When I brought a copy of the glossy home construction magazine Fine Homebuilding , to the office in the 1990s, one of my more design-conscious colleagues turned up her nose at what she saw. She was disappointed that the projects were not the high-style designs seen in Architectural Record, Casabella, Domus, or Progressive Architecture. In many issues the designs tend towards the vernacular, and the beauty is more in the detailing, with pictures, diagrams and descriptions of how someone installed a basement window, or a roof deck, or a balustrade. I stopped subscribing because I was moving too often, but I still keep an eye out for the yearly House issue.

I'm going to plug their Houses 2012 Awards issue, which costs about nine dollars, and probably isn't viewable online. This issue includes an article called A Case for Resilient Design, a partially straw bale house, an airtight remodel, a small (800 SF) house, a rather grand zero energy house, several other houses, a good article on The Trouble with Building Science, and another called A Practical Approach to Passive House. Most of the houses featured were designed by architects, and some might even be zotzy enough to satisfy my former coworker. I think anyone with any thought of building or redesigning an energy efficient house would profit from this issue.
 

By: Hrafnkell HaraldssonMay 24, 2012

Here's just 'a bite of the satanic satire apple'....click on link for core and all.

It’s a real idiot’s parade when you get right down to it: Rick Santorum saying that Satan is “systematically” destroying America; Pat Robertson saying Satan is behind homosexuality and women’s reproductive rights; and that King of Idiots Bryan Fischer spewing last year that when the personhood amendment was defeated in Mississippi by unexpectedly sane voters it was a victory for Satan; Right Wing Watch recently reported that “conservative columnist and frequent Fox News guest Jesse Lee Peterson” said Obama is not a Christian and is being aided by Satan and that Satan wants to crush religion in a real bad-ass destructive sorta way.

Satan complex much?

And of course for dominionists, probably the most idiotic of idiots, government, the economy and the media are all occupied by Satan. This Satan thing gives a whole new meaning to the word occupy, which suggests a possible slogan for fundamentalists: Occupy Satan. I mean, if he’s gonna occupy people and animals, occupy his ass right back, right? That should be an especially attractive prospect for Catholic priests. Speaking of occupying things, turns out the reason the occupy movement exists at all is because it is Satan in control of Wall Street, not fundamentalist Christians.

I’m no shrink but I really think it’s a sort of Satan-envy they’re dealing with here. Maybe they just want to have big bone boners like Satan so they can really lord it over all those uppity women.

Matthew O'Brien, business editor for the Atlantic​, reports that a majority of unemployed Americans have attended college.  O'Brien reports that this has never before been the case among those falling within the definition of unemployed.  The good news, according to O'Brien, is that the statistic does not suggest that a college degree is no longer a prudent long-term investment.  The bad news he suggests, however, is that although more and more Americans are attending college, the spiraling cost of a college education is preventing more and more of those attending college from completing their degree:

But there's something of a chicken-and-egg problem here. More students would finish school if they could afford it. That's certainly not the only reason our college dropout rate is so high, but it's certainly one of the reasons. 

 

In other words, the high cost of college is disguising the payoff of college. There still aren't many better long-term investments than a college degree. Graduates have lower unemployment. They earn more. And the gap between what college and high school graduates make is only growing. But you know what they say about the long-run. It can be awfully hard to get there when the short-run costs are so high. That's why reining in college tuition is so critical. It will both help young graduates struggling with the terrible economy, but also help more people become young graduates. 

The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994.

.......

“We should never have a woman come into the office saying, ‘I need to learn more about Plan B for when my daughter gets raped,’ ” said Charon Asetoyer, a women’s health advocate on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, referring to the morning-after pill. “That’s what’s so frightening — that it’s more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women.”

The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.

By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2012

MOSCOW — Stiff new penalties aimed at opposition protesters were given preliminary approval Tuesday by Russian lawmakers loyal to President Vladimir Putin, the target of mass rallies and demonstrations before his March election victory.

The bill, which opposition parliament members termed draconian and protested by threatening to file out of a legislative session, calls for fines of up to $50,000 and up to 200 hours of community service for organizers of rallies and demonstrations that grow violent or exceed the approved number of participants.

The sanctions were approved on first reading by parliament's lower house, which is controlled by Putin's United Russia party. They mark a return by the Kremlin to a tough stance against critics after concessions during the recent election campaign [...]

Also see:

Russians back Putin, strong leadership
Washington Post, May 22, 2012

A Pew survey of 1,000 Russians found that President Vladimir Putin is well-liked by more than 70 percent of citizens, especially older adults.

By Tamasin Ford in Monrovia, Guardian.co.uk, May 22, 2012

Husbands, not strangers or men with guns, are now the biggest threat to women in post-conflict west Africa, according to a report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) released on Tuesday.

The IRC report, Let Me Not Die Before My Time: Domestic Violence in West Africa, based on data collected over 10 years by the IRC in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, said domestic violence is the "most urgent, pervasive and significant protection issue for women in west Africa" [.....]

Nasa's administrator Charles Bolden said: "Today marks the beginning of a new era in exploration... The significance of this day cannot be overstated; a private company has launched a spacecraft to the International Space Station that will attempt to dock there for the first time.

…

The carriage of freight will be the first service to be bought in from external suppliers; the transport of astronauts to and from the station will be the second, later this decade.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko resigned on Monday, ending what had been months of fighting both over and within the panel charged with regulating the US nuclear industry. ...
Jaczko's main opponent on the panel was William Magwood, an Obama appointee and nuclear industry insider who had waged a campaign to push the chairman out. Magwood had previously worked for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, a major provider of nuclear fuel, technology, plant design, and equipment, and had a record of championing expansion of the industry. He and the three other more industry-sympathetic commissioners accused Jaczko of mismanaging the commission. They expressed "grave concerns" about his leadership in a letter to the White House, and said he "intimidated and bullied" NRC staff.

[I predict more public billions spent building and decommissioning nuclear plants.]

Perceptive Dagblog readers know the difference between Obama, Romney and Bush:

Obama NYT today: .how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House....The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it. “Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”...Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy...

Mitt Romney, Feb. 2012 : LAS VEGAS -- LAS VEGAS -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday night blasted President Obama and his administration for “putting in jeopardy” the nation’s military mission by signaling it hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of 2013.

Appearing at a campaign rally here shortly after landing in Nevada, Romney said Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s statement Wednesday that U.S. forces would transition from a combat mission in Afghanistan next year “makes absolutely no sense.”....

George W. Bush, from May, 2003:  BBC - "We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide... Free nations will press on to victory,"

Bush Afghanistan strategy :  Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation.  The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”

Aristotle and Plato didn’t agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, “It is owing to their wonder that men . . . first began to philosophise.” This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. “I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky,” wrote Carl Sagan in 1985, locating in this response the stirrings of a Copernican desire to know who and where we are.

Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance? We had better get to grips with this question before we too hastily appropriate wonder to sell science.  That is surely what is going on when pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are (unconsciously?) cropped and coloured to recall the sublime iconography of Romantic landscape painting, or the Human Genome Project is wrapped in biblical rhetoric, or the Large Had­ron Collider’s proton-smashing is depicted as “replaying the moment of creation”. The point is not that such things are deceitful or improper, but that if we want to take that path, we should first consider the complex evolution of the relation between science and wonder.

[....]

Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”. It is easy to understand the historical origins of this attitude: the need to distinguish science from credulous “enthusiasm”, to develop an authoritative voice, to strip away the pretensions of the mystical Re­nais­sance magus who acquired knowledge through personal revelation. We no longer need these defences, however; worse, they become a defensive reflex that exposes scientists to the ­caricature of the emotionally constipated boffin, hiding within thickets of jargon.

By Ryan Devereaux in New York, guardian.co.uk, 17 May 2012

Woman says she was defending herself, but a jury – and the prosecutor now on George Zimmerman's case – disagreed

[.....] Florida lawmakers – including congresswoman Corrine Brown and state senator Siplin – have deplored the verdict. On Monday Brown released a statement in which she claimed she "watched in horror and extreme sadness" as Alexander's conviction was handed down.

"This African American woman didn't hurt anyone, and now she might not hug her children for twenty years," Brown said.

"The Florida criminal justice system has sent two clear messages today. One is that if women who are victims of domestic violence try to protect themselves, the 'Stand Your Ground law' will not apply to them." [....]