The Most Hated Buzzword(s)…

The really scary aspect of all this is that the most hated buzzword — think outside the box — garnered only a 16 percent disapproval. Sheesh.

Scott Adams nailed the problem back in 1994…

From Wired:

According to Ben Brandt, a former adviser to Delta, the airlines and the feds should be less concerned with what gels your aunt puts in her carry-on, and more concerned about lax screening for terrorist sympathizers among the airlines’ own work force. They should be worried about terrorists shipping their bombs in air cargo. And they should be worried about terrorists shooting or bombing airports without ever crossing the security gates.

Brandt says aviation security needs a fundamental overhaul. Not only is the aviation industry failing to keep up with the new terrorist tactics, TSA’s regimen of scanning and groping is causing a public backlash. “From the public’s perspective, this kind of refocusing would reduce the amount of screening they have to put up with in the United States,” Brandt tells Danger Room, “and refocus it where it’s needed.”

In the new issue of the CTC Sentinel, a wonky security newsletter published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, Brandt all but indicts his former industry and its government protectors. “Government regulators suffer from a lack of imagination in anticipating and mitigating emergent and existing threats” to air travel, he writes.

Think first about what aviation security is. Since 9/11, it’s largely been a line of defense ahead of a departure gate to keep dangerous people and dangerous materials off a plane. By Brandt’s calculations, it’s cost $56 billion since 9/11. In one sense, it’s worked as planned: No planes have been blown up or hijacked for a decade.

But the last several years’ worth of plots on the friendly skies indicate the terrorists have switched their game plans.

Does anyone honestly dispute that by turning the United States of America into a nation cowering rabbits Al-Qaeda achieved its goals at levels far beyond their wildest imaginings?

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Here’s the story: we sent the paper to the journal that Bem published his paper in, and they said ‘no, we don’t ever accept straight replication attempts’. We then tried another couple of journals, who said the same thing. We then sent it to the British Journal of Psychology, who sent it out for review. For whatever reason (and they have apologised, to their credit), it was quite badly delayed in their review process, and they took many months to get back to us.

When they did get back to us, there were two reviews, one very positive, urging publication, and one quite negative. This latter review didn’t find any problems in our methodology or writeup itself, but suggested that, since the three of us (Richard Wiseman, Chris French and I) are all skeptical of ESP, we might have unconsciously influenced the results using our own psychic powers.

As long as there are people, who, for a great variety of reasons, refuse to, or cannot accept, reality, scammers and other purveyors of magical thinking will continue to enrich themselves at these people’s expense.

I use a Firefox app called Read It Later to download stories from the Intertubes that I find interesting but don’t have time at the moment to dive into. Here are the pieces that caught my eye today:

Michigan’s Radical Assault on Public Education, Suguru: Hack Things Better, How Do You Explain Gene Weingarten? Occupied America? What I Lost in Libya, “I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white,” More Evidence Found for Quantum Physics in Photosynthesis, Good for Business; Kids Not So Much and Open source online board game engine with over 1,000 modules.

Previously…

Just because they were made to look foolish…

[Update @ 1333: When I was a staff sergeant in the Ohio Army National Guard we did one weekend of riot/crowd control training each year. One of the lessons pounded into us was to never become distracted by taunting from those we were supposed to be controlling.]

You decide…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Transparency. It has been the righteous code word of the Plain Dealer in its dealing with public officials. Especially the new County Council.

What transparency means is this: Honesty. Openness. Trustworthiness. Fairness.

In this respect, the Plain Dealer is absolutely correct. And righteous. And true.

Now comes the hard part.

What’s good for public officials should be good for PD editors. No?

Next time the PD editorial board makes a crucial editorial endorsement – be it for President, mayor, county office or for any important public issue – let it practice what it preaches.

Give us transparency. Continue Reading »

*Not Really What It Means, But It Sure Sounds Like It…

Radly Balko writes:

Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a “war,” and the consequences are predictable. These policies have taken a toll. Among the victims of increasingly aggressive and militaristic police tactics: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., whose dogs were killed when Prince George’s County police mistakenly raided his home; 92-year-old Katherine Johnston, who was gunned down by narcotics cops in Atlanta in 2006; 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, who was killed by Modesto, Calif., police during a drug raid in September 2000; 80-year-old Isaac Singletary, who was shot by undercover narcotics police in 2007 who were attempting to sell drugs from his yard; Jonathan Ayers, a Georgia pastor shot as he tried to flee a gang of narcotics cops who jumped him at a gas station in 2009; Clayton Helriggle, a 23-year-old college student killed during a marijuana raid in Ohio in 2002; and Alberta Spruill, who died of a heart attack after police deployed a flash grenade during a mistaken raid on her Harlem apartment in 2003. Most recently, voting rights activist Barbara Arnwine was raided by a SWAT team in Prince George’s County, Md., on Nov. 21. The police appear to have raided the wrong house.

Ever wonder why 1 percenter slum lords didn’t get shot in War on Povery?

[Update @ 0833 on 8 December: Cory Doctorow’s thoughts…]

Valerie Strauss writes:

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

One of the ignorant Internet memes that pop up into my mail box periodically is a purported high school test from the late 19th or early 20th century. The message here is that today’s school students are more ignorant then their last-century peers.

I’ve argued before that that is just not the case. I would love to see all elected officials annually take the highest-level proficiency test in their state. I think the scores would be enlightening.

Michael O’Reilly writes:

During the summer of 1950, on the outskirts of Harrisburg Pennsylvania U.S.A., my sister’s boyfriend “Skip” was sitting on the glider on the front porch of our house. He said to me – “Hey Mike… bring me a sheet of paper.” I answered why? and he responded with his make believe impatience “Just bring it!” I obeyed and he said that he was going to build the best paper airplane in the world. I was eight years old at the time and my meager knowledge of paper airplanes was the traditional flying wedge that spiraled into tight loops and fell head first to the ground.

When he started folding the paper, I knew this was something different, something special. He never explained how he did it but every move, every fold, every detail was burned into my memory. After he finished, we walked the porch handrail and he gently tossed it horizontally towards the street. It glided like no paper airplane I have ever seen before, it was acting like a REAL airplane. It gently curved into the slight breeze and began to rise vertically without moving forward. The craft then began to lower as if it were a helicopter and gently came to rest on the asphalt below.

Over the years, I have shown many eight year old children this paper plane. I don’t know if they will remember but I hope they pass the knowledge on.

Go on, you know you have to fold one…

D. ON ICE from Ale on Vimeo.

In solidarity with the West Coast Port Blockade planned for next Monday, 12 December, Occupy Denver has called for a blockade of America’s landlocked ports: Walmart distribution centers, of which there are five in Ohio.

Wal-Mart Distribution Center #6024
3880 Southwest Blvd
Grove City, OH 43123
(614) 871-2333

Wal-Mart Distribution Center #6492
2150 International Pkwy.
N. Canton, OH 44720
(330) 899-1003

Wal-Mart Distribution Center #7012
1400 Old Chillicothe Rd S
Washington Court House, OH 43160
(740) 636-5400

Wal-Mart Distribution Center #7017
843 State Route 43
Wintersville, OH 43952
(740) 765-5700

From Occupy Denver:

Considering the coordinated attacks on the Occupations and attacks on workers:

Occupy Denver stands in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who will be protesting the abuses of the economic apparatus of the 1% on Dec 12.

The wanton pursuit of profit at the expense of human values by multinational corporations with no local grounding has destroyed communities throughout the world, disregarded workers’ natural rights, eliminated production jobs in the United States and sweatshops abroad, and lowered the standard of living for all, only to enrich the wealthy by manipulating the laws and base corruption. At the same time, coordinated nationwide police attacks have turned our cities into battlegrounds in an effort to disrupt our Occupy movement, which is protesting this state of affairs while our politicians are neglecting the very serious issues we are raising.

We call on every occupation to organize a mass mobilization on December 12 in support of the actions taken across the US, especially those on the West Coast against Goldman Sachs and other bankers.

On 12/12 Occupy Denver will be rallying at the Walmart Distribution Center, 7500 Crossroads Boulevard, Loveland, Colorado, in order to illustrate the problems with a globalization solely based on the interests of multi-national corporations and total disregard for human values or human beings.

Via Big Think…

Rick Ungar writes:

I have long argued that the impact of the Affordable Care Act is not nearly as big of a deal as opponents would have you believe. At the end of the day, the law is – in the main – little more than a successful effort to put an end to some of the more egregious health insurer abuses while creating an environment that should bring more Americans into programs that will give them at least some of the health care coverage they need.

There is, however, one notable exception – and it’s one that should have a long lasting and powerful impact on the future of health care in our country.

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

All insurance companies rake in profits by using other people’s money to invest in the stocks and bonds. This is why David Kaiser’s original genius was to figure out how to collect health care premiums deny health care, and get away with it.

Will this bomb explode or fizzle?