Relaxed Focus: "Life goes on, man."

Psychedelic hero Alexander Shulgin nearing death - Boing Boing: "Our best wishes and deep respect to psychedelic pioneer and maverick chemist Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin who is preparing for his final trip on Earth; he is "surrounded by love and a lot of laughter," his wife and research partner Ann Shulgin"

NSA facial recognition: combining national ID cards, Internet intercepts, and commercial facial databases for millions of people - Boing Boing: "A newly released set of slides from the Snowden leaks reveals that the NSA is harvesting millions of facial images from the Web for use in facial recognition algorithms through a program called "Identity Intelligence." James Risen and Laura Poitras's NYT piece shows that the NSA is linking these facial images with other biometrics, identity data, and "behavioral" data including "travel, financial, behaviors, social network.""

Read Snowden’s comments on 9/11 that NBC didn’t broadcast — RT USA: "You know, and this is a key question that the 9/11 Commission considered. And what they found, in the post-mortem, when they looked at all of the classified intelligence from all of the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States to detect this plot,” Snowden said. “We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we have... The problem with mass surveillance is that we’re piling more hay on a haystack we already don’t understand, and this is the haystack of the human lives of every American citizen in our country,” Snowden continued. “If these programs aren’t keeping us safe, and they’re making us miss connections — vital connections — on information we already have, if we’re taking resources away from traditional methods of investigation, from law enforcement operations that we know work, if we’re missing things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of these mass surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world didn’t reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us about by name, is that really the best way to protect our country? Or are we — are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that’s actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our way of life?"

I am a mutant. I await my call from Professor Xavier. Gene Study Shows Blond Hair Color Is Just Skin Deep: "For thousands of years, people have both prized and mocked blond hair. Now, a new study shows that many can thank a tiny genetic mutation—a single letter change from an A to a G among the 3 billion letters in the book of human DNA—for their golden locks."

Science Explains Why Bacon Smells Amazing - It's thanks to 150 chemical compounds: "The smell, the site explains, is the result of 150 different chemical compounds created when bacon is cooked. Those compounds come partially from the Maillard Reaction, in which sugars react with amino acids in cooking. It's what causes food to turn brown when you cook it, notes a video from the American Chemical Society featured at Time. All kinds of different compounds are created in the process. Hydrocarbons, for instance—hydrogen and carbon atoms linked together—in some cases give off an excellent smell, NPR notes. Another key element of cooked bacon's unique smell appears to come from those compounds that contain nitrogen, which add to the "meaty aroma." Now you'll know why your mouth is watering for that cooked breakfast"

This is awesome. Also, America: Land of the ~~Free~~ Nanny-State. Europe Installs Raw Milk Vending Machines While U.S. Rules Unpasteurized Dairy Illegal | EcoWatch: "As the U.S. government continues to issue warnings regarding raw dairy products, several European countries have done just the opposite by expanding access through unpasteurized milk vending machines"

VIDEO: Teenage Girl Goes HAM on Mother For Sleeping with Her Friend | BroBible.com: "First off, this is some serious slut-shaming. That a 16-year-old girl could be so upset with her mother for expressing her sexuality by tagging some teen boy trim is absurd. Not cool, teen girl. This is 2014. #YesAllWomen. Also, I don’t think the tough love approach method will work here. Mother seems pretty content with doing drugs and banging teens."

Air Force Captain Assaulted for Not Knowing His Neighbor - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Capt. Nicolás Aquino is a model Air Force officer who plans to devote his entire life to military service. His family fled Paraguay before he was born and sought refuge in the United States because of the rights the US Constitution offered. However, those rights weren't afforded to him last December when Sheriff's Deputy Ivan Rodriguez physically assaulted Aquino on his own property. The deputy reportedly believed Aquino was a burgler even after the Air Force officer repeatedly told Rodriguez he was the property owner... In December 2013, Aquino was at home when he noticed Sheriff's Deputy Ivan Rodriguez outside his property. Apparently, one of Aquino's neighbors didn't recognize him and called the Sheriff's Department to report a suspicious person. According to Aquino, Rodriguez didn't identify himself and didn't clarify why he was at Aquino's address. After some conversation, Aquino asked if he was being detained, and the officer said yes. The police report claims that Aquino asked this in a "confrontational tone." "The officer, he appears to have been offended at the idea that a citizen would question his authority or would even ask any questions," says Aquino's lawyer, Steven Liner. "Everything that Nicolás was doing, to me is sort of like textbook 'OK, I'm going to be respectful, I'm going to answer questions, but I'm also going to insist that you answer questions for me, because I am within my rights on my property to ask these questions.'" Even after Aquino provided his military ID and offered to get his utlity bills to show proof of address, Rodriguez remained unconvinced that Aquino was not a burglar and moved to physically detain him."

Video About Steak Teaches You Everything You Want to Know About Delicious Steak | "Meat purveyor Pat LaFrieda put together this video, walking through almost every cut on the cow. It is better than the majority of pornography."

Ribeye/Cowboy/Tomahawk steak FTW. And then a nice filet mignon or a porterhouse.

Trivial Dispute: Obama Versus the Straw Interventionists - Reason.com: "You may strain your eyes trying to differentiate between Obama and the people he dismisses as "interventionists.

...what passes for foreign-policy debate within the accepted range of opinion. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Barack Obama’s address to the West Point graduates the other day. In that address, as in other speeches on foreign policy, Obama tried to position himself in what he likes to portray as the reasonable center. On the one side is "isolationism..."

On the other are those he calls "the interventionists from the left and right..." Note how Obama stakes out his "moderate" position between isolationism and interventionism. To do this he has to misrepresent what he stigmatizes as "isolationism" and create a straw man in order to place himself in opposition to the interventionists...

Isolationism—the appropriate term is noninterventionism—does not naively suppose that what goes on in the rest of the world is of no possible interest to those of us who live in the United States. Rather, it is based on the understanding that U.S. government entry into other people’s conflicts can be counted on to make things worse by magnifying the violence and setting in motion other regrettable unintended consequences.

For example, the conflict in Syria became a full-blown civil war when Obama and other Western politicians declared that President Bashar al-Assad "must go" and formally recognized certain members of the opposition as the legitimate government. This removed any incentive that Assad and the opposition had to negotiate, which would have ended the killing of innocents caught in the crossfire. U.S. assistance to alleged "moderates" in the opposition (which is dominated by al-Qaeda affiliates) prolongs the civil war and adds to the casualty toll among noncombatants...

...the interventionist paradigm must be replaced with principled nonintervention. Licensing the U.S. government to police the world—Obama calls it "leadership" and "American exceptionalism"—is a surefire path to disaster, even if it means only enlisting local proxies to do the dirty work. History demonstrates this. The government will always keep secrets about its activities abroad, and that secrecy will shroud from public view inevitable operations to benefit special interests—the military-industrial complex would abhor nonintervention—and to support brutal and corrupt regimes that are useful to the policy elite’s objectives. Government simply cannot be trusted with such power."

Libertarianism 3.0: Koch And A Smile - The Daily Beast: "“One misconception that’s out there,” Schulman told me in an interview, “is that these guys are merely out there to line their pockets. If you look at their beliefs in a consistent framework, Charles Koch has been talking about a lot of this [libertarian] stuff since the 1960s and 1970s. This didn’t just happen during the Obama era. And if you look at it that way, you have to start to see these guys as outside the political villain-robber baron caricature...

Imagine, if you will, a country in which government at every level spends less money and does fewer things (but does them more effectively), doles out fewer perks to special interests (from Wall Street banks to sports teams to homeowners), regulates fewer things across the board, engages in fewer wars and less domestic spying, and embraces things such as gay marriage, drug legalization, and immigration. If surveys showing record levels of Americans are worried that government is too powerful are accurate, libertarianism may well be on its way to becoming the new civic religion. That’s partly out of necessity (no country can spend money it doesn’t have forever) and partly out of intellectual shifts borne out of argumentation and world events...

In a recent piece for The Washington Post, Schulman reminds readers that while the Koch brothers remain staunch opponents of Obamacare and government spending, “they are at odds with the conservative mainstream” and “were no fans of the Iraq war.” As a young man, Charles was booted from the John Birch Society (which his father had helped to found) after publishing an anti-Vietnam War newspaper ad, and David told Politico of his support for gay marriage from the floor of the 2012 Republican National Convention. In the past year, the Charles Koch Institute cosponsored events with Buzzfeed about immigration reform (which angered many on the right) and with Mediaite about criminal justice reform. The libertarian or “freedom movement” is a loose and baggy monster that includes the Libertarian Party; Ron Paul fans of all ages; Reason magazine subscribers; glad-handers at Cato Institute’s free-lunch events in D.C.; Ayn Rand obsessives and Robert Heinlein buffs; the curmudgeons at Antiwar.com; most of the economics department at George Mason University and up to about one-third of all Nobel Prize winners in economics; the beautiful mad dreamers at The Free State Project; and many others. As with all movements, there’s never a single nerve center or brain that controls everything...

In 1977, Charles Koch was one of the co-founders of the Cato Institute—and, as Schulman puts it, “the organization’s wallet.” In a 1978 issue of Libertarian Review, Schulman writes, Charles “decried corporate leaders who preached ‘freedom in voluntary economic activities,’ but simultaneously called for ‘the full force of the law against voluntary sexual or other personal activities.’” He didn’t have patience for businessmen who railed against welfare for the poor while lobbying for subsidies and protectionist policies for their own bottom lines, either."