Today's edition of quick hits:
* Good economic news: "A surge in homebuilding U.S. construction spending up in May, the latest indication that the housing sector is slowly recovering."
* Bad economic news: "Manufacturing in the U.S. unexpectedly contracted in June for the first time in almost three years, indicating a mainstay of the U.S. expansion may be faltering."
* The crisis in Syria intensifies: "Syrian attack helicopters bombarded a suburb of Damascus on Monday and Turkey said it had scrambled warplanes near the border in the north, as a 16-month conflict entered a more violent phase and diplomacy appeared to have failed. "
* Friday's severe storms in D.C. and the Mid-Atlantic knocked out power for millions and killed 17 people.
* Mexican voters elect Enrique Pena Nieto as their new president, completing the Institutional Revolutionary Party's comeback.
* The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals is not impressed with the sham perpetrated by Crisis Pregnancy Centers.
* Joan McCarter notes that, by one estimate, 98.4% of the names on Florida Gov. Rick Scott's (R) purge list are eligible voters.
* A Higgs Boson Breakthrough? "Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought 'God particle' answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist."
* And remember Jonathan Krohn? At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, the 13-year-old conservative quickly became a right-wing celebrity, delivering a speech on the virtues of conservatism. Four years later, Krohn isn't a conservative anymore -- he supports marriage equality, reads The New Yorker, and considers Obamacare "a good idea."
Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.
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How many laws out there protect Doctors who lie to men? "No, vasectomies don't hurt---you'll be back in action tomorrow."
Steve, it appears you misread the 4th circuit opinion, which appears to be just hunky-dory with the American Taliban deliberately misleading those slutty, slutty women who get lured into their "clinics."
Everyone knows that men are number one and women are number two. Who can argue with that?
You noticed that, did you? It was what I was going to mention, but you were there first.
I agree, Steve. It's all about free speech, don'tcha know?
Oh, and smb? This isn't even about doctors! This is about ill-educated Taliban Christians who don't provide any medical advice beyond "Jesus will hate you if you abort!"
Jesus hates everybody.
http://www.metroweekly.com/news/last_word/2012/07/armando-montano-22-year-old-out-gay-journalist-fou.html
http://www.metroweekly.com/news/last_word/2012/07/armando-montano-22-year-old-out-gay-journalist-fou.html
From just 2009 to now was all it took for the kid at CPAC? What an interesting story. Growing up in Alaska, I had a similar trajectory (was reading Milton Freidman on the beach in Hawaii between my junior and senior years of high school-- hey, those were the "Family Ties" days!-- to applying for an internship with Sen. Ted Stevens & getting drummed out for writing an essay that was a bit too radical libertarian... (yeah, if I hadn't changed, I'd have given you-know-who a run for her money)
I got to college and started taking philosophy and ethics courses, and that was about all it took to puncture arguments from religious or secular authority, ANY argument or ethical principle based on power or authority. There wasn't a lot in the far right positions that held water after that. Almost all of them are based on one sacred cow/authority or another, or coercion.
Other than the vague appeal of anarchy... Alaskans are just SO into it. Until you face what Thomas Hobbs describes in Leviathan:
Yeah, nasty, brutish and short. Not a whole lot of appeal in that. The trappings of civilization may get a bit too "sanitized for your protection" -- especially with the current generation of kids who never built a fort in a real woods, who grew up in fenced, burby backyards.
But as we are losing the generation that brought us through the Great Depression, a depressing fact remains: We are, all of us, MUCH too soft (think Eloi) to survive just the levels of hardship they had to face. We'd be a bunch of tit-babies, wah wah wah! Mommy!
Chris: I won't pretend to have studied "Leviathan" in depth. But it is my understanding that Hobbes advocated a strong central government, preferably a king or perhaps a royal council. Without a strong authority, civilization would devolve into the "war of every man against every man." As I recall, Hobbes was not referring so much to literal warfare as he was to a state of constant struggle and neverending distrust.
I am not so sure that I share Hobbes' extremely pessimistic view of his fellow humans. And I am pretty sure that I don't want a king.
On the other hand, Hobbes was surely right about the need for some sort of strong authority. As he put it so eloquently: "And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all."
RE: constant struggle and neverending distrust: In other words, the kind of survivalist anarchy libertarians dream of. No baseline civil society. Mad Max world. A daily struggle for water, food, shelter and clothing.
While I have no love of kings (or even overly representative forms of democracy/oligarchy), I do favor a stronger central government over a more grassroots federalism (Current Michigan is just one exemplar of why this is important. The slave-owning American South is another).
I think a strongly and fairly governed and empowered central government can prevent an awful lot of local corruption and abuse.
I also think the Eurozone would not be in the financial nightmare it has now if it had a more empowered central government such as what came out of the US Constitutional Convention of 1787.
As has been written elsewhere, the Savings and Loan Crisis of the '80s was presented as a national crisis, when, if we had a looser federation in the style of the Eurozone, the Savings and Loan Crisis really would have only bankrupted the state of Texas (and maybe Colorado).
A strong central government can be formed for the purposes of protecting the civil rights and small-d democratic decisions. It does not have to be run as a top-down, dictatorial bureaucracy.
For that matter, corporations could also be structured as small-d democracies, worker-owned and worker-run. Nobody died and said our currently dominant form of business management and organization is by any means set in stone, or the be-all and end-all of CEO-driven, board of directors bullying madness, now and for all time.
I beg you, please don't use the name "God Particle," even if you're linking to an article that does use it. It's annoying, the Higgs Boson has nothing more to do with "God" than any other particle in the Standard Model, and the guy who dubbed it that really regrets it. If you have to have another phrase to avoid repeating "Higgs," (which really, you don't), refer to it as the particle that confers mass. (Which is also not quite accurate, but it's at least close to factual and informative.)
Thank you for listening to my personal quixotic rant.
Agree on "God particle," which is asking for trouble. And while I'm at it, what's with capitalizing "boson" (or pronouncing it like boatswain, yet), or even belaboring the point that it's a boson at all. Does the average reader know the difference between a boson and fermion? Just call it the Higgs particle and be done with it! (Then again, since it has to do with inertial mass, maybe you could call it the Hog Particle...)
God particle? The more I read about quantum mechanics and general relativity the less I am sure anything really exists. That is especially true when you throw in string theory. Everything seems to collapse into a house of mirrors reflecting to infinity and everything depends upon the observer--(us?).
Unfortunately you are right. Things don't add up because of the way we "know". Everything we know comes to us from electromagnetic waves and yet electromagnetism can't "explain" everything. There are still large discrepancies in the theories. Hence, "dark matter"! But dark matter can't be "known" with electromagnetic waves because it neither reflects them or absorbs them. I think "string theory" is just beating electromagnetism to death and probably won't produce much in the way of breakthroughs.
Soooo, I think we are going to have to develop a new way to "see" - and since gravity is the only other "force" we are aware of, it is probable that the next great Einstein of our world will develop a set of theories and a new way of thinking about gravitism that will expand what we can 'know". I await the new theories with baited breath!!! I sure hope this "new Einstein" is working on them now!!
Onceuponatime, we didn't need to know how anything worked. Why bother now, it's so boring. I need to know how to help people with memory problems, Dorothy has prairie wind blowing through her head. I know all of the things that she likes and she is asking me to help her, or at least comfort her. She used to be like a nun, and then she woke up and now she's almost fast asleep. I know she can't tell me anymore what she needs, I think she was always very happy. So many things have been uncovered about this, it's not the aluminum, it mostly happens to teachers. We have to give science a rest for a while and start communicating. The power outages should suffice for a while in order to save electricity. People need to start buying spray water bottles. And lots of fans, drink alot of juice. Be lazy, and stay inside.
Angle that is an interesting post, but I have had a couple of glasses of wine. I will try reading it again in the morning to see if it makes any sense then. I don't think I have dementia, but there are days when I feel I have a prairie wind blowing through my mind.
Anyway, my problem with harmonizing general relativity and quantum mechanics might be because I don't really understand the math, but then again, Einstein understood the math and he couldn't fit it all together. We are always diving deeper into the seemingly eternal regression trying to reconcile the reality of the very large with the very different reality the very small. In the reality of the very large, space/time warps and the earth is actually moving in a "straight" line while orbiting the sun. At a very small level you can either know where a particle is but you can't know how fast it is moving, or you can know how fast it is moving but you can't know where it is. Somewhere in the middle light acts like both a wave and a particle. Reality is filled with absurd paradoxes. The past is dead and gone and the future has not yet arrived. There is only now and now changes from observer to observer. At the smallest of all levels, some physicists insist that all of nature is a harmony of strings, but like much in science they can't prove the existence of strings. It is almost like God is having fun at our expense.
we need to get these Republican Governors to sign a pledge not to accept the Medicaid Expansion before the the election in Nov. because after Pres. Obama wins reelection they will suck it up like a dry sponge. We need to use their Tea party identity against them for this election , right now.
You are posting this comment to a publicly viewable discussion. We need more sponges in order to soak up the water. Then, we can save them for a rainy day.Witches hate water. So, we should make it rain a lot that way we can all sing together. Now, that would certainly be a horse of a different color, a painted one. We all love the old one. Check your pockets for any old laundramat(not sure if this is spelled right.) tickets.
Great economic news: Climate change is pushing a vast wave of rebuilding across the country.
Even better news: America still has a whole bunch of coal to burn.
Also, has the Dread Justice Roberts made the case for a constitutional amendment to limit the power of Congress to tax and did he intend to do so?
Are you sure that's not a video of an Obama-ordered drone strike on a "terrorist" funeral?
Yeah, trees don't fall from the sky.
It was very interesting to read about Jonathan Krohn at the Politico website. I see, among other things, that he reads philosophers like Nietzsche and Kant--at age 17! Judging from the article and the accompanying video, he seems like a very bright and levelheaded young man who will surely go very far in life. Who knows--he might be a major player in the political world by, say, 2030.
It looks like they're carrying a Stormtrooper.
Jews did the Death Star? Nevar forget?
The Republicans act like 13-year-olds much of the time. Jonathan Krohn outgrew them once he hit his middle teens. That's why he's now a progressive. He's showing maturity and intellectual growth.
Women only shlould be able to vote.
And besides the infinite and the eternal there is the Possible. And just as the first two must somehow be contained to create this reality, so too must the third. So is it possible that each individual person who has ever existed will live your life and mine? Now that I have sugested it, it will.. It's not so much "there but for the grace of god go I",,, it's more accurate to say "there I will go"... And doesn't it strike anyone that that the empathatic life review (after death) is also Justice?
Interesting news from Europe this morning:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48054475
Bob Diamond resigns as CEO of Barclays' a large London based bank, based on the bank's manipulation of LIBOR rates (the rates banks use to borrow from one another for short term loans) to make their bank appear more stable than it was.
There is evidence that Bob Diamond KNEW about this:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48054109
Yet many feel that he was Europe's "smartest banker" (yep, another "smartest guy in the room")
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000100595&play=1
Why is this important?
Because Romney will be in London later this month raising money from the English banks to pay for his campaign in the United States (Diamond was one of the 18 "co-chairs"). (Romney claims he is ONLY taking money from the US side of the bank - yea sure!)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48054195