Cavalcade of Mammals

The Skeptical Chymists — associated with a modern version of a 1920’s chem set for kids
Amateur chemistry discussion board
Estimated 1:20000 eggs in the US are contaminated with Salmonella enterica. The fraction varies as infection rises and falls in flocks, at times 1:10 eggs are contaminated. The majority of egg-laying flocks have Salmonella infections, but only a subset of chickens are infected, only some eggs get contaminated, and egg-washing reduces Salmonella in eggs. Still this works out to over 2e6 contaminated eggs / year in the US.
What Central Asia’s spectacular states can tell us about authoritarianism in America.
Autocracy: Rules for Survival by Masha Gessen
. Notes from a reporter in Putin’s Russia on what to expect.
Rants on 2016 US election
Global sea ice super anomaly Nov 2016
An Insider’s View: The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America By Forsetti’s Justice
Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate Medicare
What you — yes, you — can do to save America from tyranny. Written by Timothy Snyder
The 14 Characteristics of Fascism by Lawrence Britt

Harry Truman, 1952

I’ve seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn’t believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are–when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people–then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again.

We are getting a lot of suggestions to the effect that we ought to water down our platform and abandon parts of our program. These, my friends, are Trojan horse suggestions. I have been in politics for over 30 years, and I know what I am talking about, and I believe I know something about the business. One thing I am sure of: never, never throw away a winning program. This is so elementary that I suspect the people handing out this advice are not really well-wishers of the Democratic Party.

The Post’s Jane Ridley tells why she was staunchly anti-vax until she had a frightening wake-up call

How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream. The full story of his connection with far-right extremists. by Sarah Posner and David Neiwert

Profile of Chicago school system head Forrest Claypool–the guy who sold CTA fare system Ventra to a private company.

A Science Fiction Tasting Menu for the As Yet Uninitiated (not books I would pick, but some interesting comments)

Collection of evidence Trump is a racist
Another collection of examples of Trump racism
Electroetching steel
MIT Nanomaker course (CD Spectrometer, PDMS Microfluidics, Photovoltaics)
Ross Greene approach to disciplining kids
Iraq War deaths: 405,000 (95% uncertainty interval 48,000–751,000) + 10% more due to emigrants

Roland Fryer is wrong: There is racial bias in shootings by police
Hillary Clinton ‘scandals’ in perspective
Rundown of newer health fraud merchants

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
–Eugene Gendlin
1977 Time ‘Coming Ice Age’ cover is a hoax
Gary Johnson is Worse than Donald Trump (tax plan + party platform)
Libertarianism: Half-Baked Thought Experiment Cooked Up by Self-Entitled Pricks
Greenland sharks live to 400 years (272-512 yrs)
NGS sequencing machines, July 2016

Trump poll watcher voter intimidation effort runs afoul of 1982 court settlement banning RNC from voter intimidation (expires 2017 unless they get caught again)
How the Trumps Got Rich: The Trump fortune was built off theft — from workers, from the state, and from the commons. by Samuel Stein
the Primer movie explained , also youtube explanation

Trump supporters profile in The New Yorker
Hillary Clinton Isn’t Getting Indicted. Here’s Why (ThinkProgress)
Low carb diets reduce insulin levels but do not increase metabolism rate

Trump University was a scam. And so Trump is attacking the judge in two of the cases.
Illinois budget background
Similarities between Trump and Reagan: both disdainful of fasts, incurious, initially weakly supported by GOP establishment

Review by Theda Skocpol of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
Kevin Hall’s followup studies of the “Biggest Loser” dieters at +6 years, PDF
Why the Gold Standard is poor policy
List of Email to SMS Gateways
Technological Improvement Graphs
Economics of Karl Polanyi
Meet the Father of Modern Space Art, Chesley Bonestell
Military equip given to police departments

Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y
Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Budget for Fiscal Year 2017
Laser Sonics model 8000, 150 W medical YAG laser system, pulsed or CW, which runs on three-phase 230 VAC
Disease heatmap showing the introduction of vaccines
New National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) five year plan still encourages nonsense
CDC uninterested in discussing how the Nepal UN mission to Haiti started a cholera epidemic

The Urgent Need to Save Orthodox Economists from their Crippling Myths by William Black

Our autopsies revealed a number of patterns that proved critical to our analysis, predictions, and policy prescriptions. For the sake of brevity I will not define here terms I have explained in hundreds of blogs, articles, and slides. As I noted, the blogger has heard me present and define the terms. First, we came to understand that the S&Ls were “control frauds.” Second, we found that “accounting” was the “weapon of choice” in finance – we were dealing with “accounting control frauds.” Third, we realized that accounting control fraud had become epidemic. Fourth, we realized that the control frauds were so numerous and concentrated (by asset type, commercial real estate loans (CRE) and geography) and growing so quickly that they were hyper-inflating regional real estate bubbles in the Southwest. Fifth, we identified the four “ingredients” of the fraud “recipe” for a lender. Sixth, we recognized that the CEOs running control frauds ran them for their personal benefit, by looting the S&L. Seventh, we recognized that firms following the fraud recipe were mathematically guaranteed to report record (albeit fictional) profits. Eighth, we realized the truth of the industry saying: “a rolling loan gathers no loss.” Ninth, we identified the recurrent scams by which S&L control frauds, individually and collectively, transmuted massive losses into fictional gains. Tenth, we realized that the CEOs running accounting control frauds were routinely able to suborn supposed “controls” by using the ability to hire, fire, and expand the engagement (in the case of outside auditors and counsel) to generate a “Gresham’s” dynamic (Akerlof 1970). Eleventh, we realized that the accounting control frauds had a great “tell” – they had to gut their underwriting and internal controls to follow the first two ingredients of the fraud recipe. Twelfth, we saw that the fraud recipe created an Achilles’ “heel” – the need for extreme growth, so we adopted a rule limiting growth.

Playmate figures graphed!
The Phenomenon of Man reviewed by Sir Peter Medawar
Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality by John Kessel

Explaining what goes on in the world: in memory of Bob Fitch by Doug Henwood
Bob Fitch and New York history
5 Icelandic words you can’t translate
Vesen (veh-sen)
Skreppa (SCRAP-ah)
Nenna (NEN-ah)
Jæja (YI-yah)
Dugnaður (DOOG-na-thuhr)
JPL Visions of the Future posters
Dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) (Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist)
Scalia’s pro-creationism dissent.