news from 12oct2013

• UPDATE!!! guy gets depressed reading news, decides to make his own version that focuses instead on real people living real life. Weekly episodes combine festivals, traffic, school, sports, music, and uppped to youtube for mass consumption. Because Uruguay is the best country
• on the bbc this morning, the world service show In The Balance has a discussion, asking the question, might it be smart for countries to have a plan B,  economically speaking, as the US totters with internal divisions? They reference a mesoamerican poet Nezahualcoyotl
• a broader explanation that makes more sense - the forest instead of the trees - focused on the historical threads that gave rise to the current insurrectionists in the US over 'Obamacare'. The article at the link posits that the political descendents of the old south hated the idea of Social Security, Medicare, Equal Rights, Voting Rights, etc. because they could not locally control these federal programs and policies. The Affordable Care Act increases these federally managed programs, to a degree and places more control of populations into hands other than the old school authoritarians. They're so mad they will shut the government down rather than help ensure people have health insurance.
• Of course the #shutstorm continues and which no one should be surprised about, but, they like to hide their nationally altering projects, for reasons they keep to themselves...

• Running to counter some of these authoritarian policies, including the historical 'stop and frisk' policy that empowers law enforcement in the old south and most major US cities, New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio spoke for nearly an hour with Alec Baldwin in a new 'Charlie Rose' style, show called 'Up Late' debuting on msnbc tonight.
• Emptywheel gets a nice write-up in Newsweek of all things. Because it IS important to know about what they know about you, and why we can't know about them...
• major typhoon hits India
• Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons gets the Nobel Peace Award this year. Alice Munro gets the prize in literature. Higgs and Englert get the award in physics for isolating the Higgs boson, the 'gravity particle'. 
• "Finding Higgs Boson", a guitar solo that Frank Zappa titled in 1988...