Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,515 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 56 of 152).

Brewery shutdown runs head-on into bad policy – The Fayetteville Observer

Wonderful takedown of Sen. Phil Berger by the Fayetteville Observer’s Tim Miller. Now that Berger’s district faces massive layoffs, will the good Senator find any value in those unemployment benefits he so cheerfully gutted?

But where did this new Berger come from? Where was his deep concern when he was chasing the film industry out of Wilmington and the rest of the state? Where was his concern when we exported thousands of television and motion picture jobs to surrounding states, most notably Georgia, which boosted its film tax incentives just as Berger was killing ours? Just two years ago, North Carolina was Hollywood East. Now, Atlanta owns that title.

And do you suppose Berger might be a little worried about what his constituents will face when they’re laid off? He should be. All those families whose votes he counts on will bedumped into the unemployment system that he also gutted. They’ll be getting some of the smallest, shortest-duration unemployment checks in the country and won’t be eligible for long-term benefits. Berger and his colleagues slashed all of those benefits, suggesting they only inspired laziness. Sorry, folks, but it was the right thing to do for the state. So get out there and hustle for those jobs — which, unfortunately, may not even exist.

Source: Brewery shutdown runs head-on into bad policy – The Fayetteville Observer

Energy law change sours Facebook on NC

The market is speaking. Are our Republican state legislators listening?

Changing attitudes toward renewable energy in state government are apparently prompting Facebook to unfriend North Carolina.

An official with the California-based social media company told a reporter at the COP21 climate summit in a Paris suburb recently that Facebook would probably not expand further in the state because of ebbing support in state government for clean energy.

“We are only considering states with strong policies and a determination to produce renewable energy,” said Bill Weihl, head of sustainability at the company. He was quoted by Justin Catanoso in a story that appeared in slightly different forms in Triad Business Journal and The News and Observer of Raleigh.

Source: Energy law change sours Facebook on NC

Smog So Thick, Beijing Comes to a Standstill

Beijing calls a code red Tuesday for the very first time, finally admitting for once that its smog has gotten too dangerous to breathe.

BEIJING — Residents across this city awoke to an environmental state of emergency on Tuesday as poisonous air quality prompted the government to close schools, force motorists off the road and shut down factories.

The government, which for the first time declared a “red alert” over air pollution late Monday, even broadcast what sounded like bombing raid alerts in the subways — warnings telling people to take precautions with their health. Yet even with those extraordinary measures, the toxic air grew worse, shrouding this capital city of more than 20 million in a soupy, metallic haze.

Source: Smog So Thick, Beijing Comes to a Standstill

Democrats Could Pick Off Some Trump Supporters on Creators.com

Columnist Froma Harrop seems to be farther into the Clinton camp than my liking but she does have a point here about a blind spot among Democratic candidates when it comes to respect for ordinary folks. Dems can win back the disgruntled rural voters if they would only follow this advice.

Bill Clinton has that magic, no doubt. Hillary? I’m not convinced, whether or not Harrop says she should have excellent coaching.

Democrats routinely hold up polls showing that the American public favors their agenda. Yet time and again, politicians opposed to what the voters want win the elections. Here’s Trump appropriating some of their agenda while tacking on populist lunacy — and look how well he’s doing.

Here’s an explanation: People badly want respect, and liberal “leaders” tend not to be good at making ordinary folks feel respected — or even noticed. They come to the debate armed with logic, facts and historical analogies. But Republicans go for the gut. To do that, one has to understand what’s in the gut. Trump the salesman has an excellent endoscope.

Source: Democrats Could Pick Off Some Trump Supporters on Creators.com

Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense – The Washington Post

As I was saying.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, the National Rifle Association proposed putting more guns in schools. After a racist shot up a Charleston prayer group, an NRA board member argued for more guns in church. And now predictably, politicians and gun rights advocates are calling for guns in movie theaters after a loner killed two people at a theater in Louisiana.

The notion that more guns are always the solution to gun crime is taken seriously in this country. But the research shows that more guns lead to more gun homicides — not less. And that guns are rarely used in self-defense.

Now a new study from researchers at Mount St. Mary’s University sheds some light on why people don’t use guns in self-defense very often. As it turns out, knowing when and how to apply lethal force in a potentially life-or-death situation is really difficult.

Source: Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense – The Washington Post

Combat veterans shoot down NRA ‘fantasy world’ of ‘good guys with guns’

The NRA loves to parrot the thinking that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. They say this because they want to encourage gun ownership and, sadly, many conservatives think that they can be the savior in the case of a mass shooting.

A journalist asked combat veterans how this would work out and predictably they were not impressed (see story below).

It reminded me of something that was emphasized time and again in my CERT training:

In a crisis, you will always fall back to your training.

Continue reading →

The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket | Mother Jones

What’s a brewer to do? How about brewing something its customers actually want to drink?

Pity Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian-owned behemoth responsible for such beloved US beers as Budweiser, Bud Light, and Michelob Ultra. When InBev bought US beer giant Anheuser-Busch back in 2008, the company accounted for 49 percent of the US beer market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since then, its US market share has dipped to 45 percent. Since 2005, sales of its big domestic brands like Bud have dropped 5.7 percent, even as craft-beer sales have rocketed up 173.6 percent. What’s a transnational, industrial-scale maker of flavor-light, marketing-heavy brews to do?

Source: The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket | Mother Jones

Gag Order Gone, Secrets of a National Security Letter are Revealed | FRONTLINE

An interview with Nicholas Merrill who, after 11 years of court battles, can now discuss the National Security Letter that the FBI gagged him with.

There are ways to legally compel information, they’re called warrants. Instead we have a security state that’s run amok. Funny how we don’t have much safety to show for the trillions of dollars we taxpayers have poured into the national security apparatus.

For the first time in 11 years, Nicholas Merrill is allowed to fully reveal the contents of a letter that came hand-delivered to him from the FBI.

In 2004, Merrill, then the CEO of a New York-based web-hosting firm called Calyx, received a so-called national security letter. The letter asked for what Merrill described as a significant array of information from the company, but because of a gag order, he was legally barred from even speaking about it.

“It was not a warrant. It was not stamped or signed by a court or a judge,” Merrill told FRONTLINE in the 2014 film United States of Secrets. “It was this letter demanding this information from me. And it also told me that I could never tell anyone that I had gotten the letter. It said that I could tell ‘no person.’”

Source: Gag Order Gone, Secrets of a National Security Letter are Revealed | FRONTLINE

Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion | Smart News | Smithsonian

Interesting. Did Reagan know something about aliens?

At one point during the 1985 Geneva Summit, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev took a break from negotiations to take a walk. Only their private interpreters were present and for years, the details of what they talked about were kept secret from both the Russian and American public. But during a 2009 interview with Charlie Rose and Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, Gorbachev revealed that Reagan asked him point-blank if they could set aside their differences in case the world was invaded by aliens.

Source: Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion | Smart News | Smithsonian

Update: You can watch Gorbachev’s comment here, beginning at the 2:53 mark.

No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to Do – The Story of the Naval Tactical Data System, NTDS

This is an excellent (and extensive) history of the Navy’s Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS), the computerized mapping of threats. I worked with NTDS in the Navy but never knew how its development not only revolutionized naval warfare but also spurred the development of modern digital computers.

It was 1962. Some of the prospective commanding officers of the new guided missile frigates, now on the building ways, had found out that the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) was going to be built into their new ship, and it did not set well with them. Some of them came in to our project office to let us know first hand that no damned computer was going to tell them what to do. For sure, no damned computer was going to fire their nuclear tipped guided missiles. They would take their new ship to sea, but they would not turn on our damned system with its new fangled electronic brain.

We would try to explain to them that the new digital system, the first digitized weapon system in the US Navy, was designed to be an aid to their judgment in task force anti-air battle management, and would never, on its own, fire their weapons. We didn’t mention to them that if they refused to use the system, they would probably be instantly removed from their commands and maybe court martialed because the highest levels of Navy management wanted the new digital computer-driven system in the fleet as soon as possible, and for good reason.

Secretary of the Navy John B. Connally, a former World War II task force fighter director officer, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh A. Burke were solidly behind the new system, and were pushing the small NTDS project office in the Bureau of Ships to accomplish in five years what would normally take thirteen years. The reason behind their push was Top Secret, and thus not known even by many naval officers and senior civil servants in the top hierarchy of the navy. Senior navy management did not want the Soviet Union to know that task force air defense exercises of the early 1950s had revealed that the US surface fleet could not cope with expected Soviet style massed air attacks using new high speed jet airplanes and high speed standoff missiles.

Source: First-Hand:No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to DO – The Story of the Naval Tactical Data System, NTDS – Engineering and Technology History Wiki