*1. Trump the Demagogue
"Trump's rise has been one of sheer hubris, overblown promises and an almost effortless seduction that can sweep up even the toughest critics." He is the type of leader who positions himself, "as a 'strong man' able to stand up...and protect the interests of their citizens. Good leadership has no easy answers. It requires the humility of perspective and the restraint of consensus. Successful leaders focus less on cult of personality and more on systems and structures that...put a cohesive set of national interests at the center. This requires nuance, it requires context, and it requires complexity. Where this is missing, the result is usually failure." From Quartz - We've seen Donald Trump's type of populism in Africa, it always ends in tears; and From WaPo - Here's what demagogues like trump do to their countries when they take power
+ "Maybe the talking heads on TV would draw the line at some mild version of fascism, but would the American people do the same? The easy yes of yesteryear has given way to awful doubt. Trump could win. He could become president, commander in chief, ruler of the Justice Department and head of the IRS. The American people could elect someone who has not the slightest appreciation for the Constitution or American tradition. When Trump insisted that he could compel a military officer to obey an illegal order, I heard the echo of jackboots on cobblestone." From WaPo - Trump has taught me to fear my fellow Americans
+ Asked to explain the political ascendance of Donald Trump, he [Stephen Hawking] - one of the smartest guys in the world - said simply, “I can’t. He is a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator.” From NYT - Stephen Hawking Calls Donald Trump a ‘Demagogue’
+ From one demagogue to another - North Korea’s state-run media has endorsed Donald Trump
*2. Work, work, work, work, work, work
"Psychology researchers...found a strong link between workaholism and ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and depression. Workaholism, which has been formally defined as 'being overly concerned about work, driven by an uncontrollable work motivation, and to investing so much time and effort to work that it impairs other important life areas.'" From Quartz - A massive new study links being a workaholic to a myriad of other psychiatric disorders
*3. Click Bait
"While mobile ad blocking is mostly an emerging market phenomenon now, it is costing the global advertising industry billions of dollars a year in lost revenue." This is an emerging market issue to save on mobile data usage, but it will eventually make its way to western markets. I use an add blocker on a desktop computer and some web sites (mostly online magazines) are filtering their sites and won't let you continue browsing until you disable the blocker. From NYT - Rise of Ad-Blocking Software Threatens Online Revenue
*4. The Fifth Element
A group of physicists working in a Hungarian lab think they have discovered a fifth force of nature...and, no, it's not Stephen Curry. "Gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are the four fundamental forces known to physics. Krasznahorkay [one of the physicists] says that the bump [in emissions of one of their experiments] is strong evidence that a minute fraction of the unstable beryllium-8 nuclei shed their excess energy in the form of a new particle, which then decays into an electron–positron pair. He and his colleagues calculate the particle’s mass to be about 17 megaelectronvolts (MeV)." Did you get all that? From Scientific American - Has a Hungarian Physics Lab Found a Fifth Force of Nature?
*5. Armageddon
Apparently, the business of asteroid mining is a thing. So much a thing that, "last year President Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA). CSLCA states that U.S. companies are entitled to maintain property rights of resources they've obtained from outer space. According the industry experts, the contents of a single asteroid could be worth trillions of dollars." From TechCrunch - Deep Space Industries partners with Luxembourg to test asteroid mining technologies; and From FP - The Asteroid Miner's Guide to the Galaxy
+ "The facts of existential risk are simple: We may not be able to indefinitely keep the planet habitable - but we sure can get off this planet and create cool new places to live safely in outer space. Mega-space habitats would also make an easier launch base for space mining, an industry booming with interest." From TechCrunch - Space exploration will spur transhumanism and mitigate existential risk
+ Onstage at the Code Conference on Tuesday, the Amazon founder and CEO [Jeff Bezos] said that we have to start bringing parts of the industrial economy to space in order "to save Earth." From Re/code - Jeff Bezos thinks we need to build industrial zones in space in order to save Earth
*BOTTOM OF THE NEWS
* "As scientists look for explanations for the roots of chronic disease as well as the connections between nutrition and health, the answer may be in your gut - and what you feed it." From WaPo - How to feed a happy, healthy gut
* "Although membership in Facebook is voluntary...there is an impact on people's lives if they don't belong to the giant social network, because so much of the interaction among family members and friends takes place on Facebook." From Fortune - Zuckerberg Is a Dictator of the World's Largest Nation, Pirate Bay Founder Says
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* "As scientists look for explanations for the roots of chronic disease as well as the connections between nutrition and health, the answer may be in your gut - and what you feed it." From WaPo - How to feed a happy, healthy gut
* "Although membership in Facebook is voluntary...there is an impact on people's lives if they don't belong to the giant social network, because so much of the interaction among family members and friends takes place on Facebook." From Fortune - Zuckerberg Is a Dictator of the World's Largest Nation, Pirate Bay Founder Says
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