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09
May
13

Roundup – Star Wars Filibuster

By Zombie Jesus X Leave a Comment
Categories: Roundup
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Line O’ the Day:

I try my best to be impartial. Many of you think I am not. I look at it this way: If my relationship with Kevin Demoff and Fisher helped me spend the first round inside the Rams’ draft room — and of course it didn’t hurt — then read the story and weigh whether it was worth it. I believe it was.

That’s awful big of you, Pete. Also specious reasoning to assume that simply disclosing conflict of interest eliminates it. C’MON GUYS, HE’S TRYING REAL HARD NOT TO BE SWAYED BY CATERED LUNCHES AND OPEN MOUTH JEFF FISHER KISSES! Also, I like how Peter’s argument is “I know many of you think I’m biased and have reasons to think so, but read my shit anyway. Sure, it’s still fucked, but you’re the one who read it, so who’s the real sap?”

- Christmas Ape, “Peter King Got Puked On By A Kid On A Plane. Lofty Puke.” [KSK]

Best of the Best:

There’s More Than One Way to Sleep [Robert T. Gonzalez on io9]

These disagreements give rise to a sort of chicken and egg scenario that pits definitions of sleep against why we sleep in the first place, and it’s a rather confounding scenario, at that. Sleep – after literally centuries of research – remains one of the most poorly understood areas of biology. In the words of William Dement, a pioneer in the field of sleep research and founder of Stanford University’s Sleep Research Center: “As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.”

US torture ‘indisputable’, CNN’s humiliation, and Iran sanctions [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

The disgrace of the American torture regime falls on Bush officials and secondarily the media and political institutions that acquiesced to it, but the full-scale protection of those war crimes (and the denial of justice to their victims) falls squarely on the Obama administration.

Happiness is…thinking you get laid more often than your friends [Robert T. Gonzalez on io9]

Does this mean you should try to increase your happiness by trying to have more sex than your friends? Hardly. In fact, a better tactic might be to ignore their sex lives altogether. The conflation of relative sexual activity with happiness (and the overarching social awareness that Wadsworth mentions), calls to mind a review co-authored in 2011 by Yale psychologist June Gruber, wherein she concludes that, when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, one of the best things you can do is stop trying to be happy.

Sometimes, We Want Prices to Fool Us [Stephanie Clifford and Catherine Rampell on The New York Times]

The problem, economists and marketing experts say, is that consumers are conditioned to wait for deals and sales, partly because they do not have a good sense of how much an item should be worth to them and need cues to figure that out. Just having a generically fair or low price, as Penney did, said Alexander Chernev, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, assumes that consumers have some context for how much items should cost. But they don’t.

Tata’s Nano, the World’s Cheapest Car, Is Sputtering [Siddharth Philip on Bloomberg BusinessWeek]

Tata Managing Director Karl Slym insists the company won’t kill the tiny, egg-shaped car. It will soon add improvements to breathe new life into the model, a move that would ultimately bring its price closer to those of rivals. The Nano’s marketing “didn’t jell with anybody,” Slym says. Scooter drivers weren’t attracted because others “don’t think I’m buying a car, they think I’m buying something between a two-wheeler and a car. Anyone who had a car didn’t want to buy it, because it was supposed to be a two-wheeler replacement.”

Report: No Easy Options for Feds in Legal Marijuana States [Maggie Clark on Stateline]

The Justice Department could choose to challenge the marijuana laws in federal court, according to CRS. However, the researchers cast doubt on the argument that that the state laws preempt federal authority, or directly violate the intent of the federal Controlled Substances Act, which classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, just as dangerous as heroin and LSD. But if a legal victory is a long shot, so is trying to enforce federal law without one, according to CRS.  Without the cooperation of the states, CRS notes, federal agents simply do not have the resources or manpower to arrest and prosecute every person who violates the federal Controlled Substances Act by growing, selling or using marijuana. At the same time, according to the report, declining to enforce the federal law may ‘pose a threat to federal supremacy by acknowledging that states are free to make policy decisions in direct conflict with those made at the federal level.’ In November 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado agreed to directly challenge the federal marijuana prohibition and legalize the growing, selling and consuming of marijuana for all people age 21 and older. State officials have spent the last few months working on regulatory schemes that would not run afoul of federal authorities, who have so far taken a hands-off approach to marijuana enforcement in both states. Attorney General Eric Holder still has not given any indication of the administration’s response to the laws and has remained silent since testifying at a Senate hearing in March that ‘we’ve had good communication (with Colorado and Washington) … I expect that we will have an ability to announce what our policy is going to be relatively soon.’

Game Theory: Jane Austen Had It First [Jennifer Schuessler on The New York Times]

Most game theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically. Take the scene in “Pride and Prejudice” where Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth Bennet promise not to marry Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise, and Lady Catherine repeats this to Mr. Darcy as an example of her insolence — not realizing that she is helping Elizabeth indirectly signal to Mr. Darcy that she is still interested. It’s a classic case of cluelessness, which is distinct from garden-variety stupidity, Mr. Chwe argues. “Lady Catherine doesn’t even think that Elizabeth” — her social inferior — “could be manipulating her,” he said. (Ditto for Mr. Darcy: gender differences can also “cause cluelessness,” he noted, though Austen was generally more tolerant of the male variety.) The phenomenon is hardly limited to Austen’s fictional rural society. In a chapter called “Real-World Cluelessness,” Mr. Chwe argues that the moralistic American reaction to the 2004 killing and mutilation of four private security guards working with the American military in Falluja — L. Paul Bremer III, leader of the American occupation of Iraq, later compared the killers to “human jackals”— obscured a strategic truth: that striking back at the city as a whole would only be counterproductive. “Calling your enemy an animal might improve your bargaining position or deaden your moral qualms, but at the expense of not being able to think about your enemy strategically,” Mr. Chwe writes.

Is This How You Really Talk? [Sue Shellenbarger on The Wall Street Journal]

People who hear recordings of rough, weak, strained or breathy voices tend to label the speakers as negative, weak, passive or tense. People with normal voices are seen as successful, sexy, sociable and smart, according to a study of 74 adults published recently in the Journal of Voice…Other common vocal irritants include “uptalk”—pronouncing statements as if they were questions—and “vocal fry”—ending words in a raspy growl. Such quirks “make the listener think the person who is speaking is either uncomfortable or in pain,” says Brian Petty, a speech pathologist at the Emory Voice Center in Atlanta.

San Francisco Probes Nevada for ‘Dumping’ Mental Cases [Bloomberg]

San Francisco will investigate allegations that Nevada has bused hundreds of indigent people with mental illnesses out of state, including to the Northern California city. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said his office has opened a formal investigation and is requesting public records from the Nevada Health and Human Services Department, according to a letter today to Mike Willden, the agency’s director. The investigation follows reports in the Sacramento Bee newspaper that the Rawson Neal Psychiatric Hospital, a mental- health facility controlled by the state, put more than 1,500 mentally-ill patients on Greyhound Lines Inc. buses and sent them to cities throughout the U.S. over the past five years, with a third going to California, including at least 36 to San Francisco, Herrera said in a statement.

What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

[C]onsider how radically Obama’s “war on terror” has altered political opinion. As noted, even the narrow “public safety” exception to Miranda was the work of mostly right-wing Supreme Court justices who long hated Miranda. For that reason, it was loathed by liberals, including Thurgood Marshall, who viewed it as a stealth attempt to destroy Miranda. Yet now, the Obama administration has radically expanded even that once-controversial exception by claiming the power to question suspects without Miranda warnings far beyond what even those conservative justices recognized (as the Obama DOJ put it: “There may be exceptional cases in which, although all relevant public safety questions have been asked, agents nonetheless conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary”)

Bipartisan Report: US Practiced Widespread Torture, Has “No Justification” Doesn’t Yield Significant Information, Nation’s Highest Officials Bear Responsibility [Washington's Blog via The Big Picture]

Indeed, top American military and intelligence interrogation experts from both sides of the aisle have conclusively proven the following 10 facts about torture: (1.) Torture is not a partisan issue (2.) Waterboarding is torture (3.) Torture decreases our national security (4.) Torture can not break hardened terrorists (5.) Torture is not necessary even in a “ticking time bomb” situation (6.) The specific type of torture used by the U.S. was never aimed at producing actionable intelligence … but was instead aimed at producing false confessions (7.) Torture did not help to get Bin Laden (8.) Torture did not provide valuable details regarding 9/11 (9.) Many innocent people were tortured (10.) America still allows torture

NFL Plays Offense to Get Public Money for Stadiums [Daniel C. Vock on Stateline]

In fact, the vast majority of major professional sports teams in baseball, basketball, soccer and hockey have also received new homes. But the NFL, followed closely by Major League Baseball, depends most heavily on public subsidies, Matheson and Baade found…“The NFL is somewhat different than the other leagues, because it doesn’t really matter where the teams play; it only matters that they are playing in a new, heavily subsidized luxury suite venue,” said sports economist John Vrooman of Vanderbilt University… NFL franchises threaten to move, usually to Los Angeles, if they do not get stadium improvements. “The thing is, that is an extremely credible threat,” said Matheson of Holy Cross. Los Angeles has not had an NFL team since 1994, even though it is the second-largest media market in the country. Two potential ownership groups have put together credible plans to build stadiums for teams willing to move to southern California. Right now, the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams (which left Los Angeles in 1994) are threatening to leave for Los Angeles. At least seven other teams have made the same threat in recent years, according to Vanderbilt’s Vrooman. “In the NFL’s extortion game, the L.A. market may be more valuable to the NFL empty than occupied,” he said.

The Lease They Can Do: What the Fight Over ‘Used’ Music Reveals About Online Media [Paul Ford on Bloomberg Businessweek]

“The clear” in this case is the “first sale doctrine,” which holds that when you buy a copy of a copyrighted work, you have the right to “sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner.” Capitol Records didn’t think this applied in a world of perfect duplication. Neither did a U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan. There are many ways to look at this decision. One in particular stands out: ReDigi is capitalizing on the arbitrary rules put in place by music sellers regarding the use and re-use of digital files. Often, you’re not buying the song so much as the license that lets you hear the song. (A few months ago there was a good bit of speculation as to who owns your music after you die, and the answer was: “no one you know.”)

You didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral—corporations did [Kevin Ashton on Quartz]

“Harlem Shake” originated with a drunken man named Albert Boyce dancing at Harlem’s Rucker Park basketball court in 1981. It was sobered up by children in the bleachers and became a popular dance in the hip-hop community. When Boyce died in 2006, the dance had found its way into some rap songs and videos. In 2012, Harry “Baauer” Rodrigues sampled one of these songs, Plastic Little’s “Miller Time,” and dropped it onto a piece of electronic dance music made in a style called “trap” that is only somewhat related to hip hop. The song was a commercial failure until student George Miller included it in his YouTube video.

A Point of View: Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence [Adam Gopnik on BBC News]

And there lies what I think of now as the asymmetry of mastery – the mystery of mastery, a truth that is for some reason extremely hard for us to grasp. We over-rate masters and under-rate mastery. That simplest solution was the hardest, partly because they underestimated the space inside the cabinet, but also because they overestimated just how good the chess player had to be. We always over-estimate the space between the uniquely good and the very good. That inept footballer we whistle at in despair is a better football player than we have ever seen or ever will meet. The few people who do grasp that though there are only a few absolute masters, there are many, many masters right below them looking for work tend, like Maelzel, to profit greatly from it. The greatest managers in any sport are those who know you can stand down the talent, and find more to fill the bench. It is the manager who is willing to bench Beckham, rather than he who worships his bend, who tends to have the most sporting success.

I’m For Sale: Creative ambition is lovely, but what happens when you need real money? [Genevieve Smith on Elle]

Now in retirement, my dad paints almost every day, and I think often of that dream deferred, or at least set aside, for the practicality of making a living. Looking at his decision, I realize that the trade-off that women now face isn’t all that new. It’s one men have always shouldered, and so in some ways, our own struggle to redefine fulfillment is just another sign that we’re inching further toward equality, just not quite in the way we expected.

Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embraced [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

News reports yesterday indicated that Bradley Manning, widely known to be gay, had been selected to be one of the Grand Marshals of the annual San Francisco gay pride parade, named by the LGBT Pride Celebration Committee. When the predictable backlash instantly ensued, the president of the Board of SF Pride, Lisa L Williams, quickly capitulated, issuing a cowardly, imperious statement that has to be read to be believed

Calm Down: You Are More Likely to Be Killed By Mundane Things than Terrorism [Washington's Blog via The Big Picture]

You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

Syria: Al-Qaeda’s battle for control of Assad’s chemical weapons plant [Colin Freeman on The Telegraph]

Outside of Syria, it also has another desired effect – underlining the differences between Mr Assad’s opponents in the West. Last week, the hawkish US Republican senator, John McCain, who lost to Mr Obama in the 2008 presidential race, called on America to send in troops to secure factories such as al Safira. But Mr Obama shows no enthusiasm for doing so, and this weekend he even appeared to adjust his language slightly, saying that America would not permit the “systematic” use of chemical weapons. Critics pointed out that proscribing the use of chemical weapons on a “systematic” basis is not the same as proscribing their use altogether.

Doctors back denial of treatment for smokers and the obese [Denis Campbell on The Guardian]

A majority of doctors support measures to deny treatment to smokers and the obese, according to a survey that has sparked a row over the NHS‘s growing use of “lifestyle rationing”. Some 54% of doctors who took part said the NHS should have the right to withhold non-emergency treatment from patients who do not lose weight or stop smoking. Some medics believe unhealthy behaviour can make procedures less likely to work, and that the service is not obliged to devote scarce resources to them.

My Week at Private Equity Boot Camp [Brendan Greely on Bloomberg Businessweek]

Before I leave Scottsboro, John Stewart walks me around the main plant, as before stopping to chat with line workers. Some have his personal cell number, and use it. When he gets to a new plant, he looks at hands; if they are not moving, something is being wasted. He looks at forklift loads; if they are not full, something is being wasted. Stewart believes that if you can get costs down, there’s no reason not to make things in the U.S. Offshoring carries political risks and incurs supply-chain costs, he says. It can prove difficult to teach culture to a foreign workforce. “You make investments in people,” he says. “We believe that North American manufacturing deserves to exist.” This is the language of a union leader, not a private equity executive. Later that day, I talk to HTPG’s union steward and try without success to get her to say something bad about Monomoy. After several tornadoes touched down in Scottsboro last year, Monomoy’s partners sent everyone at the plant whose houses were hit a Home Depot gift card for $500. Yet Monomoy is not a charity. It sells its acquisitions when it is done with them.

Canadians Make a Racket Over Mysterious ‘Windsor Hum’: Unexplained Noise Spurs Diplomatic Fracas At Detroit Border; Americans Can’t Hear It [Alistair MacDonald and Paul Vieira on The Wall Street Journal]

Studying the hum, much less its origin, is challenging. It is difficult to capture the mainly nocturnal sound on tape, since it doesn’t hum all the time. During a recent visit to Windsor by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Windsor resident Gary Grosse played several recordings he said came from the noise, which modulated from metallic grating to a pulsing beat. On a visit to the area around Zug Island, a fainter version of similar sounds was audible. But Americans nearby said they still can’t hear it. Fishing under the shadow of some of the large mounds of coal that fringe Zug Island, Samson Jenkins says that in 20 trips here he has never heard a noise like that described in Windsor.

Beastie Boys: New Slang [Eric Ducker on Fader]

But on this go around Paul’s Boutique hit me at the right time. It was fun, strange, clever, complicated, braggadocious, kind of retarded, smoked-out, funky and everything else I imagined myself to be. It also sounded like nothing else my classmates—wrapped up in the misogynistic thrill of Dr Dre or the three-decade-long allure of the Grateful Dead—listened to. Even the kids who were just playing “Sabotage” in the school van before basketball games or still worshipping the hydraulic phallus of License To Ill wouldn’t—couldn’t—appreciate it. Paul’s Boutique was a secret handshake, and the music was a key to a combination of juvenile energy and hip knowledge that sounded right as I spent my weekends making mixtapes, hotboxing in Oakland Hills cul-de-sacs, generally dorking out and imagining the person that I might become but usually drawing a blank.

Life after Seinfeld [Ryan Gilbey on The Guardian]

In a medium that prided itself on comforting audiences, Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no learning” rule was positively hostile. Each of the regulars exhibited selfish traits, particularly George, based on David himself. He could be deceitful and evasive (“I don’t think there’s ever been an appointment in my life where I wanted the other guy to show up”), or downright toxic. Praying that his fiancee Susan will perish in a plane crash, he is reminded by Jerry that such accidents are rare. “It’s something,” George snaps back. “It’s hope.”

When the Troops Were Very Young [Michael M. Phillips on The Wall Street Journal]

On Sept. 11, 2001, Corey Shaffer was in fourth grade at Cutler Ridge Christian Academy in Miami. Because his mother was cafeteria manager, he was at school early and was enjoying a bowl of Lucky Charms when news of the terrorist hijackings flashed on the television screen. He remembers being confused. “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” he said. It wasn’t until he was in middle school that the significance became clear, when he read about the attacks in his history book. Now he’s 19 years old and a Marine infantryman, fighting in the longest war in his nation’s history.

In Canada, Alternate Currency Keeps Traction With Fans [David George-Cosh on The Wall Street Journal]

For more than half a century, thrifty Canadians have had an alternative to their legal tender. Canadian Tire Corp., an iconic retailer here that sells everything from car batteries to hockey sticks, hands out Canadian Tire money to loyal shoppers. Customers receive the brightly colored coupons, equivalent to a fraction of their shopping bill, at the checkout. They can redeem them next time through the door. Each bill features the face of fictional character Sandy McTire. Over the years, the coupons—printed on counterfeit-resistant paper in denominations ranging from five Canadian cents (about five U.S. cents) to two dollars—have gained currency outside the store’s doors. Collectors covet older bills and anticipate print runs of newer ones. One group auctions off rare Canadian Tire bills and publishes a newsletter devoted to the coupons.

Checkbox Syndrome: Why We Spend Money on Things We Don’t Need (and How to Avoid It) [Alan Henry on Lifehacker]

When I worked with the folks at PC Mag, we saw hundreds of gadgets, all of which sold themselves based on some specific way it would transform your life. PC Mag’s Lead Analyst for Mobile, Sascha Segan, took specific issue with some of this—especially when it came to phones. He explained that smartphone makers had succumbed to “checkbox syndrome,” or the habit of putting a feature in a product because everyone else had it and it was easy to market, not because it was actually useful to anyone.  The worst part of checkbox syndrome is that it extends to us, the buyers. We make buying decisions based on these fantasy uses. We buy Android phones with powerful front-side cameras even though we never use them for video chat, or we buy a new Macbook Pro with Thunderbolt even though we don’t have—and have no plans to buy—Thunderbolt peripherals. We buy new cameras because they’re marginal upgrades over the previous model, but hey—it’s new, so it must be better, right? Here’s how to think twice about that marketing hype, push through the fog of checkbox syndrome, and save some money when you consider your next upgrade.

Louisiana is the world’s prison capital [Cindy Chang on The Times-Picayune]

Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations. If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars…In Louisiana, a two-time car burglar can get 24 years without parole. A trio of drug convictions can be enough to land you at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of your life. Almost every state lets judges decide when to mete out the severest punishment and when a sympathetic defendant should have a chance at freedom down the road. In Louisiana, murderers automatically receive life without parole on the guilty votes of as few as 10 of 12 jurors. The lobbying muscle of the sheriffs, buttressed by a tough-on-crime electorate, keeps these harsh sentencing schemes firmly in place.

Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is [Christopher Mims on Quartz]

The “bigger” your data, the more false positives will turn up in it, when you’re looking for correlations. As data scientist Vincent Granville wrote in “The curse of big data,” it’s not hard, even with a data set that includes just 1,000 items, to get into a situation in which “we are dealing with many, many millions of correlations.” And that means, “out of all these correlations, a few will be extremely high just by chance: if you use such a correlation for predictive modeling, you will lose.” This problem crops up all the time in one of the original applications of big data—genetics. The endless “fishing expeditions” conducted by scientists who are content to sequence whole genomes and go diving into them looking for correlations can turn up all sorts of unhelpful results…The important thing is gathering the right data, not gathering some arbitrary quantity of it.

Military Sex Assaults Rising 35% Bring Calls for Change [David Lerman on Bloomberg]

The Pentagon’s anonymous survey of active-duty troops found that 26,000 reported experiencing unwanted sexual conduct last year, amounting to an average of 71 incidents per day. A survey two years earlier estimated 19,300 such incidents. In 2006, the only other time the survey was conducted, there were an estimated 34,200 incidents. About 6.1% of active-duty women and 1.2% of active-duty men surveyed said they had experienced unwanted sexual contact within the previous 12 months. Those estimates dwarf the number of cases reported each year. Victims have said they’re afraid of coming forward, partly because they feared a risk their career. There were 3,374 reported cases of assault in 2012, a 5.7% increase from the previous year, the Defense Department said yesterday.

Breaking news: Traffic from Syria Disappears from Internet [Dan Hubbard on Umbrella Security Labs]

Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world. It’s unclear whether Internet communication within Syria is still available. Although we can’t yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fiber cuts and power outages.

Egypt Investment Collapsing as Citizens Turn Into Vigilantes [Tarek El-Tablawy, Mariam Fam & Salma El Wardany on Bloomberg]

More than two years after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, the proliferation of weapons and a spate of vigilante killings, violence and sexual attacks are eclipsing the hope born from the revolt. Fueled by political deadlock and economic stagnation, the security breakdown threatens to put solutions beyond the reach of President Mohamed Mursi. A growing number of Egyptians think that “you can actually achieve your goals using violence,” said Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. Beneath that lies the “dashed expectation and hope of the youth,” he said.

Generation jobless [The Economist]

Official figures assembled by the International Labour Organisation say that 75m young people are unemployed, or 6% of all 15- to 24-year-olds. But going by youth inactivity, which includes all those who are neither in work nor education, things look even worse. The OECD, an intergovernmental think-tank, counts 26m young people in the rich world as “NEETS”: not in employment, education or training. A World Bank database compiled from households shows more than 260m young people in developing economies are similarly “inactive”. The Economist calculates that, all told, almost 290m are neither working nor studying: almost a quarter of the planet’s youth.

Gun crime plunges, though most Americans think it has risen [Ian Simpson on Reuters]

Some 11,101 gun-related homicides were reported in the United States in 2011, a figure that is down 39 percent from the 1993 peak, the Justice Department reported. Nonfatal firearm crimes declined by 69 percent to 467,300 in the same period…some 56 percent of Americans believe that gun crime is higher now than it was 20 years ago, the Pew Research Center said its poll showed. Only 12 percent of Americans realize that gun crimes have fallen, the center said in a statement. The Pew survey was based on a March 14-17 survey of 924 adults and had a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points…In 2011, about 70 percent of homicides and 8 percent of nonfatal violent crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault, were committed with a firearm, mainly a handgun. From 2007 to 2011, about 1 percent of victims in nonfatal violent crimes reported using a firearm to defend themselves. The Justice Department findings were based on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System.

Curiously Strong Remains:

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28
Mar
13

Roundup – WATCH THE JELLO WIGGLE

By Zombie Jesus X Leave a Comment
Categories: Roundup
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Line O’ the Day:

“So, if the average female porn star is a 5’5″ woman who weighs 117lbs and has B-cup breasts, what colour is her hair? Blonde, presumably, if my friends’ guesses were anything to go by. Apparently not. Dark-haired porn stars outnumber blonde ones almost 2-to-1. Of course, the vast majority of the fair-haired performers dye their hair, because only 5% of Americans are naturally blonde,5 but the fact that most female porn stars don’t choose the blonde bombshell look is interesting, I think. The notion of most porn stars being busty blondes (as opposed to brunettes with B-cups) must either be a carryover from a cultural stereotype (that the most sexually adventurous and available women are blonde with big breasts), or an indication that when someone thinks of the average porn star, the vision they see is an amalgam of a few of the most famous adult models, who do fit the busty blonde mold: Jenna Jameson, for instance.”

- Jon Millward, “Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers” [Jon Millward: Psychology, Self-Improvement, Sexual Attraction blog]

Best of the Best:

Italy’s ex-intelligence chief given 10-year sentence for role in CIA kidnapping [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

Not a single victim of the abuses of the US War on Terror – not one – has even been allowed by the US federal judiciary to have a day in court, let alone obtain accountability for what was done to them. Federal judges have obediently slammed the courthouse doors shut in the faces of War on Terror victims even when everyone recognizes that the victims were treated savagely and were guilty of nothing. Indeed, US courts have refused even to hear cases brought by rendition (kidnapping) victims. Instead, US federal judges, over and over, have meekly submitted to the decrees of US national security state officials that the mandates of secrecy and national security shield them from any form of judicial review even when they kidnap and torture innocent people.

DOJ kill list memo forces many Dems out of the closet as overtly unprincipled hacks [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

Democratic partisans owe a public, sincere, and abject apology to George Bush and Dick Cheney. It’s certainly true that Obama has not continued many of the policies progressives found so heinous: he hasn’t invaded Iraq or legally authorized waterboarding. But Obama has completely reversed himself on so many of the core criticisms he and other Democrats made about Bush and Cheney regarding the need for due process for accused Terrorists, the dangers of radical secrecy, the treatment of Terrorism as a war on a global battlefield rather than a crime to be prosecuted. And if Tomasky’s excuse is correct – empathy with the leader’s need to Keep Us Safe shows that these are much more complicated issues than civil libertarians claim – then he and his fellow partisan soldiers should apologize, since that’s exactly what Bush/Cheney defenders said for years would happen once a Democratic president was empowered.

The state of our union is … dumber: How the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined [The Guardian]

Using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test the Guardian has tracked the reading level of every state of the union

South Americans Face Upheaval in Deadly Water Battles [Michael Smith on Bloomberg]

When Adelaida Tabaco went out looking for her husband, Paulino Garcia, gunshots were still crackling in the afternoon air. She says she heard dozens of shots as she searched, and she saw bullet casings rain from the sky as soldiers blasted from a military helicopter. Troops were shooting at people running away, she says. “They were firing at anything that moved,” she says. “It was like war.” The barrage began just as Garcia was walking past some houses, witnesses told his wife. One person saw Garcia on the street when he was shot, Human Rights Watch investigators found. Marco Arana, a former Catholic priest, says it’s morally — and should be criminally — wrong for the government to allow officers to randomly shoot and kill people. “For this violence to stop, the deadly police actions must be ended,” he says. “The government is wrong if they think that with bullets, torture and beatings, they can repress the justifiable concerns of the people.” A day after the shootings, Arana, who works for a Peruvian human rights organization called Grufides, helped lead a march against the Conga mine in Cajamarca’s central square, just across from the town’s 18th-century Catholic cathedral. As he rested on a bench, helmeted, shield-wielding riot police beat him and dragged him away, television images show.

How New Mexico Legalized Gay Marriage – For 8 Hours [Jake Grovum on Stateline]

It was just after 8 a.m., February 20, 2004. For the next eight hours, same-sex marriage was legal in New Mexico. The state put an end to it that afternoon. But since then, the whole issue has been in a sort of legal limbo, leaving citizens and especially the 64 couples who married that day living in an uncertain situation. Today, New Mexico is the only state in the country that has no law of any kind dealing with same-sex marriage. The controversy started when Sandoval County Clerk Victoria Dunlap announced she’d begin issuing licenses to same-sex couples, arguing, correctly, that nothing in state law defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. “She just sprung it up,” Norma Vazquez de Houdek, Mary’s spouse, says. “I thought it was a big hoax.” But it was no hoax. And the quiet county government building in Bernalillo quickly turned into a circus, as Mary Houdek recalls. Journalists, lawyers, protesters and, of course, couples, flooded the scene. By mid-afternoon, armed guards were stationed at the complex holding back the throng of couples rushing to file paperwork. The final license was processed at 4:10 p.m., after then-Attorney General Patricia Madrid ordered the county to stop. In all, 66 licenses were issued. Dozens were left in line.

My Experience Making ‘The Canyons’ [James Deen via The Daily Beast]

Bret and I began to email back and forth. He made it clear he was not offering me a role in a movie, and I made it clear all I wanted to do was hang out with the writer of Less Than Zero. Before we met, he sent me the treatment. I read it in less than 45 minutes. I couldn’t put it down, even to take a sip of water. The story was riveting. We met at the SoHo House in West Hollywood. I am a pretty nervous person, and I was fighting a panic attack as I waited for the literary icon to arrive. He walked in, and I could see he was full of the same nerves I was. I got comfortable after we had a 15-minute conversation about the proper place to sit.

  • James Deen’s first-hand account of working with Lindsay on The Canyons [Vince Mancini on Filmdrunk] The lack of Lindsay Lohan stories is kind of incredible when you consider that this is a movie that spawned an epic, almost 8,000-word NY Times piece focusing largely on Lindsay Lohan and what a pain in the ass she was. The porn guy out-classes the Old Grey Lady! (I think that’s also a Ron Jeremy title, incidentally). It’s interesting to me that the people who seem to have the best, most-realistic attitude about the movie business are people who started out in porn. Like it’s only after you’ve been jizzed on and degraded without pretense that you can fully understand what it’s about and navigate accordingly. Porn is like the movie industry without the metaphor.

Tight Market for Farmhands: Growers Press for Immigration Bill to Ensure a Steady Flow of Migrant Workers [Miriam Jordan and Mark Peters on The Wall Street Journal]

Meanwhile, ahead of their coming harvest, many farmers are turning to a temporary agricultural visa, known as the H-2A program, which allows growers to bring workers into the U.S. for a short period. Growers have long avoided this program because it means they have to pay higher wages, housing costs and other expenses. But in a difficult labor market, “there is no room for error,” said Mike Carlton, director of labor relations for the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association. In North Carolina, growers are using the program to avert huge losses from not being able to pick tobacco—it can cost $3,000 to $4,000 an acre to grow—rather than to avoid fines for hiring illegal workers. “What’s driving it is not a fear of enforcement, but a fear they’re not going to have a workforce there when they need it,” said Lee Wicker, deputy director of the North Carolina Growers Association, which handles visas for 750 farms.

Why Tax Revision Is an Inexact Science [Josh Goodman on Stateline]

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan—which he is still formulating—will call for removing sales tax exemptions to pay for ending the income tax. He has said the plan will be revenue-neutral. Jindal has good reasons for that: He’s pledged not to raise taxes, but a tax cut likely wouldn’t fly in the legislature given the state’s serious recent budget troubles. So neutrality may be the only politically viable option. However, achieving even approximate revenue neutrality won’t be easy. “Nobody knows exactly what people pay for haircuts in Louisiana. Nobody knows exactly what the beauty salons earn,” says James Richardson, a Louisiana State University economist and veteran member of the state’s revenue estimating conference. “The numbers that are out there are very tentative. We’ll essentially not know until we actually tax them how much is actually there.” The estimates also generally don’t account for another factor: the way tax changes could alter how taxpayers act. States usually assume that cigarette tax increases will reduce smoking rates because the link is so clear, but when it comes to other behavior-related tax revisions, there often aren’t any reliable estimates at all. States also often assume 100 percent compliance with new taxes, even though they are sometimes difficult to enforce or administer. “I don’t think there’s any state out there that does dynamic forecasting,” says Von Mosch, of the Minnesota Department of Revenue. “Behavioral changes are not part of our estimates.”

50 Years Ago: The World in 1963 [In Focus with Alan Taylor on The Atlantic]

A half century ago, much of the news in the United States was dominated by the actions of civil rights activists and those who opposed them. Our role in Vietnam was steadily growing, along with the costs of that involvement. It was the year Beatlemania began, and the year President John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin and delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Push-button telephones were introduced, 1st class postage cost 5 cents, and the population of the world was 3.2 billion, less than half of what it is today. The final months of 1963 were punctuated by one of the most tragic events in American history, the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

Luring Primary Care Docs into Medicaid [Michael Ollove on Stateline]

Which is why some are puzzled by one of the restrictions of the health law. The rate increase applies to physicians who provide primary and pediatric care services. Only doctors whose practices comprise at least 60 percent primary care will be eligible for the Medicaid pay raise. Not covered, however, are nurse practitioners, who often provide primary care in rural and isolated areas that do not have doctors nearby. Seventeen states allow nurse practitioners to operate independently of the supervision of physicians, but the nurse practitioners in those states will not be eligible to receive higher fees. “We think it will limit access and does create a discriminatory aspect that shouldn’t be there,” says Jan Towers, a senior policy adviser at the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Asked why she thought the nurse practitioners were excluded, Towers gave a simple answer:  money.

Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ at 30: How One Album Changed the World [Billboard]

Thriller’s” legacy goes far beyond its own sales and awards accomplishments. Once MTV found success with Michael Jackson, videos by other black performers quickly appeared on the playlist. This development single-handedly forced pop radio to reintroduce black music into its mix: After all, pop fans, now accustomed to seeing black artists and white artists on the same video channel, came to expect the same mix of music on pop radio. It was impossible to keep the various fragments of the audience isolated from one another any longer. Mass-appeal Top 40 radio itself made a big comeback due to this seismic shift. Beginning in early 1983 in Philadelphia, and rapidly spreading through the country, one or more FM stations in every city switched to Top 40 and many rose to the top of the ratings playing the mix of music made popular by MTV-young rock and urban hits. In the age of “Thriller,” black music made a resounding comeback on the pop charts. If 1982 was the genre’s low point in terms of pop success, by 1985 more than one third of all the hits on the Billboard Hot 100 were of urban radio origin. Even Prince’s “1999″ single, shut out of pop radio upon its initial release in 1982, was re-launched in mid-1983 and off the back of its belated MTV exposure became a huge pop radio success the second time around. Thus, in a way few historians appreciate, the Michael Jackson/MTV team proved itself a remarkably progressive force, helping to reintegrate a fragmented popular culture at the dawn of the Reagan era. Black music was back at the center at the mainstream, and to this day it has never again been pushed from the spotlight.

As Companies Seek Tax Deals, Governments Pay High Price [Louise Story on The New York Times]

A Times investigation has examined and tallied thousands of local incentives granted nationwide and has found that states, counties and cities are giving up more than $80 billion each year to companies. The beneficiaries come from virtually every corner of the corporate world, encompassing oil and coal conglomerates, technology and entertainment companies, banks and big-box retail chains. The cost of the awards is certainly far higher. A full accounting, The Times discovered, is not possible because the incentives are granted by thousands of government agencies and officials, and many do not know the value of all their awards. Nor do they know if the money was worth it because they rarely track how many jobs are created. Even where officials do track incentives, they acknowledge that it is impossible to know whether the jobs would have been created without the aid.

The Insourcing Boom [Charles Fishman via The Atlantic]

GE hadn’t made a water heater in the United States in decades. In all the recent years the company had been tucking water heaters into American garages and basements, it had lost track of how to actually make them…The GeoSpring suffered from an advanced-technology version of “IKEA Syndrome.” It was so hard to assemble that no one in the big room wanted to make it. Instead they redesigned it. The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent. It eliminated the tangle of tubing that couldn’t be easily welded. By considering the workers who would have to put the water heater together—in fact, by having those workers right at the table, looking at the design as it was drawn—the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.

Dreams in Infrared: The Woes of an American Drone Operator [Nicola Abé on Der Spiegel]

Why isn’t he with the Air Force anymore? There was one day, he says, when he knew that he wouldn’t sign the next contract. It was the day Bryant walked into the cockpit and heard himself saying to his coworkers: “Hey, what motherfucker is going to die today?”

59% of America’s “tuna” isn’t actually tuna [Christopher Mims on Quartz]

Sushi restaurants were far more likely to mislabel their fish than grocery stores or other restaurants.

NATO may keep Afghan forces at peak strength longer [Phil Stewart and Adrian Croft on Reuters]

NATO officials are strongly considering a proposal to keep Afghan forces at their peak strength of 352,000 until at least 2018, as opposed to current plans to cut the force by a third after 2015, alliance officials said on Thursday…The United States this year is providing $5.7 billion of the $6.5 billion cost to field the Afghan forces, which are nearly at peak strength. Other NATO members are providing $300 million and the Afghans are paying for $500 million of that total.

One Month in Damascus: A Photographer’s War Story [Goran Tomasevic on Reuters via PBS Newshour]

One day, I watched a man fire an antiquated, probably 1960s vintage, Soviet B-10 recoilless rifle, a heavy, bazooka-style cannon normally mounted on a little trolley and weighing about 70 kg (150 pounds); the rebel fighter simply hefted it onto his shoulder and blasted a heavy round somewhere down the road.

Supreme Court shields warrantless eavesdropping law from constitutional challenge [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

The supreme irony here is that when Obama supported this 2008 eavesdropping law, it sparked intense anger among his own supporters as he ran for president. To placate that anger, he vowed that, once in power, he would rein in the excesses of this law that he oh-so-reluctantly supported. He has done exactly the opposite. He just succeeded in pressuring the Congress, with heavy GOP support, to extend this eavesdroppiong law for five years without a single reform. And now his Justice Department has used the five right-wing justices to completely immunize the law from judicial review (the only way the law could now be challenged is from a handful of extremely unlikely situations, such as if the US government criminally prosecutes the foreign clients and sources of these plaintiffs using information they obtained from the warrantless eavesdropping, and even then, the ability to challenge the law’s constitutionality is far from certain).

On Terror’s New Front Line, Mistrust Blunts U.S. Strategy [Drew Hinshaw and Adam Entous on The Wall Street Journal]

Edgar Raupach was among hundreds of German engineers working in Nigeria’s booming construction industry, helping pave stretches of road. In January 2012 he disappeared from the northern city of Kano, and word spread in nearby Kumbotso that some men had brought home a German hostage. Locals said these men were unpopular outsiders who didn’t speak the prevailing Hausa language. If the outsiders weren’t popular with the Nigerian villagers, Nigeria’s national police and armed forces were even less so. Residents at a town council meeting quarreled over whether to tell the security services, some arguing that doing so might just make matters worse, according to people who attended. The outcome was unclear, a council official saying he sent a letter to the government but got no reply, while other residents doubted a letter was ever sent.

We Found Our Son in the Subway [Peter Mercurio via The New York Times]

When we finally remembered the purpose of the visit, and Danny and I moved into position to exchange vows, I reflected on the improbable circumstances that delivered all of us to this moment. We weren’t supposed to be there, two men, with a son we had never dreamed of by our side, getting married by a woman who changed and enriched our lives more than she would ever know. But there we were, thanks to a fateful discovery and a judicious hunch.

Curiously Strong Remains:

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 ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ

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10
Feb
13

Roundup – Tidal Wave Nightmare

By Zombie Jesus X Leave a Comment
Categories: Roundup
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Line O’ the Day:

Please be sure the genital region is adequately covered so that there is no visible “puffy” bare skin exposure.

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? “PUFFY” BARE SKIN? HAVE NETWORK CENSORS EVER SEEN GENITALIA? DO THEY THINK ALL MUSICIANS AND SINGERS HAVE HORRIFYING VENEREAL DISEASES THAT RESULT IN “PUFFY” GENITALIA? ARE THEY SPEAKING DIRECTLY TO SEAN COMBS? I MUST KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS SENTENCE IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL DIE.

- Danger Guerrero, “Attention Grammy Attendees: CBS Would Like A Word About Your Boobs And Butts, Please” [Warming Glow]

Best of the Best:

Special Report: The latest foreclosure horror: the zombie title [Michelle Collins on Reuters]

Five years ago, Keller, 10 months behind on his mortgage payments, received notice of a foreclosure judgment from JP Morgan Chase. In a few weeks, the bank said, his three-story house with gray vinyl siding in Columbus, Ohio, would be put up for auction at a sheriff’s sale. The 58-year-old former social worker and his wife, Jennifer, packed up their home of 13 years and moved in with their daughter. Joseph thought he would never have anything to do with the house again. And for about a year, he didn’t. Then it started to stalk him. First, in 2010, the county sued Keller because the house, already picked clean by scavengers, was in a shambles, its hanging gutters and collapsed garage in violation of local housing code. Then the tax collector started sending Keller notices about mounting back taxes, sewer fees and bills for weed and waste removal. And last year, Chase’s debt collector began pressing Keller to pay his mortgage, which had swollen, with penalties and fees, from $62,100.27 to $84,194.69. The worst news came last January, when the Social Security Administration rejected Keller’s application for disability benefits; the “asset” on Avondale Avenue rendered him ineligible. Keller’s medical problems include advanced liver disease, hepatitis C and inactive tuberculosis. Without disability coverage, he can’t get the liver transplant he needs to stay alive.

Jason Taylor’s pain shows NFL’s world of hurt [Dan Le Batard on The Miami Herald]

[W]e begin the anatomy of Taylor’s story at the very bottom … with his feet. He had torn tissues in the bottom of both of them. But he wanted to play. He always wanted to play. So he went to a private room inside the football stadium. “Like a dungeon,” he says now. “One light bulb swaying back and forth. There was a damp, musty smell. It was like the basement in Pulp Fiction.” The doctors handed him a towel. For his mouth. To keep him from biting his tongue. And to muffle his screaming. “It is the worst ever,” he says. “By far. All the nerve endings in your feet.” That wasn’t the ailment. No, that was the cure. A needle has to go in that foot, and there aren’t a lot of soft, friendly places for a big needle in a foot. That foot pain is there for a reason, of course. It is your body screaming to your brain for help. A warning. The needle mutes the screaming and the warning. “The first shot is ridiculous,” Taylor says. “Ridiculously horrible. Excruciating.” But the first shot to the foot wasn’t even the remedy. The first shot was just to numb the area … in preparation for the second shot, which was worse. “You can’t kill the foot because then it is just a dead nub,” he says. “You’ve got to get the perfect mix [of anesthesia]. I was crying and screaming. I’m sweating just speaking about it now.” How’d he play? “I didn’t play well,” he says. “But I played better than my backup would have.”

Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax [Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey with Dom Cosentino and Tom Ley on Deadspin]

Manti Te’o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper. Nor is there any report of a severe auto accident involving a Lennay Kekua. Background checks turn up nothing. The Stanford registrar’s office has no record that a Lennay Kekua ever enrolled. There is no record of her birth in the news. Outside of a few Twitter and Instagram accounts, there’s no online evidence that Lennay Kekua ever existed. The photographs identified as Kekua—in online tributes and on TV news reports—are pictures from the social-media accounts of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua. She is not a Stanford graduate; she has not been in a severe car accident; and she does not have leukemia. And she has never met Manti Te’o.

The Latest Chinese Pollution Crisis [James Fallows on The Atlantic]

Therefore I am sobered by news reports, official warnings, and messages from friends in Beijing, Xi’an, and elsewhere saying that the air pollution there is worse than it has ever been before. Here’s a gauge: the picture above was taken back when the level of dangerous “PM 2.5″ small-particulate pollution, as reported by the rogue @BeijingAir monitoring site on the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing, was in the low-300s “hazardous” range. The readings in the past few days have been in the previously unimaginable 700s-and-above range, reported as “beyond index” by @BeijingAir. The worst I have personally seen in Beijing was in the high 400s, and that day I did not understand how life could proceed any further in such circumstances.

How To Solve Problems Like Sherlock Holmes [Jennifer Miller via fast.co.create]

She points to a study from the National Academy of Sciences, which showed that people who described themselves as heavy media multi-taskers had much more trouble tuning out distractions than light media multi-taskers. They were also worse at switching between tasks. “So even though they were multi-tasking all the time, they were less efficient,” says Konnikova. She explains that our minds are programmed to wander, which multi-tasking exacerbates. But concentration is self-reinforcing. The more you do it, the better you get. “The more you learn to filter out irrelevant distractions, the better your brain can monitor [your] environment–both externally and internally.” This means that focusing on one activity or thought at a time will help you notice or remember details in your work, the things your read, and the people you talk to. This kind of focus will also make you better attuned to how you’re feeling, physically and emotionally.

Life in the Red [Benedict Carey on The New York Times]

In one experiment, participants competed in rounds of the game “Family Feud,” a trivia contest in which each question allows for multiple guesses. One team was “poor,” allotted only 15 seconds per round; another was “rich,” having budgets of nearly a minute per round. Both groups could borrow time against future rounds, but the poor borrowed far more, progressively shrinking their future paychecks while the rich mostly avoided debt. The research team, which included Sendhil Mullainathan and Dr. Shafir of Princeton, demonstrated that same effect in a series of related experiments. Scarcity by itself — independent of personality or any other factors — fuels a drive to borrow recklessly.

Smokers who quit before age 40 live almost as long as people who never smoked: Ontario study [Jason Rehel on The National Post]

Jha’s used data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey, which includes a cross-section of the population that’s surveyed every year about many health topics. More than 200,000 survey participants were linked to the National Death Index, which includes death certificate information for all Americans since 1986. Researchers working with Jha found that people who quit smoking between ages 35 and 44 gained about nine years and those who quit between ages 45-54 and 55-64 gained six and four years of life, respectively. This survey of existing data is considered a more accurate gauge than similar studies in the past that were skewed by data collected mainly from nurses or other health care workers.

Former Porn Star Is China’s Hottest New Politician [Josh Chin with Te-Ping Chen on China RealTime Report on The Wall Street Journal]

News that Gansu was playing host to Ms. Pang, known as Peng Dan in mainland China, produced a gush of responses on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service, including no shortage of ribald commentary linking Ms. Pang with a series of officials whose illicit bedroom exploits have gone viral in recent months. “Peng Dan might work hand-in-hand with mainland officials to welcome in the New Year by recording a 12-second film that challenges Lei Zhengfu’s record,” wrote one salty microblogger. Lei Zhengfu was Communist Party chief of a district in the megacity of Chongqing who was sacked late last year after explicit video footage of him having sex with a woman many years his junior was uploaded to the Internet. A number of commentators, noting the short duration of the video, mocked Mr. Lei’s stamina – though to be fair, the footage in question started in media res, making it difficult to say with certainty how long the act lasted.

White House Keeps Secrets as CIA Agent Goes to Prison [Bloomberg Editorial Board]

The Kiriakou saga shines yet more light on the Obama administration’s vexed relationship with transparency. There were 720 Freedom of Information Act-related complaints filed in district courts in the last two years of Obama’s first term, a 28 percent jump from the final two years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Six Americans have been indicted for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, twice as many as in the previous 90 years. All were charged with giving secrets not to hostile powers but to journalists. This record is all the more unsettling because of the relish with which the administration plays the double game of leaks: While officials have furtively and even openly divulged secret details on the drone war against Islamic militants when it served their purposes, the White House has stonewalled FOIA requests to release the Justice Department documents making the legal case for the program. Similarly, days after the New York Times published a front-page article on U.S.-instigated computer attacks against Iran that clearly relied on classified information from the administration, Obama had Attorney General Eric Holder open an investigation into such leaks. “The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive,” Obama said, stretching credulity.

A Health Scare for Small Businesses [Emily Maltby on The Wall Street Journal]

Even though the rule doesn’t go into effect until early 2014, a business could be subject to the so-called employer mandate if, during 2013, it averages 50 or more full-time equivalent employees, according to recently released regulations from the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service. Employers have the choice to calculate their head counts by averaging the full 12 months of 2013 or a consecutive six-month period during the year. Many small-business owners haven’t yet realized that the way they structure their firm in 2013 could determine their status under the law in a year’s time.

The Genius of Samsung [Farhad Manjoo on Slate]

Since 2010, Samsung has deepened its technical prowess. Its design and workmanship have improved, and now its devices work just as well as Apple’s and no longer look like clones of Cupertino’s best stuff. Most importantly, as Business Insider has noted, Samsung has become a master of marketing. Its commercials portraying Apple’s customers as mindless sheep were brazen—especially considering Samsung’s mimicry of Apple’s devices—but they were ubiquitous and beloved by Apple haters. They announced Samsung as a friendly, reasonable alternative to a cultish global brand. And, indeed, there is something charmingly humble about Samsung’s see-what-sticks strategy. Other tech giants operate according to lofty philosophies. Apple prizes aesthetics and usability, Google cherishes the free flow of information, and Facebook wants to connect us all to one another. Samsung has no such philosophy. All it wants to do is make stuff that we’ll buy. This strategy is an admission that customers, not companies, know best. If pleasing customers means making phones that look exactly like your rivals’ devices, or making phones that are foolishly large, or making devices that run every conceivable operating system, or creating a fridge with a built-in baby monitor and an Evernote app (unveiled at CES this week)—well, then that’s what Samsung will do.

Paper or Plastic (or Deadly Food-Borne Pathogens)? [Drake Bennett on Bloomberg Businessweek]

Recent years have seen a raft of bans put in place on plastic bags—Los Angeles and San Francisco both have them, as does China. In their paper, University of Pennsylvania economist Jonathan Klick and the lawyer Joshua Wright decided to look at emergency room admissions for illnesses related to food-borne bacteria before and after San Francisco County imposed its ban in 2007. They found that the problem had increased by more than one fourth, and that deaths had risen by the same amount.

Steven Soderbergh on Quitting Hollywood, Getting the Best Out of J-Lo, and His Love of Girls [Mary Kaye Schilling Interviews Steven Soderbergh on Vanity Fair]

I’m importing this liquor from Bolivia: Singani. Technically it’s a brandy. I was turned onto it while I was doing Che and everybody on the crew got hooked.  You don’t get that burn in your throat like you do with most hard liquor, so it’s dangerous. You can drink it like water and then you’re invisible.

Obama’s non-closing of GITMO, kind NYT headlines, and US government irony [Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian]

The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reported yesterday that the State Department “reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and will not replace him”. That move obviously confirms what has long been assumed: that the camp will remain open indefinitely and Obama’s flamboyant first-day-in-office vow will go unfulfilled. Dozens of the current camp detainees have long been cleared by Pentagon reviews for release – including Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a 36-year-old Yemeni who died at the camp in September after almost 11 years in a cage despite never having been charged with a crime. Like so many of his fellow detainees, his efforts to secure his release were vigorously (and successfully) thwarted by the Obama administration.Perfectly symbolizing the trajectory of the Obama presidency, this close-Guantánamo envoy will now “become the department’s coordinator for sanctions policy”.

Americans Most Satisfied With Military, Least With Economy [Frank Newport on Gallup]

Clearly, Americans view the performance of the nation’s military quite positively, an attitude that is also reflected in the military’s top position on Gallup’s annual measure of confidence in institutions. Americans are almost equally as satisfied with the nation’s efforts to fight terrorism. And, even though Obama made the need to address climate change a focus of his inaugural address, a majority of Americans say they are satisfied with the nation’s environmental quality. The public’s satisfaction with the military and anti-terrorism efforts is higher today than in January 2005, when George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term as president — despite the Bush administration’s focus on building up the U.S. military and on greatly enlarging the fight against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer [Jared Diamond on The New York Times]

Studies have compared Americans’ perceived ranking of dangers with the rankings of real dangers, measured either by actual accident figures or by estimated numbers of averted accidents. It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control (“That would never happen to me — I’m careful”) and of events that kill just one person in a mundane way. Having learned both from those studies and from my New Guinea friends, I’ve become as constructively paranoid about showers, stepladders, staircases and wet or uneven sidewalks as my New Guinea friends are about dead trees. As I drive, I remain alert to my own possible mistakes (especially at night), and to what incautious other drivers might do.

For Search, Facebook Had to Go Beyond ‘Robospeak’ [Somini Sengupta on The New York Times]

The project represents how Facebook builds products. It studies human behavior. It tests its ideas. Its goal is to draw more and more people to the site and keep them there longer. What it builds is not exactly a replica of how people interact offline, said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford who specializes in human-computer interaction. Rather, it reflects an “idealized view of how people communicate.”

U.N. rights inquiry says Israel must remove settlers [Stephanie Nebehay on Reuters]

U.N. human rights investigators called on Israel on Thursday to halt settlement expansion and withdraw all half a million Jewish settlers from the occupied West Bank, saying that its practices could be subject to prosecution as possible war crimes.

Native American Shuts Down Anti-Illegal Immigrant Protest: ‘Y’all Are All Illegal!!!’ [Abena Agyeman-Fisher on News One]

“That’s right. We’re the only native Americans here. Y’all are all illegal. We didn’t invite none of you! We didn’t invite none of you here. Get on, get on, get on with your bogus arguments.”

Everything Fun Is Illegal in Virginia [A. Barton Hinkle of The Richmond Times-Dispatch via Reason]

While it might soon be legal to live in sin, that doesn’t mean you can, by gad sir, fornicate. Fornication remains forbidden under the Code of Virginia, Section 18.2-344. So keep your hands and whatnot to yourself. Especially the whatnots. And don’t even think of doing other stuff. Virginia’s “crimes against Nature” statute—Section 18.2-361—still prohibits oral sex. Even between married straight couples. Moreover, state lawmakers seem particularly opposed to that practice—because in Virginia, it’s a felony. Efforts to repeal that provision or even to reduce oral sex to a misdemeanor have failed repeatedly.

Scary Health-Care Statistics on the Broken-Down Boomer Generation [Peter Coy on Bloomberg Businessweek] and Baby Boomers Sicker Than Parents’ Generation, Study Finds [Nicole Ostrow on Bloomberg]

The study, published online on Feb. 4 by JAMA Internal Medicine, says boomers were less likely to report excellent health and to do regular exercise, and more likely to suffer from obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and other maladies. To pick one sorrowful example, they were twice as likely to use a “walking assist device,” such as a cane.

Curiously Strong Remains:

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