After the Black Hawks Arrived: In Somalia, a History of US Meddling Continues

An interesting look at Somalia’s recent past and current outlook.

I was a shivering in bed on my first night in Mogadishu. At 3:30 am, I killed the air conditioner. Moments later, the room felt stuffier than a London subway. I got up and paced around, wondering if it was safe to keep the balcony door open.

A few months back, al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda faction, had stormed Jazeera Palace Hotel, where I was currently staying, and sprayed a group of Chinese diplomats with lead. Now the building was secured by a street blockade, a double-gated check-in, blastproof walls, two dozen armed men and Abdullah, the small, wiry gentleman with an AK-47 outside my door.

I took a peek into the corridor and caught Abdullah dozing off. He was balancing on a tiny wooden stool, with the rifle propped between his legs.

Source: After the Black Hawks Arrived: In Somalia, a History of US Meddling Continues

Enhancing Cognitive Function with Pregnenolone – Life Extension

I’m participating in a VA research study on pregnenolone and its helpfulness in treating Gulf War Illness.

As a result of normal aging, key hormone levels decline, resulting in a detrimental impact on memory and cognitive function. Scientists believe that the hormone pregnenolone has vast potential for maintaining healthy cognitive function and may be “the most potent memory enhancer yet reported.”

Pregnenolone is the first hormone in the pathway that generates a host of key neurohormones in the brain that are known to affect nerve cell growth and to modulate various moods. Pregnenolone therefore has a dominant effect in a wide range of nervous system functions. This is borne out in research that has demonstrated pregnenolone’s ability to reduce the risk of dementia and improve memory, while also alleviating anxiety and fighting depression. Increasing cognitive function is a key goal for any aging baby boomer.

As natural levels of pregnenolone fall, ensuring optimal levels may represent a crucial cornerstone to every adult’s cognitive wellness program.

Source: Enhancing Cognitive Function with Pregnenolone – Life Extension

The Exit Interview: I Spent 12 Years in the Blue Man Group | Atlas Obscura

This is an excellent peek into the life of a Blue Man.

Blue Man Group is a theatrical performance that defies easy categorization—part drumming, part acting, part Tobias Fünke—known for an audition process that competes with Manhattan preschools for difficulty of acceptance. But what’s it like to be behind all that blue paint? We spoke to a recently-retired Blue Man named Isaac Eddy. For over 12 years, Eddy lived and performed behind the thick blue veneer and anonymous black garb of the Blue Men. From Las Vegas to New York to London, Eddy portrayed one of the wordless azure elementals first developed by performance artists Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton in 1991.

Source: The Exit Interview: I Spent 12 Years in the Blue Man Group | Atlas Obscura

Dumb-ass stuff we need to stop saying to Dads. | Rosie Writes

Recently I got chatting with a nice lady in the queue at the supermarket.

(Because when the highlight of your Friday evening is browsing a frozen food aisle, you’ll talk to everyone.)

As I loaded a giant bag of nappies onto the checkout conveyor, Nice Lady smiled at me.

“Kids?” she asked with a grin.

“Yeah, a little boy.” I replied.

“So, who’s got him now?” she asked.

“Um, he’s at home with his Dad.”

Her grin widened.

“Ohhhh,” she said, giving me the look.

Source: Dumb-ass stuff we need to stop saying to Dads. | Rosie Writes

Multitasking Is Killing Your Brain | Inc.com

Sort of like dumping a lot of articles on one’s blog, eh? 🙂

Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time, and bombarding them with information only slows them down.

MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller notes that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.”This constant task-switching encourages bad brain habits. When we complete a tiny task (sending an email, answering a text message, posting a tweet), we are hit with a dollop of dopamine, our reward hormone. Our brains love that dopamine, and so we’re encouraged to keep switching between small mini-tasks that give us instant gratification.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop that makes us feel like we’re accomplishing a ton, when we’re really not doing much at all (or at least nothing requiring much critical thinking). In fact, some even refer to email/Twitter/Facebook-checking as a neural addiction.

Source: Multitasking Is Killing Your Brain | Inc.com

The millennial work ethic – Baltimore Sun

Some of my older friend scoffed at this column, but any mocking comes at one’s own peril, because this is how it will soon be.

The bar has been raised. If you as an employer want to attract the best and the brightest of the millennial generation, you will have to treat your employees a bit better than you once did.

Once upon a time, employment was for life. Joining a company meant you were looked after until retirement and even beyond. Then companies found that having massive layoffs and gutting these generous employee benefits appealed to Wall Street. Generations of workers became expendable to employers and learned wisely. The game had changed and job security was redefined as “how quickly one can get another job.”

Now the pendulum swings in favor of the worker, particularly the knowledege workers building our digital economy. This generation is building our new economy and the opportunities ahead of them and the awe-inspiring imagination they bring are like no other. This generation is responsible for the dizzying, accelerating pace of change in our world. They will hold you to your promises. They won’t play by the old rules. They demand a better way and they have the hustle and moxie to get it.

Laugh now if you choose, but soon you’ll be living in their world. Employers who understand this will help build this world.

Dear Previous Employer,

You may think that you have gotten the best of me, but you have not. I am a millennial. You may think that you have put me in a bad spot, but you have not. I am a millennial. You may think that you can threaten me, but I am not afraid. I am a millennial.

I didn’t write this letter on a program that I installed with a disc on my computer, I wrote it on the cloud. I didn’t grow up hungry during the Great Depression, I grew up safe and comfortable. I didn’t walk to school uphill both ways, I took a bus.

Source: The millennial work ethic – Baltimore Sun

Hillary Clinton is going to really regret saying these 4 words about Goldman Sachs – The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton spent an hour talking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper and a handful of New Hampshire voters in a town hall on Wednesday night. For 59 minutes of it, she was excellent — empathetic, engaged and decidedly human. But, then there was that other minute — really just four words — that Clinton is likely to be haunted by for some time to come.

“That’s what they offered,” Clinton said in response to Cooper’s question about her decision to accept $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in the period between serving as secretary of state and her decision to formally enter the 2016 presidential race.

The line is, well, bad. More on that soon. But, the line when combined with her body language when she said it makes it politically awful for her.

Source: Hillary Clinton is going to really regret saying these 4 words about Goldman Sachs – The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton’s Wildly Unrealistic Puppies and Rainbows Plan – MattBruenig | Politics

Hillary Clinton’s supporters like to say that Bernie Sanders stands little chance of getting his initiatives through a Republican Congress. They overlook the fact that Clinton’s odds are just as dismal.

The funniest thing about pro-Hillary punditry is the claim that her proposals are achievable while Bernie Sanders’ proposals are not. This has been all over the punditry of late, especially in the oldsplaining get-off-my-lawn punditry aimed at the rude teens who support Sanders. For an example of it, look no further than the New York Times official endorsement:

In the end, though, Mr. Sanders does not have the breadth of experience or policy ideas that Mrs. Clinton offers. His boldest proposals — to break up the banks and to start all over on health care reform with a Medicare-for-all system — have earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young people. But his plans for achieving them aren’t realistic, while Mrs. Clinton has very good, and achievable, proposals in both areas.

This is frankly insane. Hillary Clinton’s legislative agenda has a 0% chance of passing through the GOP-controlled Congress. None. Nothing. Zilch. This is true, not only because the GOP fundamentally disagrees with her proposals, but also, crucially, because the GOP pursues obstruction for its own sake. It has been very explicit about this. The GOP has (probably correctly) determined that helping a Democratic president pass things of note benefits the Democrats and hurts the Republicans.

Source: Hillary Clinton’s Wildly Unrealistic Puppies and Rainbows Plan – MattBruenig | Politics

Ubuntu upgrade kills network

I recently applied some software updates to my Ubuntu 14.04 desktop. I noticed right after I did that that the NetworkManager applet disappeared, leaving my laptop unable to automatically connect to the network.

When I tried running nm-applet manually, I got this message:

(nm-applet:6238): nm-applet-WARNING **: Failed to register as an agent: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files

(nm-applet:6238): nm-applet-WARNING **: Failed to register as an agent: (2) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files
^Cnm-applet-Message: PID 0 (we are 6238) sent signal 2, shutting down…

I know how to run

dhclient eth0

… and plug in an Ethernet cable to get back onto the network, so I did and then did some sleuthing. It turns out that I had the trusty/proposed repository enabled, and that a network-manager package in that repository has a bug. This resulted in the following error message when one tries to run NetworkManager manually:

root@savannah:/etc/init.d# NetworkManager

(NetworkManager:6288): GLib-WARNING **: GError set over the top of a previous GError or uninitialized memory.
This indicates a bug in someone’s code. You must ensure an error is NULL before it’s set.
The overwriting error message was: Key file does not have group ‘connectivity’

According to this bug report, the initial fix was to downgrade network-manager (according to this page). However, a fixed version of network-manager has since been placed in trusty/proposed. If you do

apt-get upgrade network-manager

… your Ubuntu system should fetch a working network-manager.

This is all just in case my fellow Linux geeks run into this same issue.

Calling all Time Warner customers to unite against its dreadful customer service | News & Observer

Time-Warner-Cable
Former Raleigh City Councilor Barlow Herget wrote to the N&O about his abysmal recent experience at the Time Warner Cable office.

Mr. Herget asks if the City Council could change the law to go back to local control of cable TV franchises. Local control went out the window in 2005 when a group of “business-friendly” Democrats in the state legislature successfully passed the “state franchise for cable television” bill into law for their friends at Time Warner Cable. This stripped control of cable franchises from city and county governments and placed it in the hands of the state. It’s easier to pay off state leaderss rather than local leaders, it seems.

I predicted this would happen back in 2006 and time has proven me correct. I just wish I could’ve convinced more state legislators at the time.

I recently had the dreadful occasion to visit Time Warner’s office in Raleigh. We needed a “box” for a new television. It was a hot 95 degrees outside, and inside the Atlantic Avenue office, there were 35 to 40 people waiting, including one crying baby.

The room was the size of a typical school class. We took a number and asked how long we should expect to wait. Thirty minutes. We luckily found two chairs together and sat down.My fellow subscribers were lined along the walls, a few standing, more coming in. Mostly patient, the steam was starting to rise in some of these customers. There was an inane game show on a big screen TV that a few were watching.

One lady came in carrying a big box, saw the crowd and asked how long she had to wait. Told 30 minutes, she declared she was on her lunch break and, after waiting 10 minutes, departed, muttering, “Some people have to work for a living,”

Source: Calling all Time Warner customers to unite against its dreadful customer service | News & Observer