Relaxed Focus: September 1, 2013

Liberal Media's Call for Bombing in Syria Ignores History | Mediaite:

"These humanitarian interventionists understand what the most famous progressives of all time made clear, that the obligation to rescue the unfortunate comes with an obligation to kill. What they don’t understand or willfully ignore is the lesson of history, which is that when the United States has taken on the responsibility for the well-being of humanity, it has destroyed far more lives than it has saved...

Though the Holocaust is often invoked by humanitarian interventionists, the results of the American assault on the Nazi regime were hardly a victory for humanity. American bombers not only terminated a substantial portion of the civilian populations in France and Germany, but there is also substantial evidence that the Nazi leadership accelerated the killing of Jews as a result of American entry into the war...

More recent progressive-led humanitarian interventions were smaller-scale but yielded similar results. Bill Clinton‘s incursion into Somalia killed 18 American soldiers and hundreds of Somali militiamen and civilians, and brought no improvement to the world’s most misgoverned country. Likewise, NATO’s bombing of Kosovo left hundreds of civilians dead and gave the upper hand to the Kosovo Liberation Army — an organization described by Clinton’s own special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, as “without any questions, a terrorist group” — which conducted its own campaign of ethnic cleansing after the war."

Schneier on Security: Our Newfound Fear of Risk:

"While technology has made us much safer against natural risks like accidents and disease, it works less well against man-made risks. Three examples:

- We have allowed the police to turn themselves into a paramilitary organization. They deploy SWAT teams multiple times a day, almost always in nondangerous situations. They tase people at minimal provocation, often when it's not warranted. Unprovoked shootings are on the rise. One result of these measures is that honest mistakes -- a wrong address on a warrant, a misunderstanding -- result in the terrorizing of innocent people, and more death in what were once nonviolent confrontations with police.

- We accept zero-tolerance policies in schools. This results in ridiculous situations, where young children are suspended for pointing gun-shaped fingers at other students or drawing pictures of guns with crayons, and high-school students are disciplined for giving each other over-the-counter pain relievers. The cost of these policies is enormous, both in dollars to implement and its long-lasting effects on students.

- We have spent over one trillion dollars and thousands of lives fighting terrorism in the past decade -- including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- money that could have been better used in all sorts of ways. We now know that the NSA has turned into a massive domestic surveillance organization, and that its data is also used by other government organizations, which then lie about it. Our foreign policy has changed for the worse: we spy on everyone, we trample human rights abroad, our drones kill indiscriminately, and our diplomatic outposts have either closed down or become fortresses. In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes.

There are lots more examples, but the general point is that we tend to fixate on a particular risk and then do everything we can to mitigate it, including giving up our freedoms and liberties.

There's a subtle psychological explanation. Risk tolerance is both cultural and dependent on the environment around us..."

Awesome teaching photobomb via 22 Teachers Caught Being Awesome, 18 College Professors Who Clearly Have a Sense of Humor & 15 Awesome Teachers You Wish You Had

Greg Rucka Speaks Wise - Front Toward Enemy:

"I’m going to be 44 in November, and at this point, not speaking my mind or telling the truth because something may come down the line later seems a foolish option."

Interview Exclusive: Joe Rogan Explains Everything, Part II - Bloody Elbow:

"We're still discovering things every day. There are all sorts of studies coming out saying, ‘oh, fish oil is causing cancer.' Then you look deeper into that study and the study gets debunked a few weeks later. It doesn't cause cancer, it's just a shitty study. It's very difficult to figure out what the f**k is actually going on. It's really hard. We can certainly learn more about diet and the human body, but we do already know a lot...

One of the most underrated aspects of exercise is the effect on the mind. I have friends that are really intelligent who sort of pooh-pooh taking care of the body as if it's some sort of egotistical, vapid approach. I think they're doing their mind a disservice by not clearing out all the cobwebs that come from stress and hormones building up. There is all sorts of fight or flight shit going on and reward systems that are in place in your body that are not being managed by day to day society working in a cubicle or sitting in your car in traffic. There are all sorts of things that your body doesn't do that it's sort of designed to do. For me, one of the best ways of staying level is forcing myself to exercise extremely hard. "

The Biggest Unanswered Questions About Marvel's Agents of SHIELD:

"Joss Whedon usually writes about underdogs. How do you make SHIELD the underdog? We asked Joss Whedon about this, and he responded:

It's something we've been joking about since the beginning. "They're a ragtag group of faceless bureaucrats who control your every move!" On some level, we'll be having our cake and eating it too, which is a delightful phrase for hypocrisy. But on some other level, we'll be broaching the issue in a way which is not trivializing it. If we're dealing with it as writers and the audience is dealing with it, then the characters need to deal with it as well. Sometimes S.H.I.E.L.D. will be the thing that makes it all better, and sometimes S.H.I.E.L.D. will be the thing that makes it worse. It's a very grey area, and that's part of what makes it exciting."

John Kerry Blasts Washington’s "messianic enterprise”; says “moralism can be very defeating for the United States” - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

"The man who today is attempting to convince the United States to go war based on the principle of moralistic intervention, was in November 1971 telling a hilarious William F. Buckley (sample line: "He is, as you will note, from Boston") that moralistic intervention is the root of America’s foreign policy rot:

...I think this is one of the great fallacies of our foreign policy at the present moment. Interventionism, as well as globalism, both stem from the same kind of moralism. And in a certain sense I think that moralism can be very defeating for the United States and its undertakings. It gets us into a sort of messianic enterprise, whereby we have this impression that somehow we can go out and touch these other countries and change them, and I think this is what in a sense led us into Vietnam."

TSA is officially allowed to lie to you in order to cover its ass - Boing Boing:

"The TSA is allowed to lie in its responses to Freedom of Information Requests. Its court-granted ability to lie to the public it nominally serves isn't limited to sensitive issues, either: they're allowed to pretend that they don't have CCTV footage of their own officers violating their own policies, even when they do."

TSA continues to improve experience of rich people - Boing Boing:

"More evidence that American travel is headed for a two-tier security theater that is reasonable and light for rich people and business travellers, and increasingly awful and invasive for everyone else: as Pre-Check expands, people who fly often enough to make it worth spending $85 will be able to keep shoes, jackets and belts on and avoid pornoscanners (including the new more radioactive versions). Us dirty foreigners, as well as people who save carefully for one trip every couple of years to see their families, will get the ever-expanding Grand Guignol treatment, especially since everyone with any clout or pull will be over there in Pre-Check land, getting smiles and high-fives from the TSA."

The DEA's paid perjurer - Boing Boing:

"Andrew Chambers was a paid informant for the DEA from 1986 to 2000, says Brian Sonenstein of Just Say Now, a cannabis legalization organization. "During that time he collected more than $4 million from the federal government and gave false testimony at least 16 times during that time period." AZCentral reports that Chambers was "featured in 2000 on the ABC News broadcast 20/20. He admitted giving false testimony about his criminal history, saying, 'I just lied about it. I didn’t think it was that important what I did.'” Naturally, the DEA has "reactivated" Chambers."

LOL - TFM Photo | Bringing out the best in women. TFM.: "Bringing out the best in women. "