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Prospects for life in solar system are good as amino acids and water ice seem ubiquitous in asteroid belt and nearing a dozen subsurface liquid ocean worlds

List of largest lakes and seas in the Solar System

Life "on" (inside) Europa, Enceladus? Sheeeeeeit, you can have it on Dione, Titania, Oberon, or Triton. Or maybe Pluto, Charon, Orcus, Makemake, Eris, Sedna... etc.

And if there are no life forms in these places, then you can quench your thirst (as long as you live there too).

11-Year-Old Boy Kills Himself After Alleged Social Media Prank — and Another Child Is Charged

Michigan boy, 11, hangs himself after social media prank

The juvenile is being charged with malicious use of telecommunication services and using a computer to commit a crime.

11-Year-Old Boy Killed Himself After Girlfriend Faked Suicide, Mom Says

Goss said the girl and some of her friends orchestrated the prank. It was not clear who faces charges. "She had pranked her own death," Goss, 41, said of her son's girlfriend. "I don't know what possessed her to do such a weird prank. It's a twisted, sick joke." The unnamed juvenile is being charged in Marquette County with telecommunication services-malicious use and using a computer to commit a crime, Marquette city police Capt. Michael Kohler said in a news release.

I suppose that I had more than half the bits and pieces of this story, but I never managed to put them together like Caleb T. Martin has done.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/truth-syria-manufactured-war-independent-country-2/216688/

Education, health care and national rebirth
The independent nationalist Syrian government, now being targeted by Western foreign policy, was born in the struggle against colonialism. It took decades of great sacrifice from the people of Syria to break the country free from foreign domination — first by the French empire and later from puppet leaders. For the last several decades, Syria has been a strong, self-reliant country in the oil-rich Middle East region. It has also been relatively peaceful.

Since winning its independence, Syria’s Baathist leadership has done a great deal to improve the living standards of the population. Between 1970 and 2009, the life expectancy in Syria increased by 17 years. During this time period infant mortality dropped dramatically from 132 deaths per 1,000 live births to only 17.9. According to an article published by the Avicenna Journal of Medicine, these notable changes in access to public health came as a result of the Syrian government’s efforts to bring medical care to the country’s rural areas.

A 1987 country study of Syria, published by the U.S. Library of Congress, describes huge achievements in the field of education. During the 1980s, for the first time in Syria’s history, the country achieved “full primary school enrollment of males” with 85 percent of females also enrolled in primary school. In 1981, 42 percent of Syria’s adult population was illiterate. By 1991, illiteracy in Syria had been wiped out by a mass literacy campaign led by the government.

The name of the main political party in Syria is the “Baath Arab Socialist Party.” The Arabic word “Baath” literally translates to “Rebirth” or “Resurrection.” In terms of living standards, the Baathist Party has lived up to its name, forging an entirely new country with an independent, tightly planned and regulated economy. The Library of Congress’ Country Study described the vast construction in Syria during the 1980s: “Massive expenditures for development of irrigation, electricity, water, road building projects, and the expansion of health services and education to rural areas contributed to prosperity.”

Compared to Saudi-dominated Yemen, many parts of Africa, and other corners of the globe that have never established economic and political independence, the achievements of the Syrian Arab Republic look very attractive. Despite over half a century of investment from Shell Oil and other Western corporations, the CIA World Factbook reports that about 60 percent of Nigerians are literate, and access to housing and medical care is very limited. In U.S.-dominated Guatemala, roughly 18 percent of the population is illiterate, and poverty is rampant across the countryside, according to the CIA World Factbook.

What the Western colonizers failed to achieve during centuries of domination, the independent Syrian government achieved rapidly with help from the Soviet Union and other anti-imperialist countries. The Soviet Union provided Syria with a $100 million loan to build the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates River, which was “considered to be the backbone of all economic and social development in Syria.” Nine-hundred Soviet technicians worked on the infrastructure project which brought electricity to many parts of the country. The dam also enabled irrigation throughout the Syrian countryside.

More recently, China has set up many joint ventures with Syrian energy corporations. According to a report from the Jamestown Foundation, in 2007 China had already invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Syria in efforts to “modernize the country’s aging oil and gas infrastructure.”

These huge gains for the Syrian population should not be dismissed and written off, as Western commentators routinely do when repeating their narrative of “Assad the Dictator.” For people who have always had access to education and medical care, it is to trivialize such achievements. But for the millions of Syrians, especially in rural areas, who lived in extreme poverty just a few decades ago, things like access to running water, education, electricity, medical care, and university education represent a huge change for the better.

Like almost every other regime in the crosshairs of U.S. foreign policy, Syria has a strong, domestically-controlled economy. Syria is not a “client state” like the Gulf state autocracies surrounding it, and it has often functioned in defiance of the U.S. and Israel. It is this, not altruistic concerns about human rights, that motivate Western attacks on the country.

Half a century ago I was reading a book by Isaac Asimov. I don’t remember what book, but I know it wasn’t I, Robot because I looked last night and it wasn’t in that book. But in the book, whichever one it was, Dr. Asimov wrote about the origin of the word “robot”; a story by Karel Capek titled R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.
        I searched every library I had access to, looking for this story, for years. I finally gave up.
        Then a few weeks ago I thought of the story again. I have no idea what triggered that thought, but it occurred to me that there was no internet back then, and since the book was so old, it would probably be at Gutenberg.org.
        It was! I downloaded it, and to my dismay it was written in Czech. So I fed it to Google Translate.
        Thirty five years ago when I was first learning how computers work and how to program them, I read of a program the US government had written to translate Russian to English and back. To test it, they fed it the English phrase “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Then they fed the Russian translation back in. The re-conversion to English read “The wine is good, but the meat is spoiled.”
        I figured that in the decades since their first efforts at machine translation, it would do a better job.
        I figured wrong. What came out of Google Translate was gibberish. It does a good job of translating single words; paper dictionaries have done this well for centuries. But for large blocks of text, it was worthless.
        When I first saw the Czech version I could see that it was, in fact, not a novel, but a stage play. I kept looking, and found an English language version translated by an Australian. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons, so I may add it to my online library.
        Wikipedia informed me that the play was written in 1920, and a man named Paul Selver translated it into English in 1923. So I searched Gutenberg for “Paul Selver” and there it was! However, it was in PDF form. Right now I’m at the tail end of converting it to HTML.
        After reading it I realized that this story was the basis for every robot story written in the twentieth century, and its robots aren’t even robots as we know robots today. Rather, they were like the “replicants” in the movie Blade Runner—flesh and blood artificial people. That movie, taken from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would have actually been a sequel to R.U.R., had R.U.R. ended differently.
        The Terminator was R.U.R. with intelligent mechanical robots instead of artificial life. Their aim, as the “robots” in Kapek’s story, is to destroy all humans.
        Asimov said that his robots were an answer to Frankenstein and R.U.R. He thought the very idea was ridiculous, so he made his own robots inorganic and mechanical rather than organic, and added his “three laws of robotics”. His laws weren’t physical laws like the inability of anything to travel faster than light, but legislation; similar to Blade Runner, where the artificial people weren’t allowed on Earth. In a few of his books, like The Caves of Steel, robot use on Earth is strictly limited and controlled and people hate them.
        I thought Asimov had the first mechanical, non-magical robots, but I was wrong. There were fictional mechanical robots before Asimov was born. The first US science fiction dime novel was Edward S. Ellis’ 1865 The Steam Man of the Prairies, with a giant steam powered robot.
        One thing that put me off about this play (besides the fact that it’s a play, which is far better watched than read) was that the original story was written in a language I don’t understand. That’s why I don’t read Jules Verne; his stories were written in French, and I don’t speak that language, either.
        I dislike translations because I used to speak Spanish well, according to South American tourists, and a smattering of Thai. And I’m a reader. It’s more than just the story, it’s how it’s written. There are word plays and idioms that are impossible to translate. For instance, a beautiful English phrase that uses alliteration would lose its beauty in any translation. And, there are no boring stories, only boring storytellers. I suspect that Kapek may have been an excellent writer, but Selver wasn’t, to my mind. Little of the dialog seemed believable to me.
        But in the case of this story, even the poor translation (Wikipedia informs me it’s abridged) is worth reading, just for the context it places all other robot stories in.
        It will be at mcgrewbooks.com soon.

Oops: 'Democrats Are Good For Gun Sales': Guess What Happened After Trump's Election

Since Trump's election, background checks have fallen three straight months from year-ago levels. And shops like Nova Firearms in McLean, Va., have detected a notable drop in sales of certain types of weapons such as AR-15 military-style semi-automatic rifles. During the heat of the campaign, says salesman Tom Jenkins, the shop couldn't keep those weapons in stock. Customers were worried the rifles would be singled out for a ban by Hillary Clinton.

"During the political crisis we had dozens of them downstairs, and then there would be zero. And it would go again and then go again. And right up to the election, literally, brought them in, brought them up and sold them."

Since Trump's victory those guns aren't moving nearly as fast, says Jenkins, pointing to five AR-15 style weapons on a rack behind the counter of the shop. He says it's a certain type of customer whose buying decisions are influenced by politics.

"The hunter doesn't care who's president. The revolver shooter or the target shooter or the competition shooter really didn't care who was president. It's the self-defense market and the people think certain guns may be tied to politics."

[...] On the day after the election shares of gun maker Sturm Ruger fell 14 percent. And the price of Smith & Wesson, which has since changed its name to the generic sounding American Outdoor Brands, fell 15 percent. Shares of both companies are still down, in contrast to the overall stock market, which has enjoyed big post-election gains. All of this points to that weird dynamic in the gun business.

Give it time?

This journal is #FAKENEWS. Statement from The Wall Street Journal.

Remember this story? Google Fails to Stop Major Brands From Pulling Ads From YouTube

If you can watch an 8m05s YouTube video, check this out: Evidence that WSJ used FAKE screenshots. [You can't, because it's down right now. It could be the user pulling it because they found out they were wrong, or it could even be retaliation from WSJ/News Corp. I will keep an eye on it.] Otherwise, read ahead:

A Wall Street Journal reporter, Jack Nicas, has been covering YouTube for a while. He apparently took some screenshots of ads playing alongside racist videos and uploaded them to Twitter. In one case, he "found" that Coca Cola and Starbucks were playing ads alongside a video with "Nigger" in the title. This video was obliquely referred to in one of his WSJ articles, and it was implied that he contacted Coca Cola and other brands to pressure them about his findings - resulting in their brands pulling advertising from YouTube.

Ethan Klein contacted the user that uploaded a video that was "screenshotted" multiple times by Jack Nicas. YouTube has detailed information and graphs related to monetization of videos, and the platform indicated that the video had been monetized for a few days back in September. The Nicas screenshots showed a view count close to the amount that the video reached towards the end of its life, before it was reported and deleted by YouTube (after being highlighted by Nicas on Twitter).

Basically, while YouTube may be scrambling to launch machine learning algorithms that automatically label ISIS beheading videos as offensive and minimize brand exposure to them, YouTube is not stupid enough to forgo implementing simple keyword filters. Content creators on YouTube have talked about how using the wrong words, even innocuous ones, in the title or description will result in a video getting demonetized. Why did it take days for that screenshotted video to get demonetized? Probably because the keyword filter flagged it, and then a Mechanical Turk came in days later and gave it the thumbs down, cutting off all revenue for good.

So either this Wall Street Journal reporter lied, or some of the details about how the YouTube system works are incorrect. Perhaps the revenue was not as flatlined as it appeared, or ads can accidentally play on videos that appear demonetized. Or maybe the evidence sent to Klein was itself faked. In the worst case scenario, a "reporter" actually edited screenshots to make it appear that major brands were advertising on offensive content, proceeded to pressure big companies to pull millions of bucks worth of advertising, and then bragged about it on Twitter.

Does WSJ have it in for YouTube? Klein puts out one theory. WSJ reporters, including Jack Nicas, were behind a recent hit piece on PewDiePie, the YouTuber with the most subscribers. Many YouTubers came to the defense of PewDiePie, recognizing that the alleged hate/anti-Semitic/"Nazi" content that he posted was in jest. WSJ ran its own video version of its article that stripped away much of the context surrounding the jokes. In the end, while PewDiePie was dropped from Disney's Maker Studios and lost his premium YouTube show, he appears to have gained rather than lost subscribers. So it is a bit of a lost cause for the WSJ.

Attacking YouTube directly has seemed to have a much bigger impact, with many brands pulling away from Alphabet/Google/YouTube and demanding stronger tools to prevent ads from appearing alongside offensive content. A tall order, since it is a machine learning task. Obviously, Ethan Klein and other YouTubers with millions of subscribers stand to lose a lot of ad revenue if YouTube's value to advertisers plummets. Klein also uploads videos that are likely to be labeled offensive and restricted to only advertisers that check the right boxes.

Why would the Wall Street Journal want to kill YouTube, other than baiting some clicks? WSJ is owned by News Corporation, which owns various old media outlets that would like to get a slice of YouTube's advertising pie and reach with younger viewers. Judging by the scale of the brand freakout, it was well worth the time it took to put together a half-dozen articles or so.

If you want, you can also watch this 13m59s video from Ethan Klein (part 1 to the part 2 this journal is about). There's also this 5m49s video from another YouTuber showing how at least one man (Eric Feinberg) stands to benefit from the ad controversy - by selling his patented offensive content detection algorithm to Google. This is the article that the video references:

Google said in a blog post that it's beefing up its tech efforts and hiring more people to prevent placement of ads with unsavory content. A spokesman declined to comment further.

But Mr. Feinberg said in an interview on Friday that he doubts Google can succeed. At least, he said, "not without violating my patent."

I'll turn this journal into a submission if there are further signs of the WSJ's narrative crumbling.

Trump takes risk with Freedom Caucus attack

A fun article.

Anti-tax and pro-life leaders who huddled with Ryan in the Speaker’s office Thursday were livid that the Freedom group scuttled the health bill. The legislation would have repealed $1 trillion in ObamaCare taxes and made $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, while defunding Planned Parenthood.

“I didn’t understand how big this was to the pro-life community. They are pissed as hell at the people who are undercutting them. You just torpedoed defunding Planned Parenthood and you don’t think you can be primaried from the right? You are just wrong,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform who attended the private meeting with Ryan.

Got to say, the green look on the site is actually *really* nice. If it was a few shades darker though, we'd be too close that the site that shall not be named.

Three transients arrested in Atlanta highway bridge collapse (CNBC)

Yes, they do mean that inter-dimensional travelers (persons staying or working in a place dimension for only a short time) are sabotaging America's infrastructure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/us/politics/trump-health-care-conservatives-congress.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — Whenever a major conservative plan in Washington has collapsed, blame has usually been fairly easy to pin on the Republican hard-liners who insist on purity over practicality.

But as Republicans sifted through the detritus of their failed effort to replace the Affordable Care Act, they were finding fault almost everywhere they looked.

President Trump, posting on Twitter on Sunday, saw multiple culprits, including the renegade group of small-government conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus and outside groups like the Club for Growth. Those groups, which do not always work placidly together, had aligned against the president and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the ultimate symbol of their dismay with the entrenched ways of the capital. At the same time, some saw the president as pointing a finger at Mr. Ryan when Mr. Trump urged his Twitter followers on Saturday to tune in to a Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, who went on to call for Mr. Ryan’s resignation.

For eight years, those divisions were often masked by Republicans’ shared antipathy toward President Barack Obama. Now, as the party struggles to adjust to the post-Obama political order, it is facing a nagging question: How do you hold together when the man who unified you in opposition is no longer around?