Cheap Blogging Crutch 10.13

Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?
Malcolm Gladwell looks at concussions and degenerative brain conditions in regards to the NFL. In it he runs the gamut from scientific efforts to study brain injuries and the unknown effects of concussions to whether or not these injuries are an avoidable or unavoidable part of the game. It's a nice little way to damper your love of America's most popular sport...at least until you start amping yourself up for Sunday's match-up.

Gag on Guardian reporting MP's Trafigura question lifted
A story on how recently the Guardian was not permitted to cover Parliament questions as a result of a gag order in a lawsuit brought about by oil traders Trafigura over a Guardian report on an African pollution disaster. A news organization couldn't cover news because of a lawsuit. Thankfully, for the basic tenets of free speech, the gag order was dropped. Can't the UK just use our example? Oil companies do something illegal-> most news organizations ignore it-> most Americans ignore it. It works well for us, plus no messy lawsuits. Ill-informed delusion; you might want to try it.

Don’t Fail, or Reward Success
Looks like everything is back to normal. Goldman-Sachs is set to hand out $23 billion in bonuses. But don't worry, that's all OK because they're going to give out a charitable donation of $1 billion....maybe. It's a shame they can only convert to a bank holding company and not to some sort of money printing organization. Makes little difference anyway. I'm just glad they're reaping the rewards after providing sooo many useful services over the past few years.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
You know what's just as effective as medicine? Tic-tacs that someone in a lab coat swears are medicine. You know what's a better than a white anti-depressant? The same anti-depressant, only painted yellow. Wired looks at the pharmaceutical industry and just how strong the placebo effect actually is. It turns out that in a lot of cases a sugar pill is as effective or more effective. Just as long as you didn't import that sugar pill from Canada.

Nearly One in Four Persons on Globe is Muslim
1.5 billion Muslims. Not only that, but the Muslim population will swell to 1/3 by 2050. *dusts hands off* Well, that ought to keep most of the right wing pundits and media personalities fully in business until 2050. I'm not sure but I think you could get Pat Buchanan to explode into bloody pulp if you combined this information with an appropriately sized pie chart and perhaps a prognostication from a fortune teller that we'll have a latino President after the black one.

The new golden age of supression

If you heard about it yesterday, China is having some sort of uprising/conflict somewhere over something and score of people are being wounded and injured. It's between Uighurs and the Han, over specifically what no one really knows, but broadly about ethnic and religious divides. And....that's about it. That's pretty much the extent of the knowledge of what's going on. Why is that? Because it's the new age of media and information suppression. Thought Iran tried some innovative ideas on squashing information? They were just field testing ideas China had perfected and Iran couldn't have even dreamed of China's strategies for spinning the West.

In the wake of Sunday’s deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China’s central government took all the usual steps to enshrine its version of events as received wisdom: it crippled Internet service, blocked Twitter’s micro-blogs, purged search engines of unapproved references to the violence, saturated the Chinese media with the state-sanctioned story.

It also took one most unusual step: Hours after troops quelled the protests, in which 156 people were reported killed, the state invited foreign journalists on an official trip to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital and the site of the unrest, “to know better about the riots.” Indeed, it set up a media center at a downtown hotel — with a hefty discount on rooms — to keep arriving reporters abreast of events.
...
As the Internet and other media raise new challenges to China’s version of the truth, China is finding new ways not just to suppress bad news at the source, but also to spin whatever unflattering tidbits escape its control.

Two reason for this. First, they get better blocking technology from the telcoms. Hey Iran, you get what you pay for. Second, they studied various color revolutions, including Iran's, and learned how to best shut down communication, internet, phones, TV, and social networking. Well goodie, at least someone benefited and learned from those revolutions. But what's really nice is to see those ideas applied and field tested so quickly. Iran isn't even done with it's uprising and China has already learned from the Guardian Council's Oppression Bloopers and Suppression Gaffes highlight reel. China actually learned the first lesson decades ago: don't allow elections.

What's really great about this is that it isn't some extra-special Chinese suppression technology. Or sure they sprung for some extra bells and whistles, but this basic package essentially exists in every country that has moved beyond carrier pigeon and pony based communications. So pay attention, you're seeing the new playbook being written on suppressing any level of uprising or revolution. Remember to thank your telcoms for making it it jut that easy.