"People die at the fair."

"Your preferred fairy tales have no place in a children's classroom..."  I knew I liked Nick Offerman.

Cognitive bias in all things.  Schneier on Security: Retelling of Stories Increases Bias: 

"The results: Each "partisan communicator" -- that is, each student who wrote about the incident involving his or her "friends" -- "contributed small distortions that, when accumulated, produced a highly biased, inaccurate representation of the original dispute," the researchers write."

World gone mad.  Portland police arrest, handcuff a nine-year-old girl: 

"A nine-year-old was cuffed, photographed, and fingerprinted. For a fight with a friend of about the same age. A nine-year-old...

An appropriate police response here might have been to talk to the parents of the offending girl. Perhaps they talk to the club. But they also should have told the angry parent that they aren’t going to arrest a kid who is just nine years old based on secondhand information about a fight that resulted in no injuries. Because she’s nine...

When it comes to the rigid adherence to procedure, there is no difference between a 17-year-old and a nine-year-old. There will be no exercise of officer discretion, good judgment, or common sense when it comes to nine-year-olds. Or, presumably, seven-year-olds. Or five-year-olds. All are juveniles. I’m not trying to be flip here. It’s just that there isn’t much else to say. We arrest nine-year-olds now. For scuffling with other kids. And then we point to policies, procedures, and rulebooks when someone quite correctly asks what the hell is going on. The utter insanity of all of this ought to be self-evident. But one more time: She was nine."

Trigger Warnings, Campus Speech, and the Right to Not Be Offended

Trigger Warnings, Campus Speech, and the Right to Not Be Offended - Reason.com: 

"Feminist and social justice blogs popularized the concept of the trigger warning, with writers encouraging each other to label posts that might trigger flashbacks to sexual assault or domestic abuse. As the popularity, and scope, of the trigger warning idea grew, some bloggers began listing potential triggers, ranging from rape and violence and suicide to snakes and needles and even "small holes.""

...

Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), worries that mandated trigger warnings would set a troubling precedent on campus. He points to an incident that occured on the UCBS campus only days after the resolution passed wherein an associate professor of feminist studies stole a sign from pro-life protesters and then pushed one of them away when she tried to take the sign back. The professor's defense? "What she argued was that the display was triggering," says Lukianoff. "It's a very unforunate part of human nature. If you give us an excuse to shut down speech with which we disagree, we're very quick to see it as an opportunity.""

Exclusive Trailer | A Million Ways To Die In The West

The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative - Charlie's Diary: 

"...it's worth pointing out that the NSA set themselves up for it by preventing the early internet specifications from including transport layer encryption. At every step in the development of the public internet the NSA systematically lobbied for weaker security, to enhance their own information-gathering capabilities. The trouble is, the success of the internet protocols created a networking monoculture that the NSA themselves came to rely on for their internal infrastructure. The same security holes that the NSA relied on to gain access to your (or Osama bin Laden's) email allowed gangsters to steal passwords and login credentials and credit card numbers. And ultimately these same baked-in security holes allowed Edward Snowden—who, let us remember, is merely one guy: a talented system administrator and programmer, but no Clark Kent—to rampage through their internal information systems."

 'Agents of SHIELD': Season finale art teases 'beginning of the end' | Inside TV | EW.com

On global warming, conservatives have a blind spot — and liberals have tunnel vision - The Week:

"The president's National Climate Assessment report claims that climate change is no longer a distant threat. It's already here and it's causing torrential downpours and hurricanes, rising sea levels, heat waves, and wildfires. Preventing future devastation, the White House says, will require "bold" (read: expensive and painful) action pronto to limit the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans are having none of it. They have dusted off their own report, prepared for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last summer, which points out that the observed warming — 0.8 degrees C since 1895 — is much milder than previously expected and can't possibly be blamed for these extreme weather events which, they claim, are no worse than before.

Why do Republicans so stubbornly resist the climate change story? It's not like when a tornado touches down, it spares them, targeting only Democrats. Conversely, why are liberals so eager to buy the climate apocalypse? It's not like they can insulate themselves from rising energy prices or job losses that a drastic energy diet would produce. The answer is that each side is driven by concerns over whether this issue advances or impedes its broader normative commitments, not narrow self-interest.

 ...there is no pure free market or property rights solution to global warming. There is no practical way to privatize the Earth's atmosphere or divvy up pollution rights among the world's seven billion inhabitants in 193 countries. This creates a planet-sized opening for the expansion of the regulatory state. Hence, right-wingers have an inherent need to resist the gloomy global warming narrative. This is a massive conservative blind spot. But it is, in many ways, matched by liberals' tunnel vision. It is no secret that liberal commitment is less to promoting individual liberty and more to curbing capitalistic greed, which the left views as the great enemy of social justice and equality. At first blush, environmentalism and egalitarianism appear in conflict given that the environment is something of a luxury good that rich folks generally care about more than the poor.

Lefties and enviros merged into the modern-day progressive movement only when the New Left was persuaded that environmental degradation and social injustice were manifestations of the same greed-ridden system. Global warming, in a sense, combines this twin critique of capitalism on the grandest possible scale, indicting the rich West for bringing the world close to catastrophe by hogging a disproportionate amount of the global commons, leaving less for the developing world. This is why, despite the demonstrated impossibility of imposing a global emission-control regime after the failure of the Kyoto treaty, liberals continue to demand that the West unilaterally cut emissions, even though this will arguably make little difference to global temperatures. It is a matter of cosmic justice, as far as they are concerned."

This... completely works, actually.