What I’m Reading, October 14, 2014

Posted on October 14, 2014 by wellsdc

Denied. Charles Vestal, Medium, October 10, 2014

The law itself says 20 weeks “from fertilization” (vs. “gestational age”), and we’re actually only 18 weeks from fertilization–my amazing wife tracked her cycle to a T. The hospital acknowledges it isn’t against the letter of the law, but it is a grey area their policies won’t let them touch. Too risky, too hot button a topic.

We are denied the opportunity to even make a humane and doctor sanctioned medical decision by a bill that we never thought would affect us. I was there at the capitol, fighting for the rights of women. It never crossed my mind I would be fighting for my own.

No, We Don’t Want Your Apologies (AKA You are not a very good ally if…), Feminace, October 8, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, October 13, 2014

Posted on October 13, 2014 by wellsdc

For Master Thieves, Legos Are the New Uncut Diamonds, Vocativ, Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, August 20, 2014

While Legos aren’t exactly uncut diamonds (they’re not nearly as portable), as far as untraceable commodities go, they’re almost as good. Thieves can sell unopened Lego sets, which are very difficult to track, almost immediately online for as much or more than the retail price. And if they sit on them for a while, it gets even better, because many of the bigger sets rapidly appreciate in value—at a rate much faster than inflation. In other words, they’re money in the bank.

Last week’s back-to-back busts underscore what appears to be a growing awareness among criminals of Legos’ street value. Over the last couple of years, professional thieves and opportunists around the world have turned the Danish building blocks into fat stacks of Benjamins. They’ve included Silicon Valley executives, criminal masterminds in Florida, Oklahoma conmen and even drug dealers in Amsterdam, who have started accepting Lego toys as payment.

Some go for the toy stores, others rob the delivery trucks. Earlier this year, a suspected band of crooks in Australia brandished angle grinders and crowbars to pilfer at least $30,000 in Legos from four different retailers. In England, bandits in Watford Gap and West Yorkshire pulled off Lego truck heists to the tune of $87,000 and $67,000.

The Kraken Is Such A Big Meanie, The Kraken, The Gloomy Historian, October 9, 2014 Continue reading →

This Is Why You Should Never Walk and Text, Kids

Posted on October 9, 2014 by wellsdc

You might inadvertently trigger a security lockdown at an airport.

A man disembarking a flight at Australia’s Sydney Airport was apparently so engrossed in whatever he was watching on his iPad that he couldn’t take his face away from the screen to pay attention to where he was going when he exited the plane into the airport. With the iPad still glued to his face, Sydney Morning Herald reports that the man accidentally wandered through an exit tunnel into a domestic terminal without clearing security. The entire terminal was promptly evacuated, and all the passengers had to be re-screened before being allowed to board their flights.

Here endeth the lesson.

“White, white, white and Will Smith”

Posted on October 8, 2014 by wellsdc

A friend started a discussion on Facebook the other day about how she is constantly asked where she is from—this is something that white people like me do not seem to experience nearly as much, and when we do, a simple answer like “San Antonio” will suffice. No one ever asks me where I’m really from besides the American city I just named, or where my ancestors are from (unless it was during a family tree project.) The Facebook discussion led to this comic by Shing Yin Khor, originally published on The Toast and reposted on Upworthy. This is just one panel; the whole thing is worth a look (some NSFW language).

By Shing Yin Khor, via Upworthy

What I’m Reading, October 7, 2014

Posted on October 7, 2014 by wellsdc

My day at the gun nuts’ confab: Blunt talk, high drama and mass paranoia, Alexander Zaitchik, Salon, October 7, 2014

Earlier that morning, a speaker had flattered the [Gun Rights Policy Conference] crowd by calling them “the most sophisticated gun-rights gathering in the country.” This is probably true. It’s also telling. All of the room’s combined political experience, intelligence and savvy still does not add up to the ability to grasp how America’s largely unregulated gun trade has become a public health crisis, or why background checks and other common-sense measures poll so well. The gun-rights movement continues to see background checks through the same paranoid prism it sees everything else: the threat of door-to-door gun confiscation.

Why I will no longer speak on all-male panels, Scott Gilmore, MacLean’s, October 4, 2014 Continue reading →

Establishing Fox News’ Accuracy

Posted on October 2, 2014 by wellsdc

Fox News has an accuracy rate of 18%, according to Politifact branch Punditfact (h/t Jason). This means that of the 83 statements made by the network’s talking heads reviewed by Punditfact, 15 of them were found to be “True.” Another 10% were determined to be “Mostly True,” and 22% were “Half True.” The remainder fell into the “Mostly False,” “False,” and “Pants on Fire” categories.

There are 1,440 minutes in a 24-hour day. A stopped clock is therefore right 0.14% of the time*, if you count whole minutes as single data points.

This means that Fox News is correct more than 100 times more often than a stopped clock.

Jim Champion [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)], via Flickr

“You agreed with me a few hours ago when I said it was 7:42. Why are you trying to change your answer now?”

(That bit of spin is free, Ailes, but the next one’ll cost you.)

* I’m trying to find the source of this saying, to the extent it is knowable. The most likely seems to be Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, but I’ve also seen it credited to Paulo Coelho, Stephen Hunt, and Patrick Jane. Anyone know where it comes from?

Photo credit: Jim Champion [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.

What I’m Reading, September 22, 2014

Posted on September 22, 2014 by wellsdc

The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the “free market”, CJ Werleman, Salon, September 14, 2014

Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian movement is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. In other words, the “free market” is a constructed supernatural myth.

There is much to cover here, but a jumping-off point is the fact that corporations are a government construct, and that fact alone refutes any case for economic libertarianism. Corporations, which are designed to protect shareholders insofar as mitigating risk beyond the amount of their investment, are created and maintained only via government action. “Statutes, passed by the government, allow for the creation of corporations, and anyone wishing to form one must fill out the necessary government paperwork and utilize the apparatus of the state in numerous ways. Thus, the corporate entity is by definition a government-created obstruction to the free marketplace, so the entire concept should be appalling to libertarians,” says David Niose, an atheist and legal director of the American Humanist Association.

***

Reich says rules that define the playing field of today’s capitalism don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them. “In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.”

***

That awkward pause that inevitably follows asking a libertarian how it is that unrestricted corporate power, particularly for Big Oil, helps solve our existential crisis, climate change, is always enjoyable. “Corporations will harm you, or even kill you, if it is profitable to do so and they can get away with it … recall the infamous case of the Ford Pinto, where in the 1970s the automaker did a cost-benefit analysis and decided not to remedy a defective gas tank design because doing so would be more expensive than simply allowing the inevitable deaths and injuries to occur and then paying the anticipated settlements,” warns Niose.

Spanking is a euphemism. For assault. Chocolate, Pomp, and Circumstance, Medium, September 17, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, September 18, 2014

Posted on September 18, 2014 by wellsdc

There’s nothing “shocking” about growing up, Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, September 11, 2014

Along with the gotcha! wardrobe malfunction, the “Can you even believe it that a human being is subject to the laws of time and physical progression?” story is a reliable page views grabber. Throw in wrinkles, weight or any possible cosmetic surgery and you’re particularly golden. Three years ago, the Internet blew a gasket when Sinead O’Connor, who was once 20 years old, appeared in public, in the words of an Inquisitr headline, “No Longer Bald or Skinny.” Fortunately, she had the decency to lose weight before the release of her new album earlier this year, prompting inevitable headlines about her “dramatic makeover.” And when the 81-year-old Kim Novak appeared at the Oscars this winter with an unusually taut, immobilized countenance, critics were swift to mock her “wax museum” appearance. These are your options, people. You can get older in whatever natural form that may take and be made fun of for it, or attempt to remain youthful and be made fun of for it. Basically, unless you master some vampire-like secret of remaining a fixed age and size for eternity, you’re screwed.

Colorblindness is the New Racism, Lauren Rankin, Policy Mic, July 22, 2013 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, September 12, 2014

Posted on September 12, 2014 by wellsdc

David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture, Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll, Salon, April 13, 2014

Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. He focused on the effects of irony as it transferred from one medium to the other. In the 1960s, writers like Thomas Pynchon had successfully used irony and pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture. Irony laid waste to corruption and hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the ’60s, as Wallace saw it, television adopted a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching. Fiction responded by simply absorbing pop culture to “help create a mood of irony and irreverence, to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” But what if irony leads to a sinkhole of relativism and disavowal? For Wallace, regurgitating ironic pop culture is a dead end:

Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It [uses] the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

So where have we gone from irony? Irony is now fashionable and a widely embraced default setting for social interaction, writing and the visual arts. Irony fosters an affected nihilistic attitude that is no more edgy than a syndicated episode of “Seinfeld.” Today, pop characters directly address the television-watching audience with a wink and nudge. (Shows like “30 Rock” deliver a kind of meta-television-irony irony; the protagonist is a writer for a show that satirizes television, and the character is played by a woman who actually used to write for a show that satirizes television. Each scene comes with an all-inclusive tongue-in-cheek.) And, of course, reality television as a concept is irony incarnate.

Forget Mars. Here’s Where We Should Build Our First Off-World Colonies. David Warmflash, The Crux, September 8, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, September 11, 2014

Posted on September 11, 2014 by wellsdc

Satire and fake news stories, Mano Singham, Freethought Blogs, September 2, 2014

I enjoy satirical websites like the The Onion that take current political events and trends and then twist them around and manufacture a ‘story’ to illustrate some point about it or to highlight some absurdity. It is not uncommon for people who are not aware that these are satirical sites to take them at face value, even though it should be fairly clear that they are meant as humor.

But there has emerged a new kind of website whose purpose seems to be to write stories that are not clever satire but are written as straightforward supposedly news items, just with fake ‘facts’. The point of these sites seems to be to dupe readers and even news organizations into reporting on them as if they are true stories.

***

Admittedly, drawing a clear line between ‘real’ satire and ‘fake’ satire is not easy because it can come down to intent. The idea of the The Onion seems to be to make people laugh while that of sites like National Report seems to be to fool them into thinking it is real. Some of the latter’s stories are so extreme that it is hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously but clearly some people do.

Islamic State is a threat, so let the neighbors deal with it, kos, Daily Kos, August 27, 2014 Continue reading →

Cryptic Philosopher

Oh, like YOU could think of a better tagline!

Category Archives: Culture