October 12, 2014

Let me get this straight...

Snowden's girlfriend just caught a commercial flight to Moscow and has been living with him since July and it was completely unknown by almost everyone up to now, without the Russian media or the NSA getting wise?? Do I have that correct??

Yet Mr. Counterintelligence IT expert/CIA-trained über-field agent is "stuck" there hopelessly and dependent on the kindness of strangers?

Doesn't quite add up to me, at least...

Are mom and dad also planning to make the move soon, or are they already over there and being hidden for the next big reveal?

October 11, 2014

Ok...Whose son/nephew/cousin is this?

Heavy Meta: Maine Man, 19, Poses For New Mug Shot Wearing T-Shirt With Photo Of His Old Mug Shot

In a marvelously meta moment, a 19-year-old last week posed for a jail booking photo while wearing a t-shirt with a reproduction of the mug shot taken of him after a June arrest for drunk driving.

Robert Burt was busted for operating under the influence and driving without a license. Burt, a resident of the central Maine town of Pittsfield, posed for a June 14 booking photo (seen below) at the Somerset County Jail. He was wearing a white t-shirt and held a slate in his right hand.

After copping a drunk driving plea, Burt was ordered to spend two days in custody, beginning August 8 at 6 PM. “Going to do my 48 hours whoo,” Burt announced on Facebook two hours before surrendering.

When he later arrived at the jail, Burt was searched, directed to pose for a mug shot, and shown to a cell. He was especially prepared for the booking photo session.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/mug-shot-with-mug-shot-shirt-687543

October 11, 2014

Nobel winner Betzig works in Northern Virginia

ASHBURN

One of three newly announced Nobel Prize winners plies his trade in Northern Virginia.

Eric Betzig, 54, has worked at the Ashburn campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2005.

He has spent much of his career working to develop powerful microscopes. On Wednesday, he received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a microscope that allows scientists to view living cells at a molecular level, at resolutions previously thought unattainable.

The institute said Betzig was in Munich when the announcement was made.

In an online video describing his invention, Betzig urged scientists to stray from the beaten path. He said he became so frustrated with the structure of academic science that he left academia altogether and worked for his dad's machine tool company for several years.

http://hamptonroads.com/2014/10/nobel-winner-betzig-works-northern-virginia

October 10, 2014

Arizona Teacher Fired for Breaking up Racist Bullying of 4th Grader

25 year veteran Elementary Teacher Pam Aister was fired this week by the Fountain Hills Arizona School District after breaking up an incident of Racial Bullying by Four Students against one other.

“He was called the n-word, ‘monkey’, and ‘coon,’ Aister told KNXV.
Ainster told KTAR-FM that she also said to the group, “If you’re picking on him, you’re picking on me. It’s not five against one, it’s five against two, and there will be no more taunting, teasing or racial names.”

But parents of the alleged offenders claim that Ainster used abusive language telling them to "shut up" and that one had an "ugly face", an allegation that Ainster denies. In the end the School Board, following the recommendation of their attorney, voted to terminate Ainster on the basis of reports from the parents.

Isn't it an interesting world, assuming Ainster's claims are essentially true and even that the counter claims against her are valid, where a pack of bigoted bullies can rely on their parents to protect and escalate their bullying in order to remove a teacher whose primary crime was to stand up against their racist taunting - even if somewhat vehemently - in order to protect and defend a vulnerable child?

How would you hope the teacher of your children would react in this situation?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/02/1333771/-Arizona-Teacher-Fired-for-Breaking-up-Racist-Bullying-of-4th-Grader#

October 10, 2014

Austrian jihadi teen girls reportedly want to leave Syria, ISIS, come home

The two Austrian teenagers who became poster girls for the jihad in Syria are now desperate to come home after becoming disillusioned with their new lifestyles.

Samra Kesinovic, 17, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, who grew up in Vienna and enjoyed the freedom to wear whatever they wanted and to meet whoever they wanted, were told by radical preacher Ebu Tejma at a local mosque about the evils of their lifestyle. Clerics persuaded the girls that the only way to know true peace was to head to Syria and take part in the holy war.

The twohad started lecturing classmates about their lifestyles and were even suspected of a vandalism attack at their school that called for jihad.

When they left Vienna in April, they almost certainly had somebody helping them to get out of the country, police said. They left behind a note telling their parents: "Don't look for us. We will serve Allah — and we will die for him."

But once they had arrived, they were married off to local fighters. Both are now believed to be pregnant.

Police in Austria said the girls' social media accounts were taken over and manipulated to broadcast fake messages about their new lives, and that Kesinovic and Selimovic have been used to encourage other young women to head to Syria.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/austrian-jihadi-girls-reportedly-leave-syria-article-1.1970097

And earlier story about the teens here:
http://www.inquisitr.com/1471094/two-austrian-teens-join-isis-watch-their-transformation-photos/

October 10, 2014

Love Is Not Algorithmic

There is no higher praise these days than being data-driven. A person who is data-driven is free of bias, and cuts through arguments with a sword of truth. No longer do we need to fumble through life. The answers will come. We will know how to respond, just what to do. We will let the data tell us!

And so it goes with Christian Rudder’s new book Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), a synopsis of insights he gleaned from analytics while working at the company he co-founded, OKCupid. His company, he tells us, could easily sport the tagline “Making the Ineffable Totally Effable.” Indeed, his book sets out to do this, yielding some gainful insights on dating expectations, along with other, more unsurprising findings: Men like younger women (no duh). These data are amusing, even charming.

But something more is at risk. What is troubling here, as we enter the Age of Big Data, the Age of the Internet, and the like, is that we are also entering an Age of the Axiomatic.

To be axiomatic, at its best, is to be deductive, but at its worst, it is to assume that a system is consistent and complete. For instance, in the field of genetics, we can look at aggregate data from 100,000 patients to deduce a mutation that is apt to cause a disease in any single patient. That is the power of deductive logic. But in assuming the system of logic is complete, we may fail to anticipate alternate causes, in this case “epigenetic” or biological mechanisms beyond DNA. Axioms work well in the realm of pure numbers and physics, but they are often superficially applied to biology, and especially so when applied to the social sciences.

Exactly the point we assume the data of a system to be both consistent and complete. This is when axiomatic logic at its most naïve and dangerous.

This dangerous kind of axiomatic logic is pronounced when we assume that a user is a collection of “data points” with a consistent or complete identity. In fact, online-dating services are notoriously complicated by users’ own impossible burden of fully representing themselves in a two-dimensional personality. Social media has struggled to contemplate the self-contradiction and inconsistency of its own users—to see them as more than flat profiles that can be targeted for advertising. Speaking of users who have multiple profiles, Mark Zuckerberg famously said “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Writer Curtis Sittenfeld quipped in The New York Times: “To which my only response is, 'You’ve got to be kidding.' I mean, I’m not even the same person with all the members of my immediate family.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/love-is-not-algorithmic/380688/

October 10, 2014

Ta-Nehisi Coates just keeps hitting balls out of the park...

To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child

Last Friday, I called Jordan Davis's mother Lucia McBath. It's been almost two years since her son was murdered by a man who took offense to his music. The murderer was Michael Dunn. After shooting the boy, Dunn drove to a motel with his girlfriend. He ordered pizza. He mixed a few cocktails. Then, the next day, he turned himself in and claimed that he was defending himself against a shotgun-wielding Davis. No shotgun was ever found. In his first trial, Dunn was convicted of attempted murder, for shooting—unjustifiably—at Davis's friends. He was not convicted of murdering Jordan Davis after the jury deadlocked. The state of Florida retried the case, and this time convicted Dunn of first-degree murder.

McBath and I had talked twice before and each time I'd found her to be a woman of direct and open feeling. The first time we talked she cried as she recounted the life of her lost son. The second time she stood before my son and insisted that he mattered, though all the powers of the world might tell him different. With wild theories of phantom shotguns now banished, I wanted to know how McBath felt and how she was filling the yawning space left by her departed son.

"I guess I'm speechless," she said. "Excited. Happy. It feels like the weight of the world has been lifted. But I definitely am waffling back and forth. I was elated about justice for Jordan, but I would prefer to have him here, thriving and growing. I wish that was my reality, but in light of everything this is the best I can get."

She told me that she'd taken the energy that she'd once put into child-rearing and given herself over to activism. She has set up a scholarship fund in her son's name. She is working with President Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative.

"I've been working with them because my heart is for our people," she said, speaking of My Brother's Keeper. "My heart is for everyone, but I know that there is a lot of work that has to be done for my own people."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/to-raise-love-and-lose-a-black-child/381189/?single_page=true

IMO, Coates has been on fire for pretty much all of 2014...

October 10, 2014

Why Brazil’s protests didn’t translate into change at the ballot box

After one of the most complex and fast-changing presidential races in decades, Brazil held an election on Oct. 5 that revealed little of the sentiment for change during last year’s protests. So what happened?

First of all, Marina Silva only won 21% of the vote, a result of a number of factors including successful attack ads by the Workers’ Party and a poorly executed campaign that didn’t convince voters that she would be a viable alternative. Instead, Senator Aécio Neves came within eight points of President Dilma Rousseff. While he would certainly represent a change at the Planalto, he represents the most traditional of Brazilian politics: a wealthy, white, seasoned politician from Minas Gerais. And even though neither Rousseff nor Neves represent a major break from the status quo, they both referred to themselves as the candidate for change in their victory speeches. During her address, Rousseff stood before a massive backdrop that read: “New government, new ideas.” As the two candidates head to a runoff, they’re both jockeying for Silva’s voters and trying to cast themselves as change-makers.

Next, many politicians targeted by the 2013 protests were actually reelected. Despite the fact that corruption was one of the central themes of the protests and a constant complaint of those unhappy with Brazilian politics, notoriously dirty politicians like Paulo Maluf and Fernando Collor got elected. (It’s unclear, however, if Maluf will be able to take office given his ineligibility under the clean record law.) São Paulo Mayor Geraldo Alckmin was reelected in spite of the capital city running out of water, among other things, and the reviled former Rio Governor Sérgio Cabral’s successor, Pezão, is headed for a runoff. Politicians who’ve come under fire for their homophobic views and bigoted behavior like Marco Feliciano and Jair Bolsonaro won reelection.

On the legislative front, this Congress is the most conservative elected since the post-1964 period, according to the Intersyndical Parliamentary Assistance Department. A larger number of members of the armed forces, religious groups, and agribusiness representatives won seats. Meanwhile, two of the country’s biggest parties, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), lost 18 and five seats, respectively, in the Chamber of Deputies and one seat each in the Senate. (They still, however, represent the biggest parties in Congress.) The right-leaning PSDB, meanwhile, gained 10 seats in the lower house. Now, in the already fractured party system, there are even more parties in the legislature, rising from 22 to 28.

Given these events, what happened to the demands for change during last year’s protests?

http://qz.com/278217/why-brazils-protests-didnt-translate-into-change-at-the-ballot-box/

October 6, 2014

A Smuggled Girl’s Odyssey of False Promises and Fear

EL PARAÍSO, Guatemala — The smugglers advertised on the radio as spring bloomed into summer: “Do you want to live better? Come with me.”

Cecilia, a restless wisp of a girl, heard the pitch and ached to go. Her stepfather had been murdered, forcing her, her mother and four younger siblings into her aunt’s tiny home, with just three beds for 10 people. It was all they had — and all a smuggler needed. He offered them a loan of $7,000 for Cecilia’s journey, with the property as a guarantee. “I gave him the original deed,” said Jacinta, her aunt, noting that the smuggler gave them a year to repay the loan, with interest. “I did it out of love.”

The trip lasted nearly a month, devolving from a journey of want and fear into an outright abduction by smugglers in the United States. Freedom came only after an extra $1,000 payment, made at a gas station in Fort Myers, Fla., as her kidnappers flashed a gun.

Now in Miami, Cecilia, 16, is one of more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States illegally from Central America in less than a year. Though the number of new arrivals has been declining, the Obama administration says it is determined to “confront the smugglers of these unaccompanied children,” and the “cartels who tax or exploit them in their passage.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/world/americas/a-smuggled-girls-odyssey-guatemala-migration-abduction.html?ref=world&_r=0

October 6, 2014

France denies U.S. media story on al Qaeda defector agent: source

PARIS (Reuters) - A French defense ministry source denied on Monday a U.S. media report that a French intelligence officer had defected to al Qaeda's branch in Syria and was being targeted for elimination by U.S. air strikes.

McClatchy DC, a Washington DC-based news web site, reported citing several European intelligence sources that the former French officer was the highest ranking defector to go over to al Qaeda and that coalition powers had failed to kill him in several air strikes.

"After checks this morning, we can assert that the information concerning supposed links between the jihadist cited by the press and French intelligence services is totally erroneous," the French defense source said.

McClatchy cited sources saying the man, described as a former member of military intelligence, special forces or the external intelligence services, had survived attacks on eight locations held by the al Qaeda-linked Nusra front in Syria.

The coalition preferred to use missile strikes rather than capture the man to avoid his identity being revealed, McClatchy cited sources as saying.

http://news.yahoo.com/france-denies-u-media-story-al-qaeda-defector-135351360--business.html