Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, March 10, 2015.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Noble Heart by Phox
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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Solar power just had its best year ever
By Tim McDonnell
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We’ve noted before the many ways in which solar power is blowing up in the United States: Adding tons of jobs, driving progressive policies, and attracting millions of dollars in investment from major corporations. It’s not slowing down anytime soon: New data from market analysis firm GTM Research finds that 2014 was solar’s biggest year ever, with 30 percent more photovoltaic installations installed than in 2013. Check it out:
Those numbers are even more impressive when you compare them to other types of energy sources. Even though solar still accounts for a small share of U.S. electricity generation (less than 1 percent), last year it added nearly as many new megawatts to the grid as natural gas, which is quickly catching up on coal as the country’s primary energy source. (Coal, you can see, added almost nothing new in 2014.)
The report points to three chief reasons for the boom. First, costs are falling, not just for the panels themselves but for ancillary expenses like installation and financing, such that overall prices fell by 10 percent compared to 2013. Second, falling costs have allowed both large utility companies and small third-party solar installers to pursue new ways to bring solar to customers, including leasing panels and improved on-site energy storage. Third, federal incentives and regulations have been relatively stable in the last few years . . .
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Wikimedia joins civil rights groups in lawsuit against NSA internet spying
By Dominic Rushe
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The Wikimedia Foundation, Amnesty International and a host of civil rights groups sued the National Security Agency and the US Department of Justice on Tuesday challenging the mass surveillance programme uncovered by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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According to the lawsuit, the NSA’s mass surveillance of internet traffic in the United States violates the US constitution’s first amendment, which protects freedom of speech and association, and the fourth amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
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The suit, also backed by Human Rights Watch, writers’ group PEN, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, argues the NSA’s actions impede their constitutional right to “exchange information in confidence, free from warrantless government monitoring” and exceeds the authority given to the government bodies by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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ACLU, PEN and others have previously challenged the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping programme. The supreme court dismissed that case, Clapper v Amnesty, in February 2013, months before Snowden’s revelation. The justices rejected the case in a 5-4 vote on grounds that the plaintiffs had failed to prove that they had been subject to spying and were “based too much on speculation”.
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This Air Traffic Control Plan Is Trying to Make Delivery Drones Legal
By Darren Orf
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NASA has been working on a plan for months to create an air traffic control system for drones to make sure the flying machines don't crash into things like people and planes. Now that plan includes trying to develop a reliable system so people can fly drones remotely.
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The system, called the Symphony RangeVue, would funnel FAA data and drone-tracking data into a mobile app that operators could use to see what planes or other aircraft were surrounding their drone.
Of course, this doesn't directly solve the "line of sight" problem that the FAA requires commercial drones to have. But the hope is that such a system is in place, if it can be proven reliable, might persuade the FAA to ease its restriction.
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Boko Haram child captives 'forgot names'
By (BBC)
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About 80 children rescued from a Boko Haram camp in Cameroon cannot remember their own names or origins, according to an aid official who visited them.
The children - aged between 5 and 18 - did not speak English, French or any local languages, says Christopher Fomunyoh, a director for the US-based National Democratic Institute (NDI).
. . .
He said the children had spent so long with their captors, being indoctrinated in jihadist ideology, that they had lost track of who they were.
"They've lost touch with their parents," he said. "They've lost touch with people in their villages, they're not able to articulate, to help trace their relationships, they can't even tell you what their names are."
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International |
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US diplomat warns Europe of 'dangerous' defence spending cuts
By (BBC)
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Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has appealed to European governments to spend more.
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The ambassador said she had flown to Brussels to encourage the leaders of Nato countries to meet the defence spending target of 2% of GDP.
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She warned: "The number of missions that require advanced militaries to contribute around the world is growing not shrinking."
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The ambassador appealed to governments for aid in the form of military sophistication, niche capabilities, attack helicopters and intelligence.
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Myanmar police crack down on student protesters
By (Al Jazeera)
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At least 16 police officers and eight protesters were hurt when Myanmar police clashed with students, monks and journalists as they broke up protesters calling for academic freedom, according to news reports and witnesses.
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Haung Sai, a member of the National Network for Education Reform, which took part in the protests, told Al Jazeera that there were at least three police officers to every one of the protestors and their supporters.
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Yangon is the site of numerous student-led demonstrations, including those in 1988 that sparked a pro-democracy movement that spread throughout the country, before being brutally suppressed by the military government.
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The Delegation of the European Union, which has been training the police in crowd management, condemned the crackdown, saying in a statement that it "deeply regrets the use of force against peaceful demonstrators".
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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'Sugar papers' reveal industry role in 1970s U.S. National Caries Program, analysis shows
By (ScienceDaily)
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newly discovered cache of industry documents reveals that the sugar industry worked closely with the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s and '70s to develop a federal research program focused on approaches other than sugar reduction to prevent tooth decay in American children.
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"Our findings are a wake-up call for government officials charged with protecting the public health, as well as public health advocates, to understand that the sugar industry, like the tobacco industry, seeks to protect profits over public health," Glantz added.
While the authors recognize that the Adams papers provide a narrow window into the activities of one sugar industry trade association, they noted that the sugar industry's current position remains that public health should focus on fluoride toothpaste, dental sealants and other ways to reduce the harm of sugar, rather than reducing consumption. They concluded that industry opposition to current policy proposals - including the World Health Organization's newly released guidelines to reduce added sugar to less than 10% of daily caloric intake ) - should not be allowed to block this prudent public health standard.
"There is robust evidence now linking excess sugar consumption with heart disease, diabetes and liver disease, in addition to tooth decay," said Schmidt, who also is principal investigator on the UCSF-led SugarScience initiative. "Times have definitely changed since that era, but this is a stark lesson in what can happen if we are not careful about maintaining scientific integrity."
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Washington Legislature Moves to Limit Schools Pinning Down and Isolating Kids
By Annie Waldman
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Last year, an analysis of government data by ProPublica and NPR revealed that educators frequently pin down kids and isolate them. During the 2012 school year, these practices were used on students more than 267,000 times. Nearly three-quarters of the reported restraints involved children with disabilities. Hundreds of children are injured each year during restraints and at least 20 have died as a result.
Washington’s House of Representatives passed the restraints bill earlier this month and the state Senate is expected to vote on it in the coming weeks. It would prohibit pinning down kids or isolating them unless a student’s actions could lead to the harm of a person or property. Such interventions would also no longer be allowed in the pre-approved behavior plans of special needs students.
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Not all legislators support the proposed reforms.
“Let’s be honest, some of these children are very large and very strong,” State Rep. Brad Klippert told Tacoma’s News Tribune. “I do want to be able to give our teachers the latitude to protect everyone.”
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
Last Sunday night in The Sugar Club was one of the more special and most enjoyable live shows I've attended in quite a while. I was there to see Wisconsin band Phox, hot on the heels from their appearance on Conan O'Brien the previous week and at the starting point of their European tour. . . in considerably different surroundings, they put on a superb show at the intimate venue . . . In some ways the night couldn't have gone better for both audience and band, the atmosphere was so relaxed but it didn't take long for the crowd to be fully engaged in the performance, in no small part to Phox's interaction, witty, happy and infectious. There were no trappings, just friends playing for friends is how I would sum it up.
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Remy: Your self-titled release traverses so many different genres on each track. For example, opener 'Calico Man' could easily be on Nico’s Chelsea Girl, current single 'Slow Motion' is very chamber-pop, 'Evil' is folk-country and 'Noble Heart' is a real throwback to soulful blues. Is this as a result of varied influences among yourselves or merely the result of combined creativity?
Matt: It's definitely not intentional. Well, I suppose it is inasmuch as we try to write around Monica's melodies. We aim to set the lights just right, and put out the right potpourri. It would be totally silly if 'Calico Man' was folk-country and 'Slow Motion' was Chelsea Girl. Or maybe not?
Remy: Monica, I have to ask, purely because I think your vocals are outstanding and incredibly easy on the ear, which vocalists past and / or present do you most admire?
Matt (not Monica!): Monica always cites the classic jazz singers as influences. Billie, Etta, Ella. But also some contemporary folk singers, like Brandi Carlile. She used to yodel around the house a lot.
Remy: . . . many tracks seem to start out with a small tinge of sadness before reaching a hopeful conclusion, is this an overall idea for the album or am I seeing something that isn’t actually there at all!!
Matt: There isn't an overall theme. Perhaps the best summary is that these are deeply personal stories, like entries out of Monica's diary. She never expected most of her friends in Madison to hear them, let alone have the lyrics be read by music journalists in Ireland. My read is that these songs come across vulnerable with intention to emote, not to hand-hold listeners through a story. There's no narrator.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Antibiotics Are No Longer Making Pigs Bigger
By Kiera Butler
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. . . a new meta-analysis by two Princeton researchers shows that antibiotics aren't as effective at promoting growth as they used to be. Studies from 1950-1985 suggested that antibiotics increased weight of young pigs by an average of about 17 older pigs by 4 percent. But similar studies since 2000 found much less dramatic results: 1 percent increase for young pigs and no measurable increase for older pigs.
. . . The consequences of antibiotic resistance, of course, go far beyond pigs' rates of growth. As my colleague Tom Philpott has reported, superbugs can jump from animals to humans. Antibiotic-resistant infections already kill 700,000 people every year worldwide. A recent UK report predicted that number will rise to 10 million by 2050.
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A greener afterlife: is human composting the future for funerals?
By Katie Herzog
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There are a few other options for body disposal in America, but they are not without flaws. Always dreamed of burial at sea? Good luck. You can’t just hire a dingy and have your loved ones dump you overboard. At-sea burials are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and hiring a company to do it for you will cost over $10,000. There’s also “green” or “natural” burial, which means a body isn’t embalmed or entombed and is allowed to decompose naturally, but there aren’t that many sites that allow this in the US, and most of them are in rural areas. For the vast majority of Americans, the choices are conventional burial or cremation.
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Spade explains that when animals die on farms and can’t be butchered, their bodies are processed using “static mortality composting.” About 18 inches of wood chips are spread in a field, and the animal is laid on top and covered with another 18 inches of wood chips so it resembles a mulch pile. After a couple months, the animal is just … gone. With humans, Spade says, all that remains will be the artificial parts of us, “things like titanium hips and gold teeth”. Even your bones will disappear.
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Testing is ongoing at Western Carolina University (WCU), a rural campus nestled deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the Anthropology Department’s Forensic Osteology Research Station – more commonly known as a “body farm.” WCU is one of five universities with these sites in the country, and forensic students use them to study the stages of decomposition (that’s another thing you can do with your body — donate it to science). The site at WCU is also used for training cadaver dogs, and now, for measuring rates of decay for the Urban Death Project. Spade has visited, and described a recently laid-out body as “beautiful, though it didn’t quite register as human. It’s important to respect the body, but somewhere in the system we cease to be human. We can’t be human forever.”
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Unlike a traditional graveyard, however, you could go home with your loved ones in the form of soil. You could then spread them in a garden or under a tree planted in their honor, and, Spade says, even public parks could be fertilized with the soil, so cities would be nourished by the people who lived in them.
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The South Bronx isn’t falling for Fresh Direct’s dirty trucks
By Suzanne Jacobs
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The company, currently based in Queens, dispatches trucks full of high-end groceries to residents in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Delaware. In 2012, it announced plans to move its warehouse to the South Bronx, a densely populated, low-income neighborhood in New York’s poorest borough, and as a preemptive “You’re welcome!” promised to bring with it up to 1,000 new jobs (that don’t pay very well). Company reps also told the borough president that it would give at least 30 percent of those jobs to local residents, although they’re not legally bound to that.
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Between 2002 and 2005, New York University researchers attached air pollution monitors to the backpacks of asthmatic kids in the South Bronx to see what kind of air they were breathing. Not surprisingly, it was pretty bad. Traffic fumes were a big problem; some kids occasionally registered levels of diesel emissions that exceeded what the EPA considers safe (and legal).
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According to its website, Fresh Direct currently has 10 electric trucks in its fleet and plans to make its trucks “100 percent green” within five years. That would certainly be a good thing for the South Bronx, but it wouldn’t negate the injustice of the company moving there now, before greening its fleet.
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Science and Health |
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Voices in people's heads more complex than previously thought
By (ScienceDaily)
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One of the largest and most detailed studies to date on the experience of auditory hallucinations, commonly referred to as voice hearing, found that the majority of voice-hearers hear multiple voices with distinct character-like qualities, with many also experiencing physical effects on their bodies.
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Co-author Dr Nev Jones from Stanford University said: "Our findings regarding the prevalence and phenomenology of non-acoustic voices are particularly noteworthy. By and large, these voices were not experienced simply as intrusive or unwanted thoughts, but rather, like the auditory voices, as distinct 'entities' with their own personalities and content. This data also suggests that we need to think much more carefully about the distinction between imagined percepts, such as sound, and perception."
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Rachel explains: "I hear about 13 or so voices. Each of them is different -- some have names, they are different ages and sound like different people. Some of them are very angry and violent, others are scared, and others are mischievous. Sometimes, I hear a child who is very frightened. When she is frightened I can sometimes feel pains in my body -- burning. If I can help the voice calm down, by doing some grounding strategies, the burning pains stop.
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Researchers identify PTSD biomarkers
By Brooks Hays
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In analyzing blood samples of some 188 U.S. Marines, researchers have located genetic biomarkers linked with post-traumatic stress disorder. The PTSD markers are also associated with gene networks that govern innate immune function and interferon signaling.
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"The question to ask is what's stimulating an interferon response prior to PTSD development," added Baker. "The answer could be any number of factors, ranging from a simple explanation of increased anticipatory stress prior to deployment or more complex scenarios where individuals may have a higher viral load. It's a question for future studies."
The takeaway, for this study, is that interferon signaling networks could be used as a serviceable molecular signature for predicting PTSD risk.
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The World's Oldest Mummies Are Suddenly Turning Into Black Goo
By Sarah Zhang
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Having survived 8,000 years, the Chinchorro mummies found in modern-day Chile and Peru have started decaying more quickly than ever before—in some cases even melting into gelatinous "black ooze." Scientists at Harvard think they've found the reason why.
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The team took bacterial samples from degraded and non-degraded mummy skin and grew them in a lab. At higher humidity, skin with bacteria growing on them degraded more quickly, with decay setting in after just 21 days, according to a Harvard press release. That's where it clicked: Humidity has been rising in the city of Arica, where the archeologist museum is located.
The ideal humidity for the mummies turns out to be between 40 and 60 percent. Too high and they rot; too low and acidification can happen. That's good to know for a museum with climate control, but a changing climate could spell doom for the hundreds of mummies still out there in the ground. They have survived for so long, but they may not survive the humidity
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Technology |
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Flat elements developed by Harvard could make camera lenses smaller, lighter and better
By Damien Demolder
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A team at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has developed a method for making flat lenses that could dramatically reduce the size and weight of camera lenses in the future. The method employs tiny silicon antennas positioned on flat glass components to redirect light when it reaches the surface of the lens instead of relying on refraction and the thickness of glass to bend light in a particular direction. The silicon antennas on a single flat lens element can be arranged to direct the three main wavelengths to focus at exactly the same point – a job that usually requires at least three elements in a conventional, glass lens. |
CIA Helped the Justice Dept. Build Spy Planes to Snoop on Phones
By Kate Knibbs
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There are rules barring the CIA from getting involved in matters of domestic surveillance. But here's some news: The CIA played a key role in developing a sketchy domestic dragnet phone snooping technology used by the Justice Department, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Last year, we found out that there was a secret surveillance program in the US that used devices called "dirtboxes" to mimic cell phone towers. By putting dirtboxes in small airplanes, US Marshals can redirect phone traffic to hunt for suspects. In tricking phone data to redirect to dirtboxes so that law enforcement could hunt for suspects, these spy planes briefly conduct a kind of widespread data dragnet, even on people using their phones from within their homes.
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CIA and Justice Department officials say that this close-knit, coordinated decade-long project doesn't violate rules against the CIA participating in domestic surveillance.
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Solar Impulse: Piccard crosses Arabian Sea to India
By Jonathan Amos
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Solar Impulse, the fuel-free aeroplane, has successfully completed the second leg of its historic attempt to fly around the world.
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This new model has a wingspan of 72m, which is wider than a 747 jumbo jet. And yet, it weighs only 2.3 tonnes.
. . . the performance of the 17,000 solar cells that line the top of the wings, and the energy-dense lithium-ion batteries it will use to sustain night-time flying.
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The slow speed of their prop-driven plane means these legs will take several days and nights of non-stop flying to complete.
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Cultural |
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What Can Be Done about Pseudoskepticism?
By Michael Shermer
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It began with the tobacco industry when scientific evidence began to mount that cigarettes cause lung cancer. A 1969 memo included this statement from an executive at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” In one example among many of how to create doubt, a Philip Morris tobacco executive told a congressional committee: “Anything can be considered harmful. Applesauce is harmful if you get too much of it.”
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Climate change is the latest arena for pseudoskepticism, and the front group du jour is ClimateDepot.com, financed in part by Chevron and Exxon and headed by a colorful character named Marc Morano, who told Kenner: “I'm not a scientist, but I do play one on TV occasionally … hell, more than occasionally.” Morano's motto to challenge climate science, about which he admits he has no scientific training, is “keep it short, keep it simple, keep it funny.” That includes ridiculing climate scientists such as James E. Hansen of Columbia University. “You can't be afraid of the absolute hand-to-hand combat metaphorically. And you've got to name names, and you've got to go after individuals,” he says, adding with a wry smile, “I think that's what I enjoy the most.”
Manufacturing doubt is not difficult, because in science all conclusions are provisional, and skepticism is intrinsic to the process. But as Oreskes notes, “Just because we don't know everything, that doesn't mean we know nothing.” We know a lot, in fact, and it is what we know that some people don't want us to know that is at the heart of the problem. What can we do about this pseudoskepticism?
In Merchants of Doubt, close-up prestidigitator extraordinaire Jamy Ian Swiss offers an answer: “Once revealed, never concealed.” He demonstrates it with a card trick in which a selected card that goes back into the deck ends up underneath a drinking glass on the table. It is virtually impossible to see how it is done, but once the move is highlighted in a second viewing, it is virtually impossible not to see it thereafter. The goal of proper skepticism is to reveal the secrets of dubious doubters so that the magic behind their tricks disappears.
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Conversations on blackness in games
By Leigh Alexander
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If you're a black fan of video games, your choices for representation in video games tend to be limited to "wacky sidekick", "cool gangster" or "evil gangster." Or "athlete in a sports franchise". . .
. . . black characters in games are very rarely created by black people. At Kotaku, writer and critic Evan Narcisse recently gathered other black critics and game developers alike to talk about video games' blackness problem, and it's an engrossing read.
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But, the result, in games like Watch Dogs, is that blackness is presented as pathological. The black spaces are violent, ruined, and dangerously mysterious. The black characters, at best, overcome that violence through exceptional intelligence or talent, or, at worst, give into their darkest urges. Sometimes there's a degree of sympathy in this sort of depiction: "Wow, look at how bad they have it." But what we really need—in games as well as in other media—is something more complex than this image of devastated black lives. And yeah, part of the solution there could be more melanin in game development.
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Japan marks 70th anniversary of Tokyo firebombing
By (BBC)
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Japan has marked the 70th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo by US forces that killed more than 100,000 people during World War Two.
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On Monday, Mrs Merkel told a news conference that Japan should follow Germany's example and that settling wartime history was "a prerequisite for reconciliation".
But Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida responded that it was not appropriate to compare Japan and Germany.
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Mr Abe, who will give a statement later in the year regarding Japan's wartime history, is among the conservatives in the country who are less apologetic for Japan's wartime aggressions.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |