Grasping at racial straws

Romney must be doing well. [Link]

What's important about the NPR excerpt below, which broadcast this morning, is that this is everything NPR's Cokie Roberts has to say about Romney's motives for going to Poland. This is the entirety of it. You can listen for yourself here, but when Roberts was asked why Poland, the sole motive Roberts came up with is a racial one.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your tax dollars at work:

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: So today is Poland. Why is he stopping in Poland. What does he hope to accomplish with that?

Cokie Roberts: Well, I think part of it was a desire to portray President Obama as something of a wimp, and say he's abandoned Eastern Europe. But look, you remember well the Reagan Democrats. Those ethnic white voters who had been Democrats for many years; turned out for Ronald Reagan, and have been fairly predictable Republicans since then. Now it's a smaller percentage of the population -- of the voting population -- than it used to be, but white voters are still much more Republican than any other group in the electorate. They went for McCain in 2008 by 55%. And I think that getting those ethnic voters excited is really what Romney has in mind here. It's more for the folks at home -- the descendents of the people that he will be speaking to -- in Poland.

As you can see, according to Roberts, Romney didn't go to Poland to gain some foreign policy experience or to prepare himself to be president or to help differentiate between his values and those of our current president. No, it was all some dark, divisive, cynical, racial plan to suck up to us rural white bitter-clingers.

Yep,  Romney went to Poland to blow a big racial dog-whistle.

This is pure McCarthyism on Roberts's part. Nothing more, nothing less.

I love the Internet

How much Force power can Yoda output? [Link]

I’m going to—of course—ignore the prequels.

There’s a great SMBC comic exploring the geopolitical consequences of having Superman turn a crank to provide an unlimited source of energy. We could imagine Yoda using the Force to run a similar generator. But how much power could he really supply?

Yoda’s greatest display of raw power in the original trilogy came when he lifted Luke’s X-Wing from the swamp. As far as physically moving objects around goes, this was easily the biggest expenditure of energy through the Force we saw from anyone in the trilogy.

The energy it takes to lift an object to height h is equal to the object’s mass times the force of gravity times the height it’s lifted. The X-Wing scene lets us use this to put a lower limit on Yoda's peak power output.

Gun-free zones and media ignoring defensive gun use

From after the Virginia Tech shootings. [Link]

That's how I feel about my student (one of a few I know who have gun carry permits), as well. She's a responsible adult; I trust her not to use her gun improperly, and if something bad happened, I'd want her to be armed because I trust her to respond appropriately, making the rest of us safer.

Virginia Tech doesn't have that kind of trust in its students (or its faculty, for that matter). Neither does the University of Tennessee. Both think that by making their campuses "gun-free," they'll make people safer, when in fact they're only disarming the people who follow rules, law-abiding people who are no danger at all.

This merely ensures that the murderers have a free hand. If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be harder.

In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 fromhis truck and ran to the scene. In February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.

Police can't be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it's usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they're armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

And ignoring defensive gun use. [Link]

On February 28, 2012, an angry 28-year-old gunman entered a medical office building in Colorado Springs and took three women hostage. After a three-hour standoff, the police shot him, and he died later that evening at a local hospital. The hostages were unharmed.

Yet the two largest newspapers in the state took two very different approaches in reporting the heroic actions of one of the clinic physicians, Dr. Jeff Ferguson, a legally armed civilian.

The Colorado Springs Gazette noted:

Ferguson said he has a concealed weapons permit and he grabbed his gun, which was stored nearby. He stood between the gunman and others as an estimated 20 employees and 30 patients in his offices went down the stairs. Some of the patients were in surgical gowns or partially undressed as they left the building, he said.

The local CBS affiliate KKTV reported similarly: “Doctor With Gun Saves Others From Hostage Situation”:

In the chaos, employees started shouting about another exit way, one Dr. Ferguson didn’t want the gunman to know about. He guarded the exit with his gun, allowing everyone else to escape and ready to shoot if he had to. … Dr. Ferguson got out and gave SWAT valuable information about the layout and the man inside.

The Denver Post? They did not mention an armed civilian:

Employees and clients at other offices in the medical building were able to escape with the help of SWAT officers.

Most people would regard the Denver Post version as inaccurate and misleading. But this kind of misleading reporting is not an isolated occurrence.

Gone out with a whimper

Digg sold for small change. [Link]

Which one of you rascals just bought Digg! The company, clearly in need of some new cushions for the corporate cafeteria, just sold itself for a mere $500,000. In 2008, it turned down Google's offer of two hundred million.

Of course, in 2008, Digg was one of the top sites on the entire internet. Now, not so much. As Gizmodo alumnus Mat Honan points out, this is exactly .0005 Instagrams. That's pretty much a "we're not giving you zero dollars" offer in tech land, and certainly not enough to keep Digg going as anything that resembles the Digg of today: WSJ says "None of Digg's remaining employees will join Betaworks as part of the acquisition."

Penn State officials condone child abuse; Football more important

That is the only conclusion you can draw from the report of the fallout of the Sandusky case there. Is there an accessory after the fact law for child abuse in Pennsylvania? At the very least, their football program should get the death penalty. Is this the kind of character sports is supposed to develop? [Link]

After an eight-month inquiry, Freeh's firm produced a 267-page report that concluded that Hall of Fame coach Paterno, President Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz "failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade."

Freeh called the officials' disregard for child victims "callous and shocking."

"In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at the university -- Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley -- repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse," the report said.

Paterno "was an integral part of this active decision to conceal," Freeh said at a news conference.

Asked directly if Paterno's firing last fall was justified, Freeh answered, "Yes."

School leaders "empowered Sandusky to attract potential victims to the campus and football events by allowing him to have continued, unrestricted and unsupervised access" to campus and his affiliation with the football program, the report said. The access, the report states, "provided Sandusky with the very currency that enabled him to attract his victims."

Sexual abuse might have been prevented if university officials had banned Sandusky from bringing children onto campus after a 1998 inquiry, the report said. Despite their knowledge of the police probe into Sandusky showering with a boy in a football locker room, Spanier, Paterno, Curley and Schultz took no action to limit his access to campus, the report said.

The May 1998 complaint by a woman whose son came home with wet hair after showering with Sandusky didn't result in charges at the time. The report says Schultz was worried the matter could be opening "Pandora's box."

Then, in 2001, after a member of Paterno's staff saw Sandusky in a campus shower with a boy, officials did bar him from bringing children to campus but decided not to report him to child welfare authorities.

Bryan Singer’s H+

Looks pretty cool. Not having the episodes in a set order seems a little gimmicky, but still neat. [Link]

We've been excited about Bryan Singer's new webseries H+ for a while now, based on the cool premise: Tons of people get a chip called H+ implanted, which connects their brains to the Internet. And then a virus strikes, and a third of the world population dies instantly. And Angel's Alexis Denisof stars!

H+ is debuting on Youtube on August 8, but Comic Con attendees will get a sneak peek on Friday — and there's already been a screening in L.A. Io9 reader (and independent filmmaker) John V. Knowles was there, and he sent us this report. Spoilers ahead...

Rail Madness

How rail is reducing mass transit usage in Los Angeles. [Link]

Since 2009 the MTA has added eight miles of train service, at a capital cost of about $2 billion. These new trains, the Expo Line and an extension of the east-county Gold Line, carry a total of about 39,000 people a day. 

In the meantime, the cash-strapped authority radically reduced bus service twice: It cut bus lines by 4 percent in 2010 and 12 percent in 2011. These cuts were made even though buses move more than four times as many Angelenos as trains do. In 2009 MTA buses carried about 1.2 million riders a day. Multiplying that by 16 percent, we can estimate more than 180,000 people had their service canceled while fewer than 40,000 had service introduced. 

Not surprisingly, the result is that fewer people are using mass transit overall in Los Angeles than in 2009 (about 5 percent fewer, according to MTA statistics). This is a continuation of a long-term trend. Since the MTA began rail construction in 1985, more than 80 miles of railroads have been built, but mass transit ridership as a percentage of county population is lower than it was in 1985.