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How Budget Cuts Cost Us An Ebola Vaccine I would have titled this Did Budget Cuts Cost Us An Ebola Vaccine? as it isn’t clear that we any of the 2002 vaccines would have worked nor is it clear that it isn’t just flaws in the NIH priorities. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Far-Right Texas Terrorist Planned Murder And Robbery Spree in the Name of ‘Liberty’

Robert Talbot, Jr.—who was arrested in March after the FBI had closely tracked his alleged scheme to launch a violent “American Insurgent Movement,” including alleged plans to kill police officers, rob armored cars, and blow up mosques—will appear in federal court Friday.

…

where he met the three other members of “Operation Liberty.”

Liberty.

Jim, Another peaceful lover of liberty

If Hong Kongers were allowed to vote, they would vote against the capitalism that made them wealthy …
I urge the Chinese government to drive tanks over the protestors while maintaining the utmost respect for Hong Kong’s traditions and the two systems agreement.

That’s from

Jim’s Blog
Liberty in an unfree world

Yep, another lover of liberty that is totally OK with a state using violence on peaceful protesters.

Secret Deficit Lovers

Deficit scolds actually love big budget deficits, and hate it when those deficits get smaller. Why? Because fears of a fiscal crisis — fears that they feed assiduously — are their best hope of getting what they really want: big cuts in social programs. A few years ago they almost managed to bully the nation into cutting Social Security and/or raising the Medicare eligibility age; they even had hopes of turning Medicare into an underfinanced voucher program. Now that window of opportunity is closing fast.

Dropbox Dudes Tried to Kick Children Off a Soccer Field

The argument started over a Mission District field, which Mission Local says has been popular with “mainly Spanish-speaking soccer players” for decades. The location has traditionally been used for pick-up games. But Dropbox-uniformed players that rented the field through a controversial new city process insisted it was their turn to play.

Best story about gentrification in years.

Z machine makes progress toward nuclear fusion

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, using the lab’s Z machine, a colossal electric pulse generator capable of producing currents of tens of millions of amperes, say they have detected significant numbers of neutrons—byproducts of fusion reactions—coming from the experiment. This, they say, demonstrates the viability of their approach and marks progress toward the ultimate goal of producing more energy than the fusion device takes in.

We’ve been 10 years away for 50 years now, but this time it might be true. There are three projects that all show promise of huge returns. If this works out we are looking at a 100x improvement in generating electric power.

How to Reduce Global Warming for Fun and Profit

We’re not actually so far off from turning emissions into commodities, it turns out. In the United States alone, a number of companies aim to convert waste carbon dioxide into chemicals that can be used to make products we buy every day

The only people who think regulating CO2 will end capitalism are Libertarians and Marxists. Anyone who has an understanding of economics that doesn’t begin and end in the 19th century understands that markets react to regulations in the exact same way they react to everything else. Incentives change, prices adjust, people come up with new ideas that make money.

California Will Allow Family Members to Seek Seizure of Guns

The law will allow law enforcement officials, family members and some others to seek a gun restraining order from a judge. That order would authorize officials to temporarily seize any firearm owned by someone deemed potentially violent, who would also be placed on a list of people prohibited from purchasing weapons.

I think this is a good idea but I can already hear the crazy slippery slope arguments coming.

Talking white: Black people’s disdain for proper English and academic achievement is a myth.

By contrast, “acting white” accusations were least common at the most segregated schools, a finding echoed by a 2006 study from Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who found “no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity” in predominantly black schools. Across schools, the general pattern was this: “Acting white” accusations weren’t attached to academic performance and rather were a function of specific behaviors. If you hung out with white kids and adopted white fashions, you were accused of “acting white.” Smart kids were teased, but no more than you’d see in any other group.

Worth a read.

New study shows that the savings from ‘tort reform’ are mythical

“Tort reform,” which is usually billed as the answer to “frivolous malpractice lawsuits,” has been a central plank in the Republican program for healthcare reform for decades. The notion has lived on despite copious evidence that that the so-called defensive medicine practiced by doctors merely to stave off lawsuits accounts for, at best, 2% to 3% of U.S. healthcare costs. As for “frivolous lawsuits,” they’re a problem that exists mostly in the minds of conservatives and the medical establishment. A new study led by Michael B. Rothberg of the Cleveland Clinic and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association aimed to measure how much defensive medicine there is, really, and how much it costs. The researchers’ conclusion is that defensive medicine accounts for about 2.9% of healthcare spending. In other words, out of the estimated $2.7-trillion U.S. healthcare bill, defensive medicine accounts for $78 billion.