jumps off from there:

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

The first, which is extremely common in the nerd community, is a distaste for government and politics….a sense that government is big, bloated, slow-moving, and inefficient, that politicians are dimwits and panderers, and that real progress comes from private innovation, not government mandates. None of which is facially unreasonable.

The second is the conception of politics as a contest of two mirror-image political philosophies, with mirror-image extremes and a common center, which is where sensible, independent-minded people congregate.

There’s about 4,400 more words than this, so click the link if you want to immerse yourself.

But I have a little different take on all this. The truth is that politics and tech are the same thing: inventing a product that appeals to people and then marketing the hell out of it. Back in the dark ages, this was a little more obvious. Steve Wozniak invented, Steve Jobs sold. It was so common for tech companies to be started by two people, one engineer and one salesman, that it was practically a cliche.

The modern tech community has lost a bit of that. Oh, they all chatter about social media and going viral and so forth. As long as the marketing is actually just some excuse for talking about cool new tech, they’re happy to immerse themselves in it. But actually selling their product? Meh. The truly great ideas rise to the top without any of that Mad Men crap. Anyway, the marketing department will handle the dull routine of advertising and….well, whatever it is they do.

Politics, by contrast, leans the other way. Inventing new stuff helps, but the real art is in selling your ideas to the public and convincing your fellow politicians to back you. It’s all messy and annoying, especially if you’re not very socially adept, but it’s the way human beings get things done.

Well, it’s one of the ways. Because Roberts only tells half the story. As much as most tech nerds disdain the messy humanness of politics, it’s equally true that most politicians disdain the eye-rolling naivete of tech nerds. You wanna get something done, kid? Watch the master at work.

In politics, you have the wonks and the hacks—and it’s the hacks who rule. In tech, you have the nerds and the salesmen—and it’s the nerds who rule. There are always exceptions, but that’s the general shape of the river.

But guess what? The most successful nerds have always been the ones who are also willing to figure out what makes people tick. And the most successful politicians have been the ones who are willing to marry themselves to policy solutions that fit their time and place. That doesn’t mean that nerds have to slap backs (Bill Gates never did) or that successful politicians have to immerse themselves in white papers (Ronald Reagan never did), but wonks and hacks and nerds and salesmen all need each other. The political hacks and the tech nerds need to get together and get messy. And more important: they have to genuinely respect each other. When that happens, you have a very, very powerful combination. So get to work.

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

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This company has 400 people hyped to build Elon Musk’s hyperloop

by Bryon6591cdfuls Posted on August 20, 2015

This company has 400 people hyped to build Elon Musk’s hyperloop

By on 20 Aug 2015commentsShare

It’s unclear whether Elon Musk is a comic book character come to life, or whether we’re all just comic book characters living in his world on the floor of some middle schooler’s bedroom. Either way, Musk is probably watching from a secret lair right about now, doing some serious Mr. Burns-style finger-tenting and muttering “Eeexcellent” — until an assistant pops in to feed him his latest experiment in food replacement technology.

Earlier today, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), the startup that’s trying to build Musk’s proposed Hyperloop — a super fast and super sci-fi-ish people launcher that could (in theory) get commuters from L.A. to San Francisco in 30 minutes — announced three new partnerships with an engineering design firm, a Swiss technology company, and an architecture firm. (Note: The Hyperloop is not to be confused with Musk’s other big ideas: saving the planet with solar power and colonizing Mars.)

HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn also announced that it now has 400 “team members” from places like NASA, Boeing, Tesla, and SpaceX, who have made minimum weekly commitments to the project in exchange for stock options. The company is planning to break ground on a five-mile test track in California’s Central Valley in May of next year.

Wired spoke with Carl Brockmeyer, the head of business development at Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum, one of HTT’s new partners, about the collaboration:

Oerlikon has put a half dozen employees on the project. They’re simulating how much energy it would take to clear the Hyperloop tube to near zero pressure, and what it would cost. Brockmeyer declined to give exact figures, but says “you will be surprised” by how little energy is required. In fact, he says the energy could be generated by the solar panels and wind turbines Ahlborn plans to erect in Quay Valley. All that aside, there’s another reason Oerlikon signed on.

“I thought, ‘Traveling in a vacuum tube? This is something we should be involved in,’” Brockmeyer says.

Aecom, the engineering design firm that HTT is teaming up with, helped build the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and is currently working on London’s 62-mile Crossrail tunnel. Aecom’s vice president of new ventures told Wired that he thinks HTTs plans are “very realistic.”

Presumably, all 400 people working on the project think the hyperloop is at least somewhat realistic (although we’re still waiting for proof). That is, unless this is all just a coverup for what Musk really wants to build in California’s Central Valley. DUN DUN DUUUUN! Stay tuned for the next issue of … what? If we were all living in a comic book, what would it be called?

Source:
So Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Is Actually Getting Kinda Serious

, Wired.

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Oceans 15


This scuba diver wants everyone — black, white, or brown — to feel at home in the oceanKramer Wimberley knows what it’s like to feel unwelcome in the water. As a dive instructor and ocean-lover, he tries to make sure no one else does.


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How much plastic is in our oceans? Ask the woman trying to clean it upCarolynn Box, environmental program director of 5 Gyres, talks about what it’s like to sail across the ocean, pulling up plastic in the middle of nowhere.


Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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This company has 400 people hyped to build Elon Musk’s hyperloop

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Labor Shortage? Have You Tried Paying More?

by HuldaC56ykc Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post informs us today of yet another looming labor shortage:

There’s a growing problem that chefs and restaurateurs are talking about more these days.

Good cooks are getting harder to come by. Not the head kitchen honchos, depicted in Food Network reality shows, who fine-tune menus, and orchestrate the dinner rush, but the men and women who are fresh out of culinary school and eager to earn their chops. The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago….It’s an issue in New York as well….And it extends to restaurants out West, where a similar pinch is being felt. Seattle is coping with the same dilemma. San Francisco, too.

….One of the clearest obstacles to hiring a good cook, let alone someone willing to work the kitchen these days, is that living in this country’s biggest cities is increasingly unaffordable. In New York, for instance, where an average cook can expect to make somewhere between $10 and $12 per hour….

Let’s just stop right there. We’ve seen this movie before. What’s really happening, apparently, is that there’s a shortage of skilled people willing to work lousy hours and face long commutes in return for $10 to $12 per hour.

Offer them, say, $15 per hour, and who knows? Maybe there are plenty of good entry-level cooks available. This would raise your total cost of running the restaurant by, oh, 2 percent or so,1 but it’s not like restaurants are competing with China. They’re competing with other restaurants nearby that have the same problem. If the price of a good cook is going up, it’s going to affect everyone.

I tire of reading stories like this. Tell me what happens when employers offer more money. If they still can’t find qualified workers, then maybe there’s a real problem. If they haven’t even tried it, then maybe the problem isn’t quite as dire as they’re making it out to be.

1Back-of-envelope guess based on kitchen labor cost of 15 percent and entry-level cooks making up maybe a third of that. If 5 percent of your cost base gets a 30-40 percent raise, that’s about a 2 percent total increase.

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Labor Shortage? Have You Tried Paying More?

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