Here’s Bernie Sanders Official Plan To Win — And How You Can Help

By Nathan Wellman

The Bernie Sanders campaign has had tremendous grassroots support from various sources, but his campaign is now kicking the effort into high gear.

Grassroots tools

Among all the usual methods of reaching voters, supporters are being encouraged to host what is called a “barnstorm” event to organize volunteers. These events are described as “a 90-minute organizing meeting designed to sign up everybody in the room to contact voters for Bernie. Whether it be through phone banking or canvassing. The events are fun, high-energy and easy to execute.” Information for hosting barnstorm events can be found here.

Residents of upcoming primary and caucus states can use these events to distribute directions and information for traditional methods of campaigning — canvassing for local primaries and phone banking to reach voters across the country.

Putting March 15 in perspective

The call to action was promptly picked up by the Reddit community, which has become a hub of logistical support for the Sanders campaign, building websites and Facebook pages, phone banking, fundraising, etc. A “corporal” of Maine’s branch of the “Bernie Squad” put Tuesday’s losses in perspective while outlining a “plausible path to victory.”

Regarding Tuesday’s results, they said “Expectations were high after the Michigan upset, so the loss may feel worse than it really was. We did far better in NC than expected. Polls showed a 30% loss and we got a 15% loss. We also exceeded poll numbers in a few other states.”

The briefing heavily emphasized the importance of volunteering, making a point to mention that “some of our huge gains and upsets are due largely to the activism we’ve seen” while encouraging supporters with the astounding fact that “Bernie 2016 has the largest voter contact machine in known campaign history.”

They added, “We’re on track to beat the Obama 2008 record of 100 million (phone calls), which included the general election.”

Bernie Sanders’ must-win states

The campaign will need all the grassroots help it can get. According to the New York Times, most of the coming contests throughout the remainder of March are favorable to Bernie Sanders throughout the end of March. However, Clinton will still likely have a small delegate lead, as states award Democratic delegates proportionally, rather than as a winner-take-all system:

Mr. Sanders is clearly favored to exceed his target — the roughly 16-point, 58-to-42 percent margin of victory — in six of the eight contests over the next month. He’s a strong favorite in the caucuses in Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington and Wyoming.

Barack Obama won an average of 72 percent of the vote in these contests in 2008, and so far Mr. Sanders is running an average of four points behind Mr. Obama’s showing in caucus states. Mr. Sanders is also a strong favorite in the Utah primary.

Combined, these six states hold 216 delegates. Mr. Sanders might hope to win them by a 2-to-1 margin — perhaps narrowing Mrs. Clinton’s lead by 65 to 70 delegates.

The Times, however, predicted that Sanders would come across formidable Clinton support in both Wisconsin and Arizona, where Clinton has a strong polling advantage. And while Sanders has the clear lead in small-delegate states, the end of the primary will be highly competitive in states where lots more delegates are at stake. The Times estimates Sanders will need to win some of these larger states by convincing margins to truly capture the nomination from Clinton:

The preponderance of delegates will be from the diverse, affluent, blue states along or near the coasts, like California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and the District of Columbia.

Based on the results so far, including those from Tuesday night, Mr. Sanders is not a favorite to win big in any of those. He’ll need to beat Mrs. Clinton by at least an average of 10 percentage points, and perhaps more if he under-performs in the other states mentioned.

However, the Sanders campaign has a lot of firepower left in terms of its money advantage. Sanders surpassed Hillary Clinton’s fundraising by $5 million in January, and then raised $43 million in February compared to Clinton’s $30 million. Sanders also pointed out on his website in February that the majority of Clinton’s donors have already put in the maximum contribution of $2,700, meaning Sanders capacity to fundraise is even greater still compared to Clinton.

The media has been trying to sing funeral dirges for Bernie’s campaign for months, and this week has been no exception. However, the movement’s continued enthusiasm and diligence seem to suggest that more historic surprises are not only likely, but inevitable.

Hillary Clinton Is Not Entitled To The Votes Of Bernie Sanders Supporters

By Tom Cahill

Hillary Clinton and her supporters would like to assume that if the former Secretary of State does end up with the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders’ base will fall in line and vote for Clinton to stop Trump. But they are wrong.

First off, it’s important to shut down the myth of Clinton’s inevitability as the eventual general election opponent to Donald Trump. The Democratic presidential primary is only halfway over, and Bernie Sanders has 42 percent of the pledged delegates thus far.

Even the New York Times — which has publicly endorsed Clinton’s campaign and whose public editor called out the paper for showing an obvious pro-Clinton bias in a recent stealth editing job — admits Sanders can still end up as the nominee, and they laid out a path for how he could do it.

Writing off Sanders’ chances now and telling his supporters that they have no choice but to unite behind Clinton is premature.

Aside from that, many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters aren’t Democrats. Sanders himself has identified as an independent throughout his entire career, with the exception of the 2016 election.

And he’ll be the first to tell you that he only ran as a Democrat so the media would perceive him as a serious challenger to Hillary Clinton. Likewise, his supporters are largely independents and young voters under the age of 35, and roughly half of those young voters identify as independents, despite their tendency to lean leftward in their politics.

In fact, between 2004 and 2014, the percentage of young voters who identified as independent rather than Democrat jumped from 38 percent to 50 percent. And in all of the states Bernie Sanders has won, and even the states he’s lost by considerable margins, like Virginia and Tennessee, he’s still managed to capture a wide majority of independents and voters under the age of 35. It’s unrealistic to expect these largely independent voters to switch to the Democratic Party and vote for an elite member of the Democratic establishment.

And, let’s be honest — the entire reason so many Bernie Sanders supporters are so ardently anti-Hillary Clinton might be because of her refusal to strongly oppose the corrupt campaign finance system Bernie rages against. Clinton’s top campaign donors include criminal Wall Street banks like Citibank and Goldman Sachs, and corporate-owned media companies like Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. While Sanders is raising millions of $27 donations from the grassroots, Clinton raised money from Wall Street on at least 31 different occasions between the start of her campaign and the end of February.

Asking the supporters of the anti-Wall Street candidate who rejects Super PAC's to suddenly back a pro-Wall Street candidate who embraces the Super PAC system would be asking them to betray their core values. This is likely why a full third of Bernie Sanders’ supporters refuse to back Clinton if she’s the nominee.

Hillary Clinton is unable to bring in new blood to the Democratic Party like Bernie Sanders has done. In the last 11 primary contests, 7 states have gone to Clinton and 4 have gone to Sanders. As the below table shows, turnout for all of the states Clinton won is down significantly from 2008, the last time there was a contested Democratic presidential primary. Yet in three of the last four states Bernie Sanders won, turnout was up by as much as 49 percent:



The numbers speak for themselves: The Democratic Party is in for a shellacking if they end up nominating Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders has proven himself to be the one candidate capable of uniting the Democratic Party in his ability to bring in fresh faces, his consistently higher numbers when pitted against Republicans in hypothetical general election matchups, and a message that resonates with future generations. 

Students Participate In One Of The First Human Feeding Trials Of Genetically Engineered Bananas

By Angie Carter, Anha Kruzic, Rivka Fidel, Food First

 

Students are helping to investigate GE health claims — one banana at a time.

A recent controversy about an upcoming genetically engineered (GE) banana study at Iowa State University (ISU) highlights public universities’ reluctance to engage with students in critical dialogue. Several graduate students, over the course of the last year, have raised critical questions about the claims made by ISU administrators and others that the GE banana study will save lives. The research will test the bioavailability of beta carotene in bananas genetically engineered to contain more of the Vitamin A precursor. The study recruited 12 female ISU students (ages 18-40) to eat GE bananas in return for $900. This study is one of the first human feeding trials of GE products and the first feeding trial of the GE banana.

The students also recently delivered 57,309 petition signatures to ISU in conjunction with a parallel delivery to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle by AGRA Watch and the Community Alliance for Global Justice. Critics of the initial questions and subsequent petition delivery use an increasingly common argument that critical questions about GE technology are somehow “anti-science.” Several GE proponents also accused students and activists involved in the delivery of using their white privilege to keep Africans hungry and malnourished.

Yes, students are privileged to ask these questions. The opportunity to engage in a scientific dialogue is a powerful privilege. This privilege compels us to ask difficult questions about the ethical dimensions of this GE banana research process, as well as its impacts and other viable alternatives.

Last year, the concerned ISU graduate students drafted scientific questions investigating how the study would be conducted and potential effects the GE bananas could have on Ugandan food systems.

Their questions are not about whether the use of biotechnology is morally right or wrong, or if the researchers are good or bad people. At their heart, these questions are about social, economic and environmental impacts that this kind of research will have upon real people in real places. Hunger and malnutrition are not only biological challenges, they are social problems rooted in inequality.

The questions boil down to four main queries: (1) How will GE bananas impact nutrition and hunger in Uganda, or how will ISU and/or the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation address this question? (2) How was the technology determined to be a culturally appropriate intervention? (3) Who will own or control this technology upon its development? and (4) How should public universities be involved in GE biofortification and testing?

These questions highlight the need for a public dialogue on our campuses about the role of power in the scientific process. Claims made by ISU officials that this research will save lives are premature and a smokescreen to deflect students’ questions. These claims are made without any grounding in research or recognition of the power differential between their privileged positions as tenured faculty, deans, or department chairs and the would-be recipients of their GE hunger “solutions.” The claims ignore the ways in which the incessant battle to convince communities across the world to accept GE technology as a one-size-fits-all solution to complex social problems is itself a privileged perspective.

Such far-reaching claims are not only unscientific but may lead to dangerous assumptions. These claims have also falsely implied that students, in asking their questions, attempted to directly malign the study’s primary researcher. Aligning the ISU students’ critical questions with attacks on the researcher is a sabotage of the scientific process itself.

GE proponents’ over-simplified approach poses risks to us all. Genetic engineering, in some cases, may be an appropriate technology that helps to solve agricultural and human health problems. Yet, for this approach to be scientific, it must incorporate – and take part in dialogue about – the social, economic, and environmental consequences associated with this technology.

No scientific study is free from the social, political, and cultural context in which it is conducted. We must be able to have meaningful critiques, pulling from multiple scientific disciplines, that challenge GE technology, including its potential uses, as well as interrogating who controls, owns, and benefits from it.

Science is a negotiation – an iterative process rooted in asking questions, in testing hypotheses and counter-hypotheses. Thus it is crucial that scientists and students of science – regardless of status, expertise, or background – be able to ask critical questions regarding each other’s work without fear of vitriolic retribution or retaliation.

We need a long view that takes into account social inequality and includes space for critical dialogue. No single crop, GE or otherwise, will solve the fundamental problems of hunger and malnutrition.

There is a great deal of evidence that a more diversified agriculture – a system that places women’s empowerment and food sovereignty at its center – is likely to be more successful in the long term in achieving these ends. Many in agriculture and food systems scientists acknowledge that we need more research and development in alternative agricultural solutions.

To raise questions about the safety, utility, as well as the social and ecological consequences of GE is scientifically valid, and not akin to wanting people to go hungry or become malnourished. While administrators at public universities, philanthropic organizations, and private corporations talk about “saving lives,” many others want to talk about rebuilding their lives on their own terms, through agroecological methods and food sovereignty. As such, we should be investing in these endeavors just as we invest in GE technology.

It is essential that there is a space at public universities, with large philanthropic organizations, and in broader society where students, academics, and activists can ask difficult questions in the name of a more sustainable and equitable food system without being labeled as unscientific or accused of misusing their privilege.

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Watch The Bernie Sanders Speech The Networks Won't Show You

By Arturo Garcia

 

This is what you might have seen if all the networks weren't carrying Trump.

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was among the presidential candidates speaking on Tuesday night. But as the Young Turks reported during their coverage of the evening’s primaries, national media outlets refused to show his remarks.

While the Turks showed the majority of the senator’s rally in Phoenix, other networks instead opted to cover Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s speech even before it took place.

 

Watch the speech in its entirety, as posted online,below.

 

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Obama Destroys His Legacy With Corporate-Friendly Supreme Court Pick

After a month of speculation, President Obama has made his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia.  That person is Judge Merrick Garland, who comes from the corporate defense law firm of Arnold & Porter.  With this pick, Obama has secured his legacy as a corporate appeaser.  Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Follow more of our stories at http://www.TROFIRE.com

Marco Rubio Suspends His Campaign After Florida Blowout

By Karoli Kuns

 

Marco Rubio snuck in a quiet announcement that he was suspending his campaign, but he was careful to bury it in a pile of old speeches, much of which he stole from candidate Barack Obama.

Things about being the son of immigrants, and more. He also blamed the conservative movement and the establishment Republicans for this years' season of discontent, before saying he wasn't going to be President in 2016, or maybe ever.

Bet on the ever part, Marco. Your party is dead.

Chris Matthews Suggests Hillary Clinton Pick John Kasich For A Running Mate

By Heather

This is what Chris Matthews sounds like after he's been huffing way too much of that Tip and the Gipper, bipartisan, magical fairy dust during MSNBC's Super Tuesday election coverage.

Apparently Matthews think the potential Democratic nominee for president of the United States needs to pick an anti-choice, anti-labor, trickle-down, gives tax cuts to the rich on the backs of the working class, former Lehman Brothers executive as a running mate in order to get elected.

Thanks for the advice Tweety, but no thanks.

Sorry, Hillary, but we’re done: Keep repeating racist myths and praising Kissinger and the Reagans. I’m switching to Bernie Sanders

I assumed she'd be best candidate against Trump or Cruz. But now she's made herself almost impossible to support

By Paul Campos
 

Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/Tony Dejak)

I’m sorry Hillary, but I just can’t do this anymore.

If the 2016 presidential campaign were a football game, the Democrats would be heading into it as two-touchdown favorites. Facing a Republican Party that seems to have collectively lost its mind, America’s purportedly liberal party only needs to put forth a minimally competent candidate to win an election in which that candidate will face either a reality TV star who combines ranting racist rhetoric with a bottomless ignorance of every policy question under the sun, or an extreme right-wing religious fanatic.

With the presidential election all but being handed to them, the Democratic Party’s powers that be have almost unanimously decided that Hillary Clinton is liberal America’s best hope to keep the nation from being taken over by right-wing maniacs. (In terms of endorsements, FiveThirtyEight.com’s formula currently has Clinton ahead of Bernie Sanders by a total of 478 to six.

Even the much-reviled Donald Trump has more support among Republican power brokers than Sanders has from Democratic pooh-bahs).

The problem with this decision is that it’s becoming clear that Hillary Clinton is a really bad candidate. I say that not as a Bernie Sanders supporter: my attitude toward the Democratic primary has been that just about the only relevant consideration is the question of whether Clinton or Sanders would be more likely to win the general election, given how catastrophic a GOP win would be.

Until recently, I was assuming that Clinton would be a stronger challenger to either Trump or Cruz, so I was hoping she would win out against Sanders. But I’ve changed my mind about that.

Clinton keeps making serious mistakes – and these mistakes follow a pattern that reveal why she’s making it increasingly difficult for even mildly progressive voters to support her.

Clinton’s latest blunder was her bizarre claim that Nancy and Ronald Reagan played an important role in getting Americans to talk about AIDS in the 1980's: “It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980's,” Clinton told MSNBC. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”

This is not merely false, but the precise inverse of the truth. Ronald Reagan managed to avoid ever mentioning the AIDS epidemic for the first several years of his presidency. The famous activist slogan “Silence = Death” was coined in response to the Reagan administration’s studied refusal to even acknowledge the epidemic. Indeed, the Reagans “started a national conversation” about AIDS in the same sense that Donald Trump has started a national conversation about the extent to which racism characterizes much of the Republican Party’s base.

Clinton’s surreal historical revisionism – which she walked back after a firestorm of criticism – is typical of the eagerness with which she embraces even the most dubious figures, as long as they are members of what my colleague Scott Lemieux calls America’s “overcompensated and under performing elites.”

For example, Clinton continues to cozy up to Henry Kissinger, and to the same bankers who came close to wrecking the world economy just a few years ago, shortly before they started paying her millions of dollars to give speeches to them.

A few weeks ago she repeated the racist myth that “radical” Northerners imposed corrupt governments on the defeated South after the Civil War, and thus paved the way for Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. This week she engaged in some good old-fashioned red-baiting, criticizing Sanders for opposing America’s sordid history of dirty wars in Latin America, which she mis-characterized as his support for Communist dictatorships.

All of this is both wrong as a matter of principle, and stupid politics to boot. How many votes does she think she’s going to get from (increasingly imaginary) “moderate Republicans” as a consequence of this 1990's-style triangulation? Not nearly as many as she’ll lose among disgusted liberals, who remember that the Contras were terrorists, that Kissinger is a war criminal of the first order, that Reconstruction didn’t cause the virulent racism that undermined it, and that the Reagans’ silence regarding AIDS contributed to countless unnecessary deaths.

I will, of course, vote for Clinton if she’s the nominee – she is after all vastly preferable to either Trump or Cruz – but by now this is starting to feel like pointing out that a sprained ankle is preferable to a heart attack.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Anonymous Just Declared ‘Total War’ on Donald Trump

Read more: http://usuncut.com/news/anonymous-vs-trump/

Further Primary Phenomena

Microsoft is finally pushing for cross-platform online gaming

By Kyle Orland

 With this year's Game Developer's Conference barely started, Microsoft has already rolled out a major announcement that has the potential to significantly change the console gaming landscape. By allowing for cross-network play on Xbox Live, Microsoft has signaled it's willing to open the doors to one of gaming's most frustrating walled gardens and help restore the platform-agnostic promise of the early Internet.

The question is, why now? Microsoft has been running Xbox Live since 2002, and it's been nearly a decade since the similar PlayStation Network launched on Sony's PlayStation 3 (not to mention PC-based networks like Steam). Why hasn't Microsoft made public overtures to connect these disparate networks before now?

Part of it might be technical, on all sides. After all, it's easier to develop a new, private gaming network with tens of millions of users if you are in total control of all the hardware that will be connecting together. The Xbox 360 and PS3's vastly different system architectures may have made true online agnosticism difficult on console developers in the last generation as well.

But a large part of it was surely business-related, at least for Microsoft. The lock-in effects of closed gaming networks means console gamers have long had to effectively coordinate their system purchases to line up with those of their online gaming friends.

Ten years ago, when the Xbox 360 was launching, this was a key advantage for Microsoft's new system. Back then, Microsoft had years of experience running Xbox Live (compared to Sony's standing start with the PlayStation Network), a one-year head start in reaching market with the Xbox 360, and online-centric exclusives like Halo and Gears of War in the pipe to drive multiplayer-focused gamers to its console ecosystem.

The momentum driven by that Xbox Live lock-in among console gaming's online early adopters was no doubt a large part of why the Xbox 360 was able to find relative market success—especially in the West—following Sony's market-dominating PlayStation 2 (though it surely wasn't the only reason).

Today, the console market looks quite different from Microsoft's point of view. Worldwide, the PS4 is now in close to twice as many homes as the Xbox One. Even in the usually Microsoft-friendly American market, Microsoft only rarely beats Sony in raw monthly console sales numbers these days.

That means, all things being equal, this console generation is much more likely to see a critical mass of your friends playing on Sony's PlayStation Network rather than on Microsoft's Xbox Live. If both online ecosystems are closed off from each other, more new console buyers are going to follow those friends to Sony's console if they want to play online. But in the world of cross-platform play Microsoft is proposing, the Xbox One might suddenly get a second look—especially since the system will give you access to a new Halo in addition to letting you play Call of Duty and Madden with all your PS4-owning friends.

Microsoft has said it doesn't care overly much about the size of its user base relative to Sony's. Still, the same network effects that drove the Xbox 360's sales could now be a headwind against the Xbox One gaining more momentum among prospective buyers—especially among the online gamers that tend to be console gaming's biggest spenders. That means today's announcement from Microsoft can be seen both as an olive branch of consumer-friendly cross-platform cooperation and as a white flag of surrender in the battle to drive the console market.

And it's a flag that Sony doesn't have to accept. By offering "an open invitation for other networks [read: Sony] to participate as well," though, Microsoft is very publicly pressuring Sony to follow the same course. Otherwise, Sony will likely take a significant PR hit for trying to hold on to its own relative walled-garden advantage at the expense of player convenience. (Developers will also have to play along, but the notion of having a single, unified base of players across two major consoles will probably win out over any technical growing pains in connecting the two similar consoles).

Sony hasn't given much indication how it will respond to Microsoft's very open invitation/dare, but it would be in everyone's best interests if they could bury the hatchet. Business concerns aside, there's no longer much reason to force developers and players to a limited base of competitors with the exact same hardware if they don't want to. Hopefully, Sony won't let its current market dominance prevent a chance to finally unify a hopelessly divided online gaming landscape.

Single Payer Universal Health Care Explained

There’s been a lot of fear mongering about the cost of Bernie Sanders’s health care plan. Time to set the record straight. Cenk Uygur, host of the The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

"Single-payer national health insurance, also known as “Medicare for all,” is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health care financing, but the delivery of care remains largely in private hands. Under a single-payer system, all residents of the U.S. would be covered for all medically necessary services, including doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs.

The program would be funded by the savings obtained from replacing today’s inefficient, profit-oriented, multiple insurance payers with a single streamlined, nonprofit, public payer, and by modest new taxes based on ability to pay. Premiums would disappear; 95 percent of all households would save money. Patients would no longer face financial barriers to care such as co-pays and deductibles, and would regain free choice of doctor and hospital. Doctors would regain autonomy over patient care.”

http://www.pnhp.org/facts/what-is-single-payer

Pi pops up where you don’t expect it

By Lorenzo Sadun

Woman eating pizza (Shutterstock)

Happy Pi Day, where we celebrate the world’s most famous number. The exact value of π=3.14159… has fascinated people since ancient times, and mathematicians have computed trillions of digits. But why do we care? Would it actually matter if somebody got the 11,137,423,895,285th digit wrong?

Probably not. The world would keep on turning (with a circumference of 2πr). What matters about π isn’t so much the actual value as the idea, and the fact that π seems to crop up in lots of unexpected places.

Let’s start with the expected places. If a circle has radius r, then the circumference is 2πr. So if a circle has radius of one foot, and you walk around the circle in one-foot steps, then it will take you 2π = 6.28319… steps to go all the way around. Six steps isn’t nearly enough, and after seven you will have overshot. And since the value of π is irrational, no multiple of the circumference will be an even number of steps. No matter how many times you take a one-foot step, you’ll never come back exactly to your starting point.

Calculating the area of a circle with wedges.
Jim.belk

From the circumference of a circle we get the area. Cut a pizza into an even number of slices, alternately colored yellow and blue. Lay all the blue slices pointing up, and all the yellow slices pointing down. Since each color accounts for half the circumference of the circle, the result is approximately a strip of height r and width πr, or area πr². The more slices we have, the better the approximation is, so the exact area must be exactly πr².

Pi in other places

You don’t just get π in circular motion. You get π in any oscillation. When a mass bobs on a spring, or a pendulum swings back and forth, the position behaves just like one coordinate of a particle going around a circle.

Simple harmonic motion is another view of circular motion.

If your maximum displacement is one meter and your maximum speed is one meter/second, it’s just like going around a circle of radius one meter at one meter/second, and your period of oscillation will be exactly 2π seconds.

The area of the space under the normal-distribution curve is the square root of pi.
Autopilot, CC BY-SA

Pi also crops up in probability. The function
f(x)=e^-x², where e=2.71828… is Euler’s number, describes the most common probability distribution seen in the real world, governing everything from SAT scores to locations of darts thrown at a target.

The area under this curve is exactly the square root of π.

How did π get into it?! The two-dimensional function f(x)f(y) stays the same if you rotate the coordinate axes. Round things relate to circles, and circles involve π.

Another place we see π is in the calendar. A normal 365-day year is just over 10,000,000π seconds. Does that have something to do with the Earth going around the sun in a nearly circular orbit?

Actually, no. It’s just coincidence, thanks to our arbitrarily dividing each day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds.

What’s not coincidence is how the length of the day varies with the seasons. If you plot the hours of daylight as a function of the date, starting at next week’s equinox, you get the same sine curve that describes the position of a pendulum or one coordinate of circular motion.

Advanced appearances of π

More examples of π come up in calculus, especially in
infinite series like
1 – (¹⁄₃) + (¹⁄₅) – (¹⁄₇) + (¹⁄₉) + ⋯ = π/4
and
1² + (¹⁄₂)² + (¹⁄₃)² + (¹⁄₄)² + (¹⁄₅)² + ⋯ = π²/6
(The first comes from the Taylor series of the arctangent of 1, and the second from the Fourier series of a sawtooth function.)
Also from calculus comes Euler’s mysterious equation

e^iπ + 1 = 0

relating the five most important numbers in mathematics: 0, 1, i, π, and e, where i is the (imaginary!) square root of -1.

A graph of the exponential function y=e^x.
Peter John Acklam, CC BY-SA

At first this looks like nonsense. How can you possibly take a number like e to an imaginary power?! Stay with me. The rate of change of the exponential function f(x)=e^x is equal to the value of the function itself. To the left of the figure, where the function is small, it’s barely changing. To the right, where the function is big, it’s changing rapidly. Likewise, the rate of change of any function of the form f(x)=e^ax is proportional to e^ax.

The relationship between an angle, its sine, cosine and a circle.
345Kai, CC BY-SA

We can then define f(x)= e^ix to be a complex function whose rate of change is i times the function itself, and whose value at 0 is 1. This turns out to be a combination of the trigonometric functions that describe circular motion, namely cos(x) + i sin(x). Since going a distance π takes you halfway around the unit circle, cos(π)=-1 and sin(π)=0, so e^iπ=-1.

Finally, some people prefer to work with τ=2π=6.28… instead of π. Since going a distance 2π takes you all the way around the circle, they would write that e^iτ = +1. If you find that confusing, take a few months to think about it. Then you can celebrate June 28 by baking two pies.


Lorenzo Sadun, Professor of Mathematics, University of Texas at Austin

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Rachel Maddow: It Is ‘Impossible’ To Call Clash At Trump’s Chicago Rally An Accident

Rachel Maddow explains the political science behind the classic strongman political tactic of ginning up political violence in order for a politician to present that violence as a problem that needs to be solved.

This Election Is The Biggest Threat To The Aristocracy And Biggest Opportunity For Voters, Since At Least 1932

By Eric Zuesse

 

For the first time since 1932, an American Presidential campaign presents an opportunity for the public to overthrow the aristocracy. 

 

 

The historical significance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential contest isn’t yet generally recognized. 

 

Consider the evidence regarding this historical significance, in the links that will be provided here, and from which the argument here is constructed:

For the first time ever, a Republican campaign ad against Hillary Clinton is entirely truthful about her and focuses on the most important issue facing voters:

 

For the first time since 1932, an American Presidential campaign presents an opportunity for the public to overthrow the aristocracy. 

 

And, for the first time in U.S. history, a realistic possibility exists that the voters’ choice between the two Parties’ Presidential nominees might turn out to be between two enemies of the aristocracy: 

 

Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump.

 

However, if it turns out instead to be between Trump v. Clinton, then what will be the aristocratic backing of each?

 

On Clinton’s side will be Wall Street — and this includes the ‘shadow banks’ (the non-“bank” sellers of what Bill Clinton and the Republicans caused to become unregulated credit derivatives), from which Hillary Clinton is also receiving donations, and from which the Clinton Foundation is supported and overseen — along with other Clinton funders).

 

Clearly, this is the first Presidential contest since 1932 in which the interests of the aristocracy versus the interests of the public will be presented to the voters, for them to decide which of the two sides they’re actually on.

 

And, if the election turns out to be between Trump versus Sanders, then this will be the first U.S. Presidential election ever in which both of the major-Party nominees will have committed themselves to policies (Trump clearly on foreign affairs, Sanders clearly on domestic affairs) that the aristocracy vigorously oppose, and that present a severe threat to the aristocrats' continued rule of the country.

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Please clear your mouth of food and beverages before reading this...

By FlatBaroque



I can not stop laughing.

Irrelevant Dinosaur Phyllis Schlafly To Endorse Donald Trump

By Sydney Robinson

Phyllis Schlafly, ancient conservative demon spawn, has announced that she will be attending a Trump rally on Friday afternoon where she will throw her dried husk of bitter hatred behind Donald Trump for president.

That Schlafly is to endorse Trump is no real surprise, as the living fossil has a long history of being as hateful of a conservative as there ever was.

Highlights of Schlafly’s contributions to America include her Nixon-is-too-Liberal revolt in the 1960’s, her strong opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, her belief that women should first and foremost be housewives, and her opposition to just about any progressive step forward during her lifetime.

Recent comments from Schlafly regarding Trump’s promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants gave early indication that she was supportive of the hateful candidate, but her support of Trump is the only logical conclusion for such a bitter and regressive woman.

So there you go, Trump. Have another.

Pangu releases a jailbreak for iOS 9.1, Apple TV 4 jailbreak coming soon

By Jeff Benjamin

Out of seemingly nowhere, the Pangu hacking team has released an update to its jailbreak tool for devices running iOS 9.1. The tool, which is available for both Mac and Windows, allows users to jailbreak the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. More interestingly, the same team is promising to release a jailbreak for the 4th generation Apple TV next week.

Unfortunately, few people will be able to take advantage of this jailbreak that haven’t already. Why?

Apple stopped signing iOS 9.1 back in late December, which means that anyone not currently running iOS 9.1 can no longer downgrade or upgrade to that particular version of iOS. Since many of those who are not jailbroken have since upgraded to newer versions of iOS, and those that are jailbroken are still running earlier version of iOS, it limits the scope of potential users.

Pangu acknowledges that the kernel bug used for the 9.1 release was patched by Apple in iOS 9.2. In other words, it had nothing to lose by releasing the 1.3 update, and it gave the few users who might still be running iOS 9.1 an opportunity to enjoy a jailbreak.

On its site, Pangu gave special thanks to Jung Hoon Lee, nicknamed Lokihardt, a South Korean security expert who’s well-known in hacking circles. Lee previously won a large bounty in the 2015 Pwn2Own hacking competition. Pwn2Own is where contestants are challenged to exploit mobile devices and software using new vulnerabilities.

You can download the Pangu 1.3 tool for iOS 9.1 from Pangu’s official website. The tool only works for iOS 9.1 on 64-bit iOS devices. Earlier iOS 9 versions can be jailbroken on 32-bit devices using the same tool.

Apple TV 4 jailbreak in the works

Having an iOS 9.1 jailbreak is nice, but the news of an Apple TV 4 jailbreak is much more interesting. On its official Twitter account, Pangu noted that it will release an Apple TV 4 jailbreak for 9.o.x next week.

The jailbreak will only include SSH access, so there won’t likely be any user-friendly GUI based features at the outset. Yet, this is still very good news, and will open the floodgates for new Apple TV modifications and enhancements. Remember, the third-generation Apple TV was never jailbroken, so there’s a lot of pent up demand for a new Apple TV jailbreak.

Please be aware that jailbreaking come with inherent risks. By jailbreaking, you’re using a tool created by a team outside of Apple that exploits security flaws.

That said, I personally choose to accept that risk and I still jailbreak, although not as often on my daily driver. What about you? For more details on the current state of jailbreaking, be sure to read our latest State of Jailbreak post.

Joe’s Crab Shack apologizes for using photo of lynching as table decor

By Whitney Filloon

© Provided by Vox Media, Inc.  A very poor design choice

Casual seafood chain Joe's Crab Shack is on the receiving end of some extremely bad publicity this week, and it's well-deserved: A couple who visited a Minneapolis-area location recently were shocked and disgusted to find a photo of a lynching displayed on one of the restaurant's tables, reports CBS Minnesota.

© Tyrone Williams via facebook Joe's Crab Shack Under Fire for Using Image of a Lynching as Interior Decor

Tyrone Williams and Chauntyll Allen sat down at a Joe's in Roseville, Minn. when they discovered the decorative tabletop had a picture embedded in it "that depicted two black men being lynched by a white mob, with the caption next to one of the victims that read, 'All I said was that I didn’t like the gumbo.'"

According to CBS, the couple did some brief research while still at the restaurant and found that the photo depicted a real-life lynching that occurred back in 1896. They spoke to the restaurant's manager, who apologized but also said that it was likely other restaurants had similar tables.

In a press release issued yesterday by the Minneapolis arm of the NAACP, chapter president Nekima Levy-Pounds said, "This disturbing incident that occurred at Joe's Crab Shack, demonstrates that racism is still alive and well in this country. It is sickening to know that someone would make a mockery of black men being savagely lynched and then use that imagery for decorative purposes in a restaurant. We demand accountability of Joe's Crab Shack for allowing racist material to appear in its restaurants. This is completely unacceptable."

The group is asking for a public apology from the Joe's Crab Shack corporate office, and also asking for the "immediate removal of any and all lynching or otherwise racially-offensive imagery from its restaurants," as well as "a donation to a local community-based organization that serves African American youths and teenagers."

Clearly someone on the Joe's design team needs to be fired for this one.

I can’t stand to live in a Trump building anymore

By Keith Olbermann

 One of the New York City buildings bearing Donald Trump’s name. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)

Keith Olbermann is a news and sports commentator and reporter.

Okay, Donnie, you win.

I’m moving out.

Not moving out of the country — not yet anyway. I’m merely moving out of one of New York’s many buildings slathered in equal portions with gratuitous gold and the name “Trump.” Nine largely happy years with an excellent staff and an excellent reputation (until recently, anyway) — but I’m out of here.

I’m getting out because of the degree to which the very name “Trump” has degraded the public discourse and the nation itself. I can’t hear, or see, or say that name any longer without spitting.

Frankly, I’m running out of Trump spit.

And, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m blaming a guy with the historically unique fashion combination of a cheap baseball cap and Oompa Loompa makeup for coarsening politics even though, out of the two of us, I’m the one who has promulgated a “Worst Persons in the World” list for most of the past decade. That’s how vulgar this has all become. It’s worse even than Worst Persons.

This is the campaign of a PG-rated cartoon character running for president, interrupting a string of insults the rest of us abandoned in the seventh grade only long enough to resume a concurrent string of half-crazed boasts: We’re gonna start winning again! We’re gonna build an eleventy-billion-foot-high wall! We’re not gonna pay a lot for this muffler!

All this coarseness is largely masking the truth that the Trump campaign is entirely about coarseness. Take away the unmappable comb-over and the unstoppable mouth and the Freudian-rich debates about genitalia, and there is no Trump campaign. Donald Trump’s few forays into actual issues suggest he is startlingly unaware of how the presidency or even ordinary governance works.

Of course that doesn’t preclude his election. A December study carried out with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst showed that Trump’s strongest support comes from Republicans with “authoritarian inclinations.” They don’t want policy, nuance or speeches. They want a folding metal chair smashed over the bad guy’s head, like in the kind of televised wrestling show in which Trump used to appear.

And it isn’t as though the American electorate hasn’t always had a soft spot for exactly the worst possible person for the presidency. Two months before the 1864 vote, some Republicans were so thoroughly convinced that Abraham Lincoln would lose in a landslide that they proposed to hold a second Republican convention and nominate somebody to run in his place. The Democrat they feared, George B. McClellan, was not only probably the worst general in the history of the country, but also his campaign platform was predicated on stopping the Civil War, giving the South whatever it wanted, running the greatest president in history out of town and repudiating the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after the North’s victory at Atlanta turned the tide of the war and thus the election, McClellan — anti-Union, anti-Lincoln, anti-victory and pro-slavery — still got 45 percent of the all-Northern vote.

There could still be enough idiots to elect Trump this November. Hell, I was stupid enough to move into one of his buildings. But here in those buildings, even as I pack, is the silver lining hidden amid the golden Donald trumpery.

One day Trump appeared in person and, with what I only later realized was the same kind of sincere concern and respect that Eddie Haskell used to pay “Beaver” Cleaver’s mother, asked me how I liked the place and to let him know personally if anything ever went wrong. About 15 months ago, when the elevators failed and many of the heating-unit motors died and the water shut off, I wrote him. He sent an adjutant over to bluster mightily about the urgency of improvements and who was to blame for the elevators and how there would be consequences, and within weeks Trump’s minions were obediently and diligently installing — a new revolving door at the back of the lobby.

That three-week project stretched past three months, smothered the lobby in stench and grime, required the repeated removal and reinstallation of a couple of railings, and for a time created a window frosting problem even when it wasn’t cold out.

So at least there’s this comfort. If there is a President Trump and he decides to build this ludicrous wall to prevent the immigration from Mexico that isn’t happening, and he uses that same contractor, it’ll take them about a thousand years to finish it.

Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours

By Adam Johnson

 

Fifteen of the 16 negative stories on the Bernie Sanders campaign that the Washington Post ran over a 16-hour period.

In what has to be some kind of record, the Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours, between roughly 10:20 PM EST Sunday, March 6, to 3:54 PM EST Monday, March 7—a window that includes the crucial Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, and the next morning’s spin:

• March 6, 10:20 PM: Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals
• March 7, 12:39 AM: Clinton Is Running for President. Sanders Is Doing Something Else
• March 7, 4:04 AM: This Is Huge: Trump, Sanders Both Using Same Catchphrase
• March 7, 4:49 AM: Mental Health Patients to Bernie Sanders: Don’t Compare Us to the GOP Candidates
• March 7, 6:00 AM: ‘Excuse Me, I’m Talking’: Bernie Sanders Shuts Down Hillary Clinton, Repeatedly
• March 7, 9:24 AM:  Bernie Sanders’s Two Big Lies About the Global Economy
• March 7, 8:25 AM: Five Reasons Bernie Sanders Lost Last Night’s Democratic Debate
• March 7, 8:44 AM: An Awkward Reality for Bernie Sanders: A Strategy Focused on Whiter States
• March 7, 8:44 AM: Bernie Sanders Says White People Don’t Know What It’s Like to Live in a ‘Ghetto.’ About That…
• March 7, 11:49 AM: The NRA Just Praised Bernie Sanders — and Did Him No Favors in Doing So
• March 7, 12:55 PM: Even Bernie Sanders Can Beat Donald Trump
• March 7, 1:08 PM: What Bernie Sanders Still Doesn’t Get About Arguing With Hillary Clinton
• March 7, 1:44 PM: Why Obama Says Bank Reform Is a Success but Bernie Sanders Says It’s a Failure
• March 7,  2:16 PM: Here’s Something Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders Have in Common: And the Piece of the Argument That Bernie Doesn’t Get Quite Right.
• March 7, 3:31 PM: ‘Excuse Me!’: Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Know How to Talk About Black People
• March 7, 3:54 PM: And the Most Partisan Senator of 2015 Is … Bernie Sanders!

All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he’s a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise—despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman.

There were two posts in this time frame that one could consider neutral: “These Academics Say Bernie Sanders’ College Plan Will Be a Boon for African-American Students, Will It?” and “Democratic Debate: Clinton, Sanders Spar Over Fracking, Gun Control, Trade and Jobs.”

None could be read as positive.

While the headlines don’t necessarily reflect all the nuances of the text, as I’ve noted before, only 40 percent of the public reads past the headlines, so how a story is labeled is just as important, if not more so, than the substance of the story itself.

The Washington Post was sold in 2013 to libertarian Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is worth approximately $49.8 billion.

Despite being ideologically opposed to the Democratic Party (at least in principle), Bezos has enjoyed friendly ties with both the Obama administration and the CIA. As Michael Oman-Reagan notes, Amazon was awarded a $16.5 million contract with the State Department the last year Clinton ran it. Amazon also has over $600 million in contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization Sanders said he wanted to abolish in 1974, and still says he “had a lot of problems with.” FAIR has previously criticized the Washington Post for failing to disclose, when reporting on tech giant Uber, that Bezos also owns more than $1 billion in Uber stock.

The Washington Post’s editorial stance has been staunchly anti-Sanders, though the paper contends that its editorial board is entirely independent of both Bezos and the paper’s news reporting.

 

© 2016 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.

Sanders Claims 'Game-Changing' Win as Revolution Revs Engine in Michigan

Supporters of Bernie Sanders upend naysayers, pundits, and polls by delivering primary win in bellwether state

By Jon Queally, staff writer

With come-from-behind victory, Bernie Sanders has won the Michigan primary. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)

A potentially 'huuuuge' victory.

Though expectations were met as Hillary Clinton claimed a win by large margin in the Mississippi primary, the big story of Tuesday's two Democratic primaries is that Bernie Sanders has achieved an "upset of almost unheard of proportions" by claiming victory in the bellwether state of Michigan.

"The corporate media counted us out. The pollsters said we were way behind. The Clinton super PACs spent millions against us across the country. We were hit with a dishonest attack in the debate. 

But we won, again… and if we continue to stand together, we can win this nomination." —Sen. Bernie Sanders Just after 11:30 PM ET, NBC News declared it was "projecting" the win for Sanders as returns showed him leading Clinton by more than 26,000 votes with more than 94% of precincts reporting. Michigan has 147 delegates, which will be divided proportionally between the two candidates.

"I want to thank the people of Michigan," Sanders declared in a brief television interview just after 11 PM. "Tonight, I think the people of Michigan stood up to the pundits. They stood up to the Establishment. They stood up to the pollsters. And they said they want an economy that works for all of us, and not just the people on top."

In a campaign email shortly after, Sanders declared the victory in Michigan as significant:

The results are in and we were just declared the winner in a very important state for our campaign: Michigan. That’s a major, game-changing victory for our campaign.
The corporate media counted us out. The pollsters said we were way behind. The Clinton super PACs spent millions against us across the country. We were hit with a dishonest attack in the debate. But we won, again… and if we continue to stand together, we can win this nomination.

Appearing on MSNBC as it was becoming clear that Sanders was on the verge of victory, Nina Turner, former State Senator of Ohio and a campaign surrogate, said the win proves Bernie has a winning agenda that Democratic voters are responding to and ready to support. "It really does show that his honesty and his consistency is really taken hold in the state of Michigan," Turner said.

"He was about twenty percent down last week and in July about fifty points, so he is really closing the lead," she continued. "And the more people hear his message—his righteous indignation for the working class and poor in this nation—and the way that he fought over bad trade deals that took away manufacturing jobs both in Michigan and in Ohio, people are really starting to hear his message."

Asked about the implications of the Michigan win and moving forward, Turner said the campaign's eyes are now on other midwestern states such as her own, but also larger states like California and New York later in the primary calendar. "The more that people see he has been consistent—that he doesn't change his message based on polling, that he doesn't change his message depending on what audience he's talking to—he has been a champion of the everyday people and it is starting to resonate."

Ahead of the official call, Sanders delivered a brief statement to television cameras just before 11:00 PM ET.

"We believe our strongest areas are yet to happen," said Sanders during  "We're going to do very, very well on the West Coast and other parts of this country. What the American people are saying is that they are tired of a corrupt campaign finance system and super PAC's funded by Wall Street and the billionaire class. They are tired of a rigged economy in which people in Michigan, people in Illinois, people in Ohio are working longer hours for lower wages; are worried to death about the future of their kids, and yet all new income and wealth is going to the top one percent. And the people of America are tired of a broken criminal justice system in which we have more people in jail--largely African American, Latino, and Native American--than any other major country on Earth.

"When we started this campaign," Sanders continued, "we were sixty or seventy points down in the polls. And yet what we have seen—in poll after poll; state after state—what we have done is create the kind of momentum that we need to win. So once again, this has been a fantastic night. In Michigan we are so grateful for all the support we have gotten and we look forward to going to Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and the other upcoming states that we will be competing in next week."

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Crazy is the new normal

Daughter of Civil War vet still getting a pension

http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579493830954152394

500 rare Apple II programs and games are now preserved online

By Chris O'Brien
 

In an industry that constantly lusts toward the future, the Internet Archive has once again helped retain tech’s past by announcing that it has saved more than 500 Apple II programs.

The San Francisco-based non-profit has been doing yeoman’s work for years now, maintaining everything from historical copies of webpages to archiving sound and video to digitizing out-of-copyright books. The program to preserve the catalogue of Apple II programs is yet another example of this work, and one that provides an important record of the dawn of the personal computing age.

The actual work of finding and uploading the programs is being done by a person (or possibly an anonymous collective) who goes under the name “4am.”

According to a post on the Internet Archive blog, the 4am collection now has passed the 500 program milestone. In fact, the 4am page now says it has 631 Apple II programs. These are part of a larger collection of Apple II programs that stands at 3,897 at the Internet Archive.

But the 4am set is focused on the rarest and hardest to find Apple II programs. As such, users can now experience games like Muppetville, Spy Hunter and Battlezone.

So get ready to relive your childhood or teenage years and watch hours of your adult life disappear into a black hole of nostalgic ecstasy.

Megyn Kelly Destroys Donald Trump With His Own Words At Fox News Debate

By Jason Easley



Megyn Kelly showed why Donald Trump has been so afraid of facing her by completely owning him at the Fox News Republican debate.

Video:



Before the clips rolled, Megyn Kelly said, “Mr. Trump, one of the things that voters love about you is that they believe you tell it like it is, but time and time again in this campaign, you have told voters one thing then reversed yourself in weeks or even sometimes days.”

Kelly used three sets of clips of Trump giving differing statements on troops staying in Afghanistan, George W. Bush lying about Iraq, and whether the US should accept Syrian refugees.

Trump described his flip-flopping as being flexible. It is easy to see why Trump has been avoiding Megyn Kelly. She has owned Donald Trump during this debate. As bad as the video proof of his flip-flops was, Kelly’s later destruction of Trump on the Trump University case was worse. Megyn Kelly did what Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich can’t do. She ate Donald Trump for lunch.

Kelly seems to have Trump’s number, and thanks to her position as the future of Fox News, she can go after the Republican front runner in a way that other members of the corporate media are terrified to attempt. Donald Trump is having a bad night, and Megyn Kelly is a big reason why.