n2doc

n2doc's Journal

May 21, 2014

Here’s some wasteful Big Government spending. Why isn’t Fox News outraged?

snip:

So what does this tell us? First, conservatives have a media apparatus that they can use to force certain stories into mainstream awareness when they find those that tell a tale they want people to hear. It doesn’t always work — for instance, their efforts to get everyone to care about the New Black Panthers have not borne fruit — but it works often enough.

Second, if there’s a vivid detail, even one that turns out to be untrue (like the $16 muffin), then all journalists are much more likely to find it compelling and do stories about it. You’d think that the story of the guy who managed to bill for 100 hours of work per day would be pretty compelling. Guess not.

Third, people seem to get angrier about bad behavior from government employees than from contractors, even though contractors at a place like Northrup Grumman are government employees in all but name (according to Northrop’s 2013 annual report, $21.3 billion of its $24.7 billion in sales came from U.S. government contracts). I’d give folks like Fox some credit for that, since they’ve worked so hard to convince everyone that “government bureaucrats” are both slothful and sinister, working every day to crush Americans’ freedom when they aren’t taking 3-hour lunches.

And fourth, the actual magnitude of the waste of taxpayer money is all but irrelevant to whether this kind of story gains traction. You know about the muffins, but do you remember that in Iraq, the Defense Department lost — literally just lost, with no idea where it went — a staggering $6.6 billion in cash? We’re talking pallets full of $100 bills, sent over there to make it rain on the various factions whose support we were trying to buy. Just disappeared. That should have been an earth-shaking scandal, but few people ever heard about it.

the rest

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/05/20/heres-some-wasteful-big-government-spending-why-isnt-fox-news-outraged/?wpsrc=AG0003336

May 20, 2014

Sea level rise forces US space agency to retreat

Washington (AFP) - Sea level rise is threatening the majority of NASA's launch pads and multi-billion dollar complexes famous for training astronauts and launching historic missions to space, scientists said on Tuesday.

From Cape Canaveral in Florida to mission control in Houston, the US space agency is busily building seawalls where possible and moving some buildings further inland.

Five of seven major NASA centers are located along the coast. Experts say that proximity to water is a logistical necessity for launching rockets and testing spacecraft.

Many NASA centers have already faced costly damage from encroaching water, coastal erosion and potent hurricanes, said a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

more

http://news.yahoo.com/sea-level-rise-forces-us-space-agency-retreat-042742519.html

May 20, 2014

Thomas Massie Eats Hemp on Live TV

What happens when a state legalizes the growing of industrial hemp but the drug war-addicted federal government intercepts the seeds? Well, the state (in this case, Kentucky) sues the feds, for one.

Talking about this absurd and infuriating situation on The Independents last night was the young libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), a man who so loves his hemp that he started gobbling the stuff on live television

video at link

http://reason.com/blog/2014/05/20/thomas-massie-eats-hemp-on-live-tv

May 20, 2014

April 2014 tied with 2010 as hottest on record

Global Highlights

The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for April 2014 tied with 2010 as the highest on record for the month, at 0.77°C (1.39°F) above the 20th century average of 13.7°C (56.7°F).

The global land surface temperature was 1.35°C (2.43°F) above the 20th century average of 8.1°C (46.5°F), marking the third warmest April on record. For the ocean, the April global sea surface temperature was 0.55°C (0.99°F) above the 20th century average of 16.0°C (60.9°F), also the third highest for April on record.

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the January–April period (year-to-date) was 0.64°C (1.15°F) above the 20th century average of 12.6°C (54.8°F), the sixth warmest such period on record.

more

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/4

May 20, 2014

You won’t believe this, but some big banks may have broken the law again

Just as markets were digesting the $2.6 billion penalty imposed on Credit Suisse for helping American clients avoid taxes, news from Brussels suggests that yet another big fine is looming for a few other banking giants. Today the European Commission accused JPMorgan, HSBC, and Crédit Agricole with rigging euro interest rates, alleging that they acted in a cartel to manipulate Euribor, a key interbank lending rate.

The three banks refused to settle the antitrust case in December last year, when the commission fined eight other banks and brokers a record €1.7 billion ($2.3 billion) for their roles in the rate-rigging cartel. Settling the case saved the accused 10% of the headline fine, on top of other discounts based on their degree of co-operation with regulators.

JPMorgan, HSBC, and Crédit Agricole must now answer the commission’s charges without the offer of leniency that comes from settling. That said, throughout the financial crisis European regulators have been seen as softer than their American counterparts, with Brussels wielding more limited powers and showing less of an appetite to impose big penalties. Even after settling with the EU in last year’s euro interest rate case, Société Générale is challenging its €446 million fine in court, alleging “a manifest error of assessment” in calculating it.

The three banks that were charged today will hope to benefit from the eurocrats’ presumed timidity. In theory, EU cartel fines carry a penalty of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue, which would imply a combined fine of more than $18 billion, according to the bank’s latest annual results.

more
http://qz.com/211455/you-wont-believe-this-but-some-big-banks-may-have-broken-the-law-again/

May 20, 2014

Ex-players: NFL illegally used drugs

Source: ESPN/AP

WASHINGTON -- A group of retired NFL players says in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the league, thirsty for profits, illegally supplied them with risky narcotics and other painkillers that numbed their injuries for games and led to medical complications down the road.

The league obtained and administered the drugs illegally, without prescriptions and without warning players of their potential side effects, to speed the return of injured players to the field and maximize profits, the lawsuit alleges. Players say they were never told about broken legs and ankles and instead were fed pills to mask the pain. One says that instead of surgery, he was given anti-inflammatories and skipped practices so he could play in money-making games. And others say that after years of free pills from the NFL, they retired from the league addicted to the painkillers.

Steven Silverman, attorney for the players, said the complaint was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, and a copy was shared with The Associated Press ahead of the filing.

The complaint names eight players, including three members of the Super Bowl champion 1985 Chicago Bears: Hall of Fame defensive end Richard Dent, offensive lineman Keith Van Horne, and quarterback Jim McMahon. Lawyers seek class-action status, and they say in the filing that more than 400 other former players have signed on to the lawsuit.

Read more: http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/10958191/nfl-illegally-supplied-risky-painkilling-drugs-former-players-allege-suit

May 20, 2014

$60 million Texas High School Football Stadium to close, deemed 'not safe'

ALLEN — Allen ISD officials said Monday that design flaws appear to have contributed to problems with cracking of concrete at the district’s new $60 million stadium, prompting them to close the stadium for the next football season.

Previously, PBK Architects, which designed the stadium, said the problems in the concourse level were probably caused by shrinkage in the concrete.

But an analysis commissioned by the district shows engineers have found design deficiencies at the concourse level, according to documents released to The Dallas Morning News.

Partial findings by Nelson Forensics indicate that some support structures were not designed in a way that would hold the weight anticipated on that level of the stadium.

“The stadium is not safe for public assembly,” Superintendent Lance Hindt said.

more
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metro/20140519-exclusive-60m-allen-football-stadium-deemed-not-safe-will-close-this-season.ece

everything IS bigger in Texas, including the Fail

May 20, 2014

What STEM Shortage?

The sector isn’t seeing wage growth and has more graduates than jobs.
By Steven Camarota

The idea that we need to allow in more workers with science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) background is an article of faith among American business and political elite.

But in a new report, my Center for Immigration Studies colleague Karen Zeigler and I analyze the latest government data and find what other researchers have found: The country has well more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. Also consistent with other research, we find only modest levels of wage growth for such workers for more than a decade. Both employment and wage data indicate that such workers are not in short supply.

Reports by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the RAND Corporation, the Urban Institute, and the National Research Council have all found no evidence that STEM workers are in short supply. After looking at evidence from the EPI study, PBS entitled its story on the report “The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage: How Guest Workers Lower U.S. Wages.” This is PBS, mind you, which is as likely to report skeptically on immigration as it is to report skeptically on taxpayer subsidies for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

RAND’s analysis looked backward in time and found, “Despite recurring concerns about potential shortages of STEM personnel . . . we did not find evidence that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.”

more
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378334/what-stem-shortage-steven-camarota

May 20, 2014

The obscenity trial that made H. R. Giger an icon for punk rock and free speech

Jello Biafra (center), H. R. Giger (right), and Chris Stein (left) of the band Blondie in 1993 at Stein’s New York loft. (Courtesy of Leslie Barany, Giger’s longtime agent.)

In 1985, Jello Biafra, the singer of the punk band the Dead Kennedys, came across a painting by the Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger in a copy of Omni magazine. “I was absolutely floored,” Biafra says in a new interview (audio) posted on the website of his record label, Alternative Tentacles. “Best stuff I’d seen since Bosch.”

The encounter of the two iconoclastic artists led to one of the opening salvos in the 1980s culture wars—and an emotionally satisfying victory of artistic freedom over censorship, even if it turned out to be only a pyrrhic one.

When Giger died last week at 74, after a fall, he left behind a trail of images that linger in the mind much like the nightmares that troubled his sleep. His visual style, which mixed gothic decay with serpentine futurism, left a deep impression on anyone who experienced it in the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien (for which he won an Oscar for visual effects). But Giger also had a powerful effect on visual culture in an entirely different arena, far from multimillion-dollar Hollywood franchises.

His artwork became the center of a legal case around the Dead Kennedys’ third album, “Frankenchrist,” after Biafra inserted a poster of Giger’s “Landscape XX” (also known as “Penis Landscape”) in the record sleeve. “This picture is like Reagan America on parade,” Biafra recalls thinking the first time he saw it.

more
http://qz.com/210900/the-obscenity-trial-that-made-h-r-giger-an-icon-for-punk-rock-and-free-speech/

May 20, 2014