"Choose wisely, my students."

http://www.techinsider.io/professor-tests-prisoners-dilemma-on-his-students-2015-7

A professor at the University of Maryland threw his class a curveball when he allowed them to each choose how many extra credit points they wanted to add to their final paper grade.

Sounds generous right? Well, not really. 

Here's what Professor Dylan Selterman positioned for his students:

Select whether you want 2 points or 6 points added onto your final paper grade. But there's a small catch: if more than 10% of the class selects 6 points, then no one gets any points.

So how did they choose?

A fine mess

Mehdi Hasan talks with Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency.



"Which...you have to really ask the President what is it that he actually IS doing with the policy that is in place, because it is very, very confusing...I'm sitting here today, Mehdi, and I don't, I can't tell you exactly what that is. And I've been at this for a long time."

Background:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/04/confirmed-u-s-armed-al-qaeda-topple-gaddaffi.html

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/newly-declassified-u-s-government-documents-the-west-supported-the-creation-of-isis.html

And then the refugees come here:
http://para-rigger.posthaven.com/while-you-sleep-america

Updates:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/08/unofficial-war-isis-nothing-to-show-for
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentary/565703-bedlam-in-washington


August 6, 1945 ... The Decision to Drop the Bomb

This was filmed twenty years ago in 1995.  It since has come to light that Russia's invasion of Manchuria on the day of Nagasaki was an even greater factor in the surrender of Japan than the bombs themselves, and that the Japanese had already exploded a small uranium bomb in Manchuria.

Googlemandering

How Google could select the next president

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/googles-search-algorithm-steal-presidency/

Imagine an election—a close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.
…

One group saw positive articles about one candidate first; the other saw positive articles about the other candidate. (A control group saw a random assortment.) The result: Whichever side people saw the positive results for, they were more likely to vote for—by more than 48 percent. The team calls that number the “vote manipulation power,” or VMP. The effect held—strengthened, even—when the researchers swapped in a single negative story into the number-four and number-three spots. Apparently it made the results seem even more neutral and therefore more trustworthy.

...

In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency.