[Links]
[links] Link salad wonders what’s the fuss, tell it what’s happening
Dislike Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit? Then You Don’t Know Tolkien — (Via Caias Ward.)
The Wine Grapes of Westeros — [F]or wine you need grapes, and for grapes you need something Westeros does not have: Reliably changing seasons. Interesting piece. (Via Slacktivist Fred Clark.)
The Sun and the Earth in the same photo — From spaceweather.com. (Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1){kind=small}
threeoutside
Cadaver stem cells offer new hope of life after death — Um, wow?
Napoleon Wasn’t Defeated by the Russians — Typhus.
Cloud-Powered GPS Chip Slashes Smartphone Power Consumption — The headline is slightly misleading, but still pretty cool stuff.
Programming for all, part 1: An introduction to writing for computers
Rivet Spacer — One of those tools you never knew you never knew about. Also check out the cool blog it’s found on. (Via Daily Idioms, Annotated.)
Allergies, extra weight tied to bullying — Kids who have food allergies or are overweight may be especially likely to get bullied by their peers, two new studies suggest. Not surprisingly, researchers also found targets of bullying were more distressed and anxious and had a worse quality of life, in general, than those who weren’t picked on. Also, this just in: water is wet, sun rises in east. When I was a kid, back in the 1970s, us bullying targets were asked what we’d done to antagonize the bullies, and told to be behave better so we wouldn’t be picked on so much. Keep our mouths shut so we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves. So maybe this is an improvement, that there’s academic scholarship proving what ever fat, sniffly kid has so painfully learned since the dawn of man.
Timbuktu mausoleums ‘destroyed’ — Islamists in Mali have begun destroying remaining mausoleums in the historic city of Timbuktu, an Islamist leader and a tourism official said. Ah, yes, the healing power of religion in civil society strikes again. This is why American should be a Christian nation, so we, too, can destroy our history to protect our delusions.
Extreme Climate Predicted in Eastern U.S.: Storms, Heat Waves With Global Warming — Nothing to see here. Please attend to conservative Correct Thought and move along.
Scientists Report Faster Warming in Antarctica — West Antarctica has warmed much more than scientists had thought over the last half century. Pay no attention to the climate change behind the curtain. That’s just more liberal lies by climate scientists chasing that sweet, sweet Federal grant money for their new Ferraris.
Obama vs. the NRA — Obama always promised to take on the special interests. Now he is set to square off against the strongest interest group of all. Of course, all this only justifies the conservative Obama-is-coming-for-our-guns paranoia. Sigh. If they’d signed on for sensible gun control all along instead of the NRA’s policy goal of Maximum Firearms, they wouldn’t be in the position today of feeling so threatened.
Silencing the Science on Gun Research — The typical conservative response to adverse data is to suppress it. When you base you worldview on the authority of dogma rather than the value of evidence, it becomes more important to deny reality than to acknowledge it. They certainly learned (again) from the BEST project that conservative beliefs don’t hold up to objective examination. This, in turn, is why none of my gun-owning friends’s claims about safety and crime rates hold any water. Their own side has suppressed virtually all study.
Wayne LaPierre: If It’s Crazy To Put More Guns In Schools, Then Call Me Crazy — Ok. Since you asked. Wayne LaPierre: You’re crazy. You and your organization have proven that you are crazy, destructive fucks who don’t have the moral authority or common sense to be allowed possession of a steak knife, let alone a role in our national firearms policy.
Top two headlines in my Google News this morning: 2 firefighters shot, killed while battling New York blaze and 1 Killed, 1 Wounded in Bar Shooting — Your guns are not making me or anyone else safer. Widespread private gun ownership scares me a hell of a lot more than criminals or some mythical government conspiracy. The headlines every day prove I’m right to be more scare of private citizens carrying than I am of criminals or the government.
Gun Violence And The Irrational Fear Of Home Invasion — Nationwide, there are about 100 burglary-homicides every year. When you compare that to more than 18,000 gun suicides, the conclusions seem pretty obvious. Not to mention those 10,000 gun homicides. Oops, those pesky facts. Again, I am a lot more risk from you and your gun than you are from your mythical home invader or attacker. Your illusion of safety is my real danger.
?otD: Why do you want to know?
12/24/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo brain)
Hours slept: 10.5 hours (10.0 hours fitful, 0.5 hours napping)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (30 minutes on the stationary bike)
Weight: 211.4
Number of FEMA troops on my block confiscating firearms and shutting down the Internet: 0
Currently reading: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
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Posted: 9:00 am Mon December 24 2012 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Comments
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@jay_lake *discos with disciples*
Coming from a non-US POV, I’ve always found the American fear of “home invasions” rather irrational. Burglars are overwhelmingly non-violent criminals. They tend to run away when disturbed rather than attack. Here in Germany, burglaries that end in death are extremely rare and mostly the death is heart failure due to shock. A few years ago, we had a case where the burglar called an ambulance, when the elderly inhabitant of a house he had tried to rob suffered a heart attack.
Even the term “home invasion” is a symptom of widespread irrationality, because the rest of the world simply calls it “burglary”. I guess the NRA came up with the term, because “home invasion” sounds like something we need to defend ourselves against, whereas burglary sounds like someone trying to nick my TV.
Besides, reasonable security measures and an alarm system or at least a blinking light that suggests an alarm system are better and less dangerous burglar deterrents than guns.
Another NRA talking point on this subject that is both ignorant and offensive to me is the ludicrous idea that school teachers should be armed. Public school teachers are vilified by the far right, and even by the ‘center’ right, such as it is in this country. We are reviled as lazy, overpaid, underachieving moochers and the enemy of all that conservatives hold dear. In other words, the very kind of people they realistically should not want to arm. Suddenly however, arming teachers fits their insane narrative. And apparently teaching is such an easy job that one more responsibility can be easily piled on top of it. I have never owned a gun, much less worked as a full-time armed guard. Still, I am well aware of the fact that it is work that requires the kind of training and skills I do not have. Teaching, despite the dearly held right-wing beliefs to the contrary, is a job that requires a level of skill and education that most people do not posess. Like armed security, it is a full-time job that requires one’s full, focused attention. The casual assumption that carrying a gun while doing so is even rational, much less safe, requires a degree of delusion worthy of a Mormon plural wife welcoming her husband’s 5th teenage mistress into her haome as an equal
……and furthermore, who the hell is suppposed to pay for this little cowboy fantasy? Gun owners in this country cost all of us a lot of money, in the form of incarceration, police protection, health care costs from gun violence, court and legal costs, and so on. The list is endless. My taxes pay for it. Why should they? Why should a single penny of my money be spent on the reckless indulgence of wild west fantasies of people who are victimizing the rest of us, not the other way around? I have no exxpecation that the NRA will suddenly consider it the responsibility of patriotic 2nd ammendment activists to shoulder the full burden of protecting the very society they endanger by VOLUNTEERING to provide training, weapons and ammunition, as well as pay for all those armed school guards, as well as personal time volunteering as armed guards themselves.