Cavalcade of Mammals

After the 2000 ‘hanging chad’ election, the Election Commission report concluded that about 10% of votes are never counted or miss-counted. The Republican President and House didn’t much care, threw a few billion at the states some counties replaced the punch card machines w/ electronic voting machines. It made things worse. The election results are still untrustworthy, but in many places there’s no paper record to check but there is a poorly designed and poorly secured software program counting the votes. And yet worse, these voting machine companies are all private, and keep their software a secret, so there is no way to audit the software or check the election results. In the *rare* cases where security researchers have inspected the software and computerized voting machines, they have always proved easy to break into and subvert. Same with the centralized websites counting and recording the votes. Complete failure of democracy.

LED bulbs are as cheap as incandescents
Goodbye To Harlan Ellison
Very Short Stories
Sundown Towns history
Wimshurst machine, kit
Fabricating Reflectors for Displaying Multiple Images, pdf
Climate change and China–too hot, flooded
Sanders Medicare for all proposal would save $2T over first 10 years.
Media portray these tales of perseverance as uplifting and inspirational. They’re actually horror stories.
Write in PDFs in Linux
My ancestry test revealed a genetic bombshell
Better command line tools
The end of the oceans
Colliding stars will light up the night sky in 2022
NAD precursor as anti-aging drug (Basis from Elysium Health)

Is Iron Man made of Lego?
Solving the Autism Puzzle

Elevian: daily injections of a protein called GDF11 can promote “the body’s ability to restore itself”

The company builds on research findings several years ago that if the bloodstreams of young and old mice are connected together, it seems to rejuvenate the older ones. … In a 2015 study, for example, scientists at Novartis found that GDF11 levels do not fall with age and that the protein actually inhibits rather than promotes muscle regeneration.

The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. They don’t understand him. By Sean Illing
Cactus seeds supplier

Don’t Talk to Cops. Mr. James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and a former defense attorney, tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police.
10 Rules for Dealing with Police
The RIGHT Way to Handle a Police Stop
A feminist Analysis of Die Hard

Start Making Children Happy With Math
Mandelbrot Fractals
10 Ways to Cover a Trump Rally

John Kenneth Galbraith (1963): Wealth and Poverty: “The modern conservative… not even especially modern… is engaged… in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness… link

Warriors books
Megatons To Megawatts: Russian Warheads Fuel U.S. Power Plants
First World Problems, BBC

Scanner frequencies for Chicago, 1, 2, 3
Baofeng UV-5R info

Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications

Stupid Rightwing memes: “The United States is not a ‘democracy,’ it is ‘a Republic.'”. I don’t quite get the point of this one. Impress the rubes?

Bullseye Bore–laser circle shows if drill is held at 90 degrees

West Nile virus incidence
CCR5Δ32 allele common in Europeans, loss prevents HIV infections, makes carriers more susceptible to West Nile

Bradley Foundation’s Efforts to Build Right-Wing “Infrastructure” Nationwide
The first transient climate projections using GCMs are 30 years old this year, and they have stood up remarkably well.
Trump aide Stephen Miller, meet your great-grandfather, who flunked his naturalization test. Resistance Genealogy

Cellular Landscapes: Photo-realistic renderings of various cellular structures with interactive features.
Stock Grant Sizes In Pre-IPO Tech Companies
NASA’s 1970s space colony artwork

Data display: Visual Vocabulary

fusee singing bird box “internal bird explained”
How Its Made: Mechanical Singing Birds
Reuge Byzance Crystal singing bird box
Beer Styles – Original Gravity and Final Gravity Chart
Hummingbird automata 1, Hummingbird automata 2, maker site w/ plans

Gosh, the earnest talk by Republicans on the paramount importance of scrupulous by-the-book handling of classified information was just a show for the TV cameras and gullible Republican votes.

“More than 130 political appointees working in the Executive Office of the President did not have permanent security clearances as of November 2017, including the president’s daughter, son-in-law and his top legal counsel, according to internal White House documents obtained by NBC News.” link

And for most of these folks, ‘does not have’ means the FBI checked them out and won’t approve clearance because they are a security risk. Some of these guys are known to have worked for hostile foreign powers.

Intelligence chiefs to Senate: Nope, Trump doesn’t care about Russia by Heather Digby Parton, Salon

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked a simple question that sent shockwaves through the hearing room. He asked the assembled intelligence leaders if the president had ever urged them to address the threat of further Russian interference.

He has not. When pressed, NSA Director Admiral Rogers said, “I can’t say I’ve been specifically directed to blunt or actually stop” future Russian attacks. CIA Director Mike Pompeo tried to defend Trump, but the best he could come up with was to say the CIA takes “all kinds of steps to disrupt what the Russians are trying to do.” FBI Director Wray said he had not been specifically tasked to combat Russian interference by the president. Coats said the same. When asked if the president has ordered an inter-agency strategy, he replied, “We essentially are relying on the investigations that are underway.”

Link to Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with the directors of national intelligence, the CIA, and the FBI. C-SPAN

What exactly was the “threat of communism”? As an economic system it is inferior to government regulated capitalism. Communist states grow their economies slower every year than capitalistic states, so they become less of a threat every year, and the comparison pushes their people toward capitalism. As a political system, communism was a variety of dictatorship or oligarchy, and not particularly stable or appealing.

Post-WWII in the European colonies, the threat of communism is that the people will be better off, at least in the short and medium terms, so there was a threat to European control, and then to the minority white government or the local satraps.

In the West, the threat of communism is that workers would insist on a pay raise, and the opportunity of communism was that it was a cudgel to destroy unions and the left.