Politics

Great quote from How Democracies Die. By Levitsky & Ziblatt — “Collective abdication - the transfer of power to a leader who threatens Democracy — usually flows from one of two sources. The first is the misguided belief that an authoritarian can be controlled or tamed. The second is what sociologist Ivan Ermakoff calls “ideological collusion,” in which the authoritarian’s agenda overlaps sufficiently with that of mainstream politicians that abdication is desirable or at least preferable to the alternatives.” ...

Instead of reporting on a global protest against gun violence, Fox News Covers the coming “social security crisis” of “entitlements”.

Trump hires Bolton, prepares for war, apparently.

In unwise phone call, Trump fails to condemn Putin and congratulated instead.

Watching the Mike Huckabee speech today was astonishing. Here we have a former Baptist preacher calling on every tired trigger word he was trained to use at Fox News in order to garner as much right-wing extremist support as possible. Mike Huckabee announces bid for 2016 GOP Presidential Nomination

Wow, this is kind of a big deal. A great many news outlets may have said this before, and quite a few commentators, but this is the editorial board of the New York Times. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions. Vice President Dick Cheney speaks at the christening ceremony of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford ...

Protester plays on the roof of a burned up"Berkut" bus. The barricade across Hrushevskoho str. Kiev, 10.02.2014. ...

So I am living here in Vienna along the banks of the Danube, or the Donau, whatever you like to call it. Danube, New Danube, Old Danube Deutsch: Donau, Neue Donau, Alte Donau (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Topography of Europe, with Danube marked red (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Vienna is a great city, according to the recent results of the Mercer Quality of Living survey. But the Danube river is an under appreciated part of that quality of life. It has been greatly improved where it flows through Vienna. Vienna has the Danube Canal that curves through the city center and meets up with the river proper in the south east of the city. Additionally, the Austro-Hungarian government in the 19th century had the forethought to gouge a protective floodplain which would be further developed in the 80s to become the new Danube, leaving a 21 km long thread of an island, the Donauinsel, to split the old path off from the new flood stage path of the Danube. This narrow but very long island is essentially one single park which runs down the length of the city. It’s fantastic. Perfect for bike rides, swimming, concerts, running with your staghound, or anything else that requires open green space. But wait! There’s more! One section of the river is completely closed off and forms the old Danube, a man-made oxbow lake, which is also a public space but this one has private tennis courts, water slides, playgrounds, canoes, paddle boats, parks and some cute little garden houses all along it’s shores. This is where it seems most of Vienna goes when the weather gets hot. It is a big enough lake that I sometimes think it could support the entire population of the city if it chose to sunbath all at once. These are the two largest outdoor attractions within the Vienna city limits for water lovers. ...

Did a lot of walking yesterday. Perhaps I am spending too much time walking but it is the best way to pass the time while listening to an audiobook. I just finished listening to Norman Mailer’s “The Castle in the Forest”. “Der Waldschloss” was a term used in this fictional account, at the very least, by some of the jewish prisoners at some concentration camp during World War II. It was meant to be ironic. To say their home in the woods was not a prison but a castle was an attempt at preserving a bit of humor after having had all other luxuries taken from them. ...

ESO publication statistics compared to other observatories (Photo credit: European Southern Observatory) So I woke up this morning to find this article sitting in my queue purporting to have raw data indicating that as the population of a county increased so did the percentage of votes in the primary GOP election that were directed to Mitt Romney. The authors of the article are basically pointing out that this anomalous behavior favoring a single candidate is characteristic of a form of voter fraud called vote-flipping. Please send feedback if you have some insight into this kind of statistical analysis or voter fraud. ...