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Nazis in America? This teacher analyzes his experiment years before, showing the fallibility of the human being and the analogs that can be drawn to Fascist Nazi Germany.
posted by Lockeownzj00 at 11:59 PM PST - 34 comments

THWACK!  (NASA TV Live feed) This is just a heads up, only about 80 minutes until Deep Impact (NASA mission page) slams into comet Tempel 1. Recent discussion here.
posted by planetkyoto at 9:28 PM PST - 122 comments

No Hubba Hubba and with this in the campaign too ... Is the New Zealand government trying to be "too down" with the "kids" bro? Or do they have it just right ? Morningside 4 Life!
posted by doogyrev at 6:56 PM PST - 15 comments

Workers in the U.S. South Too Uneducated to Build Cars? Automobile manufacturer Toyota announced that it would build a new car factory in Woodstock, Ontario, even though several US states offered greater subsidies and tax breaks to the company. The reason?

[M]uch of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project... Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use 'pictorials' to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.

(Also a contributing factor -- Canada's national health service, which apparently drives down the overall cost of each individual worker.)

To be fair to the US South, the problem may be more apparent there because of the region's zealousness in competing for automobile factories. But the point remains -- Toyota is saying US workers are so poorly educated that it's not worth the effort to train them. Whom to blame? And how many more factory (and other) jobs will have to be lost to better-educated workforces in other countries before this pings on the national radar?
posted by jscalzi at 6:22 PM PST - 87 comments

Driving down the street in my Panzer tank,
sittin’ drinkin’ Cris’ with my bitch Anne Frank.
And when I step into the club’s you know I’m steppin with style!
Raise my left hand, party people say “Heil!”
posted by jcterminal at 6:05 PM PST - 24 comments

Does this site make you yawn? Well?
posted by caddis at 5:08 PM PST - 49 comments

How to Recognize a Narcissist. We all have to deal with difficult people. Some days we can be pretty difficult ourselves. Recognizing the difference between normal difficulties and personality disorders can be crucial to decisions about entering new relationships and continuing existing relationships. People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) invariably leave a wake of damage behind them in social arenas of all kinds.
posted by nickyskye at 2:44 PM PST - 92 comments

The Anti-Hit List, by John Sakamoto, continues to unearth music from the depths of the net and through rare releases. It can be found in the pages of the Toronto Star and is now available in convenient podcast form. Note: previous death and rebirth of the site.
posted by boost ventilator at 1:37 PM PST - 8 comments

Put your mettle to the pedal: A website with maps of bike routes around the country, along with GPS points. via Linkfilter.
posted by atchafalaya at 1:09 PM PST - 14 comments

Wild Pigeon: A Uyghur Fable. The Chinese Muslim writer Nurmuhemmet Yasin has been sentenced to ten years in prison (contains story spoilers) for writing this short story about pigeons, which was considered subversive by Chinese authorities.
posted by bobo123 at 12:37 PM PST - 13 comments

Don't teach braille in my town again, McFadden - Martin Amis was an early fan of Jeff Lint's "The Caterer", a Pearl Comic of the mid-seventies. Steve Aylett talks about his biography of the man here, and Justin Taylor says how much he enjoyed it.
posted by TimothyMason at 10:42 AM PST - 7 comments

Jorn Barger found homeless in San Francisco after losing the domain registration to robot wisdom. Happy end to story is he's off the street and has his site back (with plenty of up-to-date links). Jorn, for those who need reminding, is credited with coining the term "weblog", but for a larger sense of his role on Usenet and the Web over the years, browse the 19,000 newsgroup posts that reference him over the years. Jorn was reported missing here in late '03 , provoking Wired to track him down at that time.
posted by Creosote at 6:15 AM PST - 86 comments

Carbon Planet - aims to reduce Climate Change by empowering individuals to erase their CO2 footprint by purchasing carbon credits. The site enables users to subscribe based on the greenhouse gas usage in their country, with the subscription buying carbon credits in a forestry scheme in Australia. Would you consider subscribing?
posted by gusset at 2:23 AM PST - 26 comments

The Zeitgeist has left its mark on us, and whoever wants to decipher it is faced with the task of working on the psychosomatics of Cynicism. This is what an integrating philosophy demands of itself. It is called integrating because it does not let itself be seduced by the attraction of the ‘great problems’, but instead initially finds its themes in the trivial, in everyday life, in the so-called unimportant, in those things that otherwise are not worth speaking about, in petty details. Whoever wants to can, in such a perspective, already recognise the kynical impulse for which the ‘low-brow themes’ are not too low.
In Search of Lost Cheekiness, An Introduction to Peter Sloterdijk’s 'Critique of Cynical Reason'
Peter Sloterdijk; A Psychonaut In Outer Space
--both from my man's sloterdijk.net, can you dig it, daddy-o ?
Spheres III - Foams
Get down on the recent tip in Damned to Expertocracy
posted by y2karl at 12:01 AM PST - 12 comments