minecanary reblogged
For Valentine’s Day, share the 3D-printed love! Here is a special listing of Emmett’s rotating gear heart, looking brilliant in pink & red. Order by Feb 7 to guarantee you receive by Feb 14!
minecanary reblogged
thegospelofdoubt-deactivated201
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
Carl Sagan (via thegospelofdoubt)
minecanary reblogged
Ending the drug war would involve reducing all of these incentives to murder. Treating addicts in hospitals and rehab centers, instead of sticking them in prisons, would reduce demand for drugs, lowering the price and starving gangs of income while reducing their incentive to wage turf wars. Decriminalization would relieve pressure on our prison system, allowing us to focus on keeping violent people off the streets instead of pointlessly punishing drug users for destroying their own health. And full legalization of recreational marijuana — which is already proceeding quickly among the states, but is still foolishly opposed by the Obama administration — is an obvious first step. In other words, yes, gun control is good. BUT don’t expect it to be a panacea for America’s gun violence problem. If we really want to save some of those 9,000 people, we need to end the self-destructive, failed drug policies that have turned us into a prison state and turned many of our cities into war zones.
Noah Smith (via azspot)
Source: The Atlantic
minecanary reblogged
…every other advanced country has much lower health costs than we do, and even within the US, the VHA and even Medicaid are much better at controlling costs than Medicare, and even more so relative to private insurance. The key is having a health insurance system that can say no — no, we won’t pay premium prices for drugs that are little if any better, we won’t pay for medical procedures that yield little or no benefit But even as Republicans demand “entitlement reform”, they are dead set against anything like that. Bargaining over drug prices? Horrors! The Independent Payment Advisory Board? Death panels! They refuse to contemplate using approaches that have worked around the world; the only solution they will countenance is the solution that has never worked anywhere, namely, converting Medicare into an underfunded voucher system.
Paul Krugman (via azspot)
Source: The New York Times
minecanary reblogged
minecanary reblogged
Keynesian stimulus used to be uncontroversial in Washington; every 2008 presidential candidate had a stimulus plan, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. But in early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version. The current Republican position seems to be that the fiscal cliff’s instant austerity would destroy the economy, which is odd after four years of Republican clamoring for austerity, and that the cliff’s military spending cuts in particular would kill jobs, which is even odder after four years of Republican insistence that government spending can’t create jobs.
Source: TIME
minecanary reblogged
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840 (via politicalprof)
minecanary reblogged
I…I don’t understand.
minecanary reblogged
CHART: Americans didn’t intend to elect a Republican majority to the House of Representatives. But thanks to GOP-engineered redistricting, they did.
Worth noting that most of the other states are Republican-leaning due to Gerrymandering in the aftermath of 2010 as well. Republicans controlled the majority of state legislatures in 2010 and that is why Gerrymandering favors them more than Democrats in most states.
An "insurance" structure simply is not applicable to modern health care. Insurance is designed for risk management; it is not a risk that you will one day (soon!) need health care, it's a certainty. Managing your health by buying health insurance is like managing your food budget by buying "hunger insurance" and filing a claim whenever you get really, really hungry.
What the 2012 presidential election actually looked like: the area of each state is equal to its percentage of the total U.S. population
Source: reddit.com
minecanary reblogged
Tuesday, October 23/2012: There are racist hipsters? OKCUPID IS THE WORST THING EVER. Why do I keep coming back?
The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
minecanary reblogged
Everglades Gatorland
Tracing an arterial route through the heart of Florida, US 27 begins in Miami’s Little Havana and ends in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The highway was a main drag of Florida tourism from the ‘40s to the ‘60s, but as the interstate system grew to connect the Gulf to the Atlantic and the Mouse to Miami, the distended polygon encompassing Lake Okeechobee and the northern Everglades increasingly became a locals-only landmass. Big Sugar thrived regardless, but the mom and pop tourist stands of old were not so fortunate.
On US 27, just south of the tiny town of South Bay, sit the crumbling ruins of Everglades Gatorland. J.C. Bowen—the former proprietor and ex-mayor of South Bay—started the joint as a gas station with his wife, Mary Lou. They moved into the live reptile sideline because snowbirds stopping to top off their tanks would often ask where they could catch a glimpse of a real Florida alligator. The menagerie eventually expanded beyond alligators to include deer, ocelots and a vulture, among other animals. Bowen also acquired a few rattlesnakes, despite the fact that they were not native to the swampy land of the ‘glades. In Bowen’s words: “The rattlesnake is a very nervous animal, and the muck soil vibrates for miles around if a tractor drives over a field. The vibrations are too much for him.”
With the tourist trade already on the wane, Everglades Gatorland lost a few of its alligators in 1965. The animals were shot with a .22 and carried off while the night watchman was off duty, likely by poachers eager to cash in on increasingly high prices for increasingly rare alligator leather. The American Alligator was declared an endangered species just two years later in 1967.
That same year, Florida enacted regulations mandating pen size, sanitation and animal care that put many of the state’s roadside zoos out of business. The Bowens’ establishment managed to hang on into the early ‘90s, but by then all the gators were gone. The only inhabitants left were a few peacocks and the Bowens–then in their 70s–still selling souvenirs to the rare tourist who wandered astray from the beaten paths of coastal asphalt.
Ten years later, the building sinks into a glorious ruin. The faded and peeling promise of “Live Alligators” may, in fact, still ring true if you wander far enough back on the property. Your Guide encourages you to visit, but takes no responsibility for your safety.
* * *
Erin Chapman is the co-founder/editor of The American Guide.
"When you become famous, you've got like a year or two where you act like a real asshole," Bill Murray told Tom Shales and James Miller when they interviewed him for Live from New York, their oral history of Saturday Night Live. "You can't help yourself. It happens to everybody. You've got like two years to pull it together — or it's permanent." He was talking, of course, about Chevy Chase, his opponent in a famous backstage fistfight. The two are friendly now, and it seems as though Murray wanted to imply that Chase had "pulled himself together" following his sudden rise to fame.
But by most accounts, Chevy Chase's assholedom was permanent.
The history of Chevy Chase being a jerk is long and varied, and from what I've heard Chevy is hard at work creating new legends of his own dickishness as the old stories become more widely known. I heard a recent story about Chevy unloading on a nervous intern who spilled a small amount of Coca-Cola in front of Chase and SNL creator Lorne Michaels. "Why don't you just piss in it?" he snarled.
But you don't even need to hunt down anecdotes of Chevy screaming at interns: between the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Saturday Night Live, his weirdly public ongoing spats with actors and writers on Community, and the unbelievably dickish and petty interviews he's given over the years, there's plenty of evidence that Chevy Chase is an asshole. Here's a working timeline.
Source: Gawker
minecanary reblogged
- There was a 22-percent increase in insulting comments during this debate vs. the debate last week.
- Over 7 percent of overall commentary contained some form of profanity, “astroturfing,” or spam.
- Comments slurring Obama exceeded those against Romney by 3 times.
- There was a 50-percent increase in negativity about Obama during this debate as compared to the second debate.
- There was a 200-percent increase in negativity about Romney during last night’s debate as compared to the second debate.
- The top themes provoking profanity on social media were China, oil, jobs, the military, and Iran.
Read more. [Image: Shutterstock/Albert Ziganshin]
Source: The Atlantic