How Americans actually feel about stronger gun laws →

But how do people in the United States actually feel about the country’s gun laws as they currently stand? In short: There is a lot of disagreement about some proposals and gun ownership itself, but when it comes to a few particular areas, polls show Americans are still strongly in favor of adding new policies and restrictions.
Take three specific proposals: Adding background checks to private gun sales, banning people with mental illnesses from buying guns and creating a federal database to track gun sale. Public support for these changes range from very strong to overwhelming, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in July.

How ISIL Out-Terrorized Bin Laden →

Longer, but great read.

The Islamic State’s brutality and its insistence on apocalypse now and caliphate now set it apart from al-Qaeda, of which it was a part until 2014. We’re used to thinking of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse. Bin Laden tamped down messianic fervor and sought popular Muslim support; the return of the early Islamic empire, or caliphate, was a distant dream. In contrast, the Islamic State’s members fight and govern by their own version of Machiavelli’s dictum “It is far safer to be feared than loved.” They stir messianic fervor rather than suppress it. They want God’s kingdom now rather than later. This is not Bin Laden’s jihad.

IoT for food and water: Here’s what the future looks like →

Some really cool technologies being experimented with, aided by small and cheap sensors:

In the near future, IoT will drive tremendous innovation in the way our food is grown, processed, distributed, stored, and consumed. Plants and animals will literally have a “voice.” Not a human voice, per se, but a voice based on data that can tell people, computers, and machines when, for example, they are thirsty, need more sun, require medicine, or need individual attention.

Seventeen-year-old sentenced to 11 years in prison for pro-ISIS Twitter account →

Intentionally recruiting, or aiding recruitment, seems like "material support" to me. But this is a teenager. And an 11 year sentence...

Today, a federal court sentenced a 17-year-old Virginia resident named Ali Shukri Amin to 11 years and four months in prison for supporting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, commonly known as ISIS. Amin ran the @Amreekiwitness Twitter account, which published pro-ISIS messages to a relatively small following, as well as directing followers how to make Bitcoin donations to the group. In one effort that proved particularly crucial to the prosecution's case, Amin arranged for an ISIS supporter to travel to Syria. All of Amin's efforts were conducted from within the United States, and there's no evidence that he ever took part in violent acts or intended to do so.

The real problem with 'pink Viagra' →

Society favors "out-of-the-blue" desire. But why? Most people (especially women, to make matters much worse, in the case of this drug) don't experience sexual desire that way; that's just how we are. Flibanserin tries to "solve" the "problem" of normal human sexuality. That's not to say some women who can't experience desire, but want to, wouldn't benefit from a drug like this. But that's not how this is being marketed. Nor is this pill good science; most people (men and women) with low desire will benefit far more from therapy (and for far less money than the ongoing cost of a pill).

Like many women, the two flibanserin Guinea pigs were taught to believe that if they don't experience a "craving" sensation, there must be something wrong with them. But that's simply not true.
Research over the last 20 years has found that there is another totally legitimate way to experience desire. It is called responsive desire, because it emerges in response to pleasure, whereas spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure.
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The FDA's analysis of the data showed that only about 10% of the research participants taking flibanserin experienced "at least minimal improvement," while the remaining 90% experienced nothing at all.
This is a drug with such potentially serious side effects that the FDA is requiring special training and certification before providers can prescribe it.
And the "disorder" it treats (or, 90% of the time, fails to treat) isn't a disorder at all but a normal, healthy variation in human sexual response.
The pharmaceutical industry has millions — billions? — of dollars riding on all of us, including our doctors, ignoring 21st century science and reverting to a model of sexual desire that made really good sense in 1977. I think women deserve better.

Syrians cross Norway's Arctic border on bicyles →

The Storskog border station -- just two hours drive from the Arctic City of Murmansk in Russia's far north -- is Norway's only legal border crossing with Russia.
According to border agreements, it is illegal either to cross the border on foot or to give someone without papers a lift, a problem Syrian refugees have sidestepped by using bicycles. 
"It is not news to us that tourists cross the border on bicycles, but recently we've also started to see some asylum seekers coming by bicycle," Gøran Stenseth, one of the border officials, told the local Sør-Varanger Avis newspaper. 
So far this year, 133 asylum seekers have entered Norway though Storskog on bicycles. According to local police, most of them are Syrian refugees.

Where Black Lives Matter Began: Hurricane Katrina exposed our nation’s amazing tolerance for black pain. →

When we look at the first 15 years of the 21st century, the most defining moment in black America’s relationship to its country isn’t Election Day 2008; it’s Hurricane Katrina. The events of the storm and its aftermath sparked a profound shift among black Americans toward racial pessimism that persists to today, even with Barack Obama in the White House. Black collective memory of Hurricane Katrina, as much as anything else, informs the present movement against police violence, “Black Lives Matter.”
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Support for the racialized view of Katrina can be seen in the way news outlets and commentators talked about the victims. One study, published a year after the storm, found a connection between mentions of race in news stories and references to survivors as “refugees,” a description opposed by many black commentators at the time. Analyzing stories from the period, researchers found exaggerated claims of violence amongKatrina victims, as well as grossly inaccurate reports of crime and disorder...
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In addition to disbelief that Katrina was a racial story, research and polling also showed a white public that held survivors in contempt. In a 2006 study that examinedwhite and black attitudes toward Katrina victims, political scientists Leonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman found that 65 percent of white respondents blamed residents and the mayor for being trapped in New Orleans. In a CNN/USA Today survey, half of all whites said that people who broke into stores and took things were “mostlycriminals,” compared to 77 percent of blacks who said they were “mostly desperate people” trying to find a way to survive. (Pew had similar findings.) If you turned to right-wing media, you’d find unvarnished disdain for those left behind in the city.
The idea that black Americans had a legitimate grievance was dismissed. The result was a collapse in black racial optimism. The year before Katrina, according to Gallup,68 percent of blacks said race relations were either “somewhat good” or “very good.” The year after Katrina, that declined to 62 percent. The next year, it declined to 55 percent, the lowest point of the decade. In broader surveys from the Pew Research Center, the period after Katrina is an inflection point, where the percentage of blacks who say they are worse off finally overtakes the percentage who say their lives have improved. Black optimism stayed on a downward trajectory for the three years after Katrina. In another Gallup trend-line, black satisfaction with society dips from a steady 41 percent in 2005, to 37 percent in 2006, to 30 percent in 2007.

H&R Block snuck language into a Senate bill to make taxes more confusing for poor people →

H&R Block's entire business model is premised on taxes being confusing and hard to file. So, naturally, the tax preparation company has become — along with Intuit, the company behind TurboTax — one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. For example, the Obama administration has pushed forautomatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from H&R Block and Intuit.
But H&R Block's latest lobbying effort is even more loathsome than its opposition to automatic filing. At the company's instigation, the Senate Appropriations Committee haspassed a funding bill covering the IRS whose accompanying report instructs the agency to at least quadruple the length of the form that taxpayers fill out to get the Earned Income Tax Credit.