The Fake Khorasan Group

(The Intercept) – Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain:

As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” …

theintercept/2014/09/28…invented

Der Digitalkommissar und die Dummheit

(SPIEGEL::Netzpolitik) – Christian Stöcker:

Wer Nacktfotos ins Netz stellt, ist “blöd”, sagt Günther Oettinger. Der künftige EU-Digitalkommissar beweist damit, dass er die Affäre um gehackte Promi-Bilder nicht begriffen hat. Er dürfte mit seinem Amt überfordert sein. …

spiegel…994547

Orbital Mechanics

(Tree Lobsters!) – “Orbiting this star … is a planet entirely populated by robots.” …

treelobsters…619

Anatomy of a Non-Denial Denial

(The Intercept) – Dan Froomkin:

The non-denial denial is an art that takes many forms in official Washington.

Even though the non-denial denial isn’t in itself strictly speaking a lie, when examined in context, isn’t that exactly what it is? …

theintercept/2014/09/26/deception

Einstein’s Greatest Legacy

(Starts With A Bang!) – Ethan Siegel:

Einstein, like no other physicist before or after him, demonstrated how the power of human thought alone, used skillfully, can allow us to consider experiments that could never be practically performed. This line of thinking, these experiments performed only in our imaginations, showed we little humans often have the power to deduce equations that govern the natural world by logical deduction alone. …

starts-with-a-bang…f910db0b8f8a

Not Really Islamic

(The Intercept) – Murtaza Hussain:

While the Islamic State is superficially and opportunistically Islamic, it owes at least as much to secular revolutionary ideologies as to its claimed religion, and borrows heavily from Western systems of organization and pop culture as well. …

theintercept/2014/09/26/isis-islamic

Oldest Star

(Slate::Bad Astronomy) – Phil Plait:

Astronomers have just published a paper about the star HD 140283, which appears to be 14.3 billion years old.

Now, before you start quoting that number for the next edition of the Guinness Book of Cosmic Records, you might want to note that the Universe itself is only 13.82 billion years old. Clearly, something must be off here. …

bad_astronomy/2014/09/26/oldest

Branching Out

(Phys.org::Astronomy) – Scientists at ALMA have for the first time detected a carbon-bearing molecule with a “branched” structure in interstellar space. The molecule, iso-propyl cyanide (i-C3H7CN), was discovered in a giant gas cloud called Sagittarius B2, a region of ongoing star formation close to the center of our galaxy that is a hot-spot for molecule-hunting astronomers. …

phys…2014-09-interstellar-molecules

Deeds

(Jesus and Mo) – Jesus: “Shit! They’ve just published a scientific study which shows that religious and non-religious people ‘commit moral and immoral deeds with comparable frequency.'” …

jesusandmo.net/2014/09/25

Military Untelligence

(The Far Left Side) – Mike Stanfill:

“Mr. President, our analysts have determined that the best way to control the Muslim insurgency is to periodically bomb the bejesus out of them.” …

farleftside.com/2014/9-24-14

Sie können es nicht!

(Telepolis) – Peter Bürger:

Das Heilsversprechen der politischen Kriegsapparate und ihrer Beherrschungswissenschaften lautet: “Yes, we can!” So genannte “Denkfabriken”, deren Produktion schon an der Wurzel auf eine aberwitzige Kurzsichtigkeit programmiert ist, liefern – maßgeschneidert – die militärischen Problemanzeigen samt den dazu passenden militärischen Problemlösungen. Die Antworten erfolgen stets auf Fragen bzw. Problemstellungen, die das falsche Denken zuvor verursacht oder als relevant behauptet hat. …

tp…42/42869

Idiots Unconvinced

(The New Yorker::The Borowitz Report) – Andy Borowitz:

A climate-change march that organizers claim was the largest on record is nevertheless unlikely to change the minds of idiots, a survey of America’s idiots reveals. …

borowitz-report/idiots

Thomas Piketty’s Capital

(Guardian Books) – Paul Mason:

That capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy.

Piketty’s argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. …

Piketty’s Capital, unlike Marx’s Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself: the 15% tax on capital, the 80% tax on high incomes, enforced transparency for all bank transactions, overt use of inflation to redistribute wealth downwards. He calls some of them “utopian” and he is right. It is easier to imagine capitalism collapsing than the elite consenting to them. …

theguardian…2014/apr/28/thomas-piketty

Epidemic

(The Far Left Side) – Mike Stanfill:

“And after months of work and millions of dollars, the CDC reports this horrible epidemic is finally under control.” …

farleftside…9-19-14

Gaius Musonius Rufus

(Secular Web) – Richard Carrier:

Since this man deserves far more publicity than he has ever gotten in the modern age, I have written this short essay. He exemplifies the sort of man who should have been venerated and made the founder of a world religion, but was not, yet he was the moral superior in my opinion to Jesus – not perfect, but admirable within the context of his own day. …

infidels…musonius

Potentially Habitable Moons

(APoD) – For astrobiologists, these may be the four most tantalizing moons in our Solar System. …

apod/ap140919

Wikipedia:

Europa
Ganymede
Enceladus
Titan