The SURE HOUSE started with a simple question: how can we design a home which both reduces its energy use and adapts to the realities of a changing, more extreme climate. Our answer emerged as a new direction in storm resilient coastal housing. We merged the inherently efficient indoor/outdoor rooms and open floor plan of the quintessential 60’s style modern beach cottage with state of the art building science, the latest renewable energy technologies, and fiber-composite materials repurposed from the boat building industry.
The House | SURE HOUSE
Harvard’s prestigious debate team loses to New York prison inmates
The showdown took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this year’s national debate champions over for a friendly competition.
A three-judge panel concluded that the Bard team had raised strong arguments that the Harvard team had failed to consider and declared the team of inmates victorious.
via Harvard’s prestigious debate team loses to New York prison inmates | Education | The Guardian.
More proof the US defense industry has nothing to do with defending America
Yes, the USAF admitted, the A-10 survived the war as well as its fast competitors; and yes, they had to admit that the A-10 flew more sorties per day because it took way less maintenance; and yeah, it was true that you could buy nine—that’s nine—A-10s for the price of one F-117. But the F-117 was new and fast and “stealth” and all black like the Batmobile—every childish high-tech BS mess the USAF has always loved, whereas the A-10 was slow and ugly and—worst of all—cheap.
via Pando: The War Nerd: More proof the US defense industry has nothing to do with defending America.
The USAF is about money, not defense, and there was huge money in the F-117 program. Especially because the aircraft didn’t work very well. One of the creepy, weird features of the US defense procurement business is that programs that don’t work make much more money for the big contractors than the ones that do what they promised. There’s money in those fixes, and re-fixes, and fixing the last fix. Trillions, in fact.
Posted in Fleecing_the_rubes
Tagged air force, welfare
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FBI Director Has a Hard Time Calling a White Supremacist a Terrorist
James Comey, the Director of the FBI, says he is unsure if the white supremacist attack on the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, which left nine African-Americans dead, is an act of terrorism. His reluctance to identify white people as terrorists reflects a larger issue of white America’s comfort level with addressing white violence.
via FBI Director Has a Hard Time Calling a White Supremacist a Terrorist – Atlanta Blackstar.
Posted in Current Events
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The Politics of Star Trek
Modeled on Gulliver’s Travels, the series was meant as an opportunity for social commentary, and it succeeded ingeniously, with episodes scripted by some of the era’s finest science fiction writers. Yet the development of Star Trek’s moral and political tone over 50 years also traces the strange decline of American liberalism since the Kennedy era.
via The Politics of Star Trek.
But by the end of Next Generation, the liberalism that once preached technological progress and human reason has reversed its priorities and now regards “progress” as incipient colonization and a threat to diversity and the environment.
Posted in Politics
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