n2doc
n2doc's JournalBoris Nemtsov Exposed Putin's Corruption—And Paid With His Life
“We need to talk about Magnitsky.”
The last time I saw Boris Nemtsov, in Tallinn, Estonia in 2013, he had wanted to find a way to tack on more Putin regime officials to a U.S. law that would ban them from entering the country or freeze whatever assets they held here. The former first deputy prime minister of Russia, who was brutally shot to death within eyeshot of the Kremlin this evening, had many enemies, not least of them the president of Russia. He was handsome, charismatic and popular in the West and in Eastern Europe. “First we liberate Belarus, and then Russia!” former Belarusian presidential candidate, dissident and Lukashenko torture victim Andrei Sannikov told him on that same occasion. Nemtsov joyfully agreed. On Sunday he had planned to lead a march against Vladimir Putin’s unacknowledged dirty war in Ukraine. He was shot repeatedly in the back by several assailants emerging from a car while he walking down the Moskvoretskiy bridge with Anna Durickaya, a Ukrainian model.
Two years ago, Nemtsov and his colleague Leonid Martynyuk released a report titled, “Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics: Corruption and Abuse in Sochi,” which alleged that Putin had personally overseen the enormous, profligate project and was therefore responsible for the estimated $26 billion frittered away in “embezzlement and kickbacks.” They named names. Nemtsov, who was born in Sochi, and Martynyuk debunked the myth peddled by the Kremlin that the bulk of the costs for the Olympics was borne by private investors, showing that actually only two—aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska and nickel magnate Vladimir Potanin—were the private financiers of the world’s most expensive Winter Games.
Moreover, they showed how brothers Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, childhood friends of Putin, were awarded 15 percent of the money controlled by Olimpstroy, the state company created to finance the Olympics; and that the bulk of this percentage was spent in awarding no-bid sweetheart contracts. They also suggested that Vladimir Yakunin, the chairman of the state-owned Russian Railroads, who along with Putin helped found the St. Petersburg Ozero Dacha Cooperative, commanded 20 percent of the Olympstroy budget and then purchased property which, according to his official declared income, he simply could not afford.
“Putin is part of a mafia,” Nemtsov told me and my colleague Olga Khvostunova, in an interview about his report. “They do not turn in their own. He gave his friends an opportunity ‘to earn some cash.’”
more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/27/boris-nemtsov-exposed-putin-s-corruption-and-paid-with-his-life.html
Weekend Toon Roundup 2- The rest
Repubs
Net
Bibi
Obama
Liar
War
Torture
-11-at-2.26.09-PM-1.jpg
Florida
Warren and DU
Hubble Images a Dusty Galaxy, Home to an Exploding Star
The galaxy pictured here is NGC 4424, located in the constellation of Virgo. It is not visible with the naked eye but has been captured here with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Although it may not be obvious from this image, NGC 4424 is in fact a spiral galaxy. In this image it is seen more or less edge on, but from above, you would be able to see the arms of the galaxy wrapping around its center to give the characteristic spiral form.
In 2012, astronomers observed a supernova in NGC 4424 — a violent explosion marking the end of a star’s life. During a supernova explosion, a single star can often outshine an entire galaxy. However, the supernova in NGC 4424, dubbed SN 2012cg, cannot be seen here as the image was taken ten years prior to the explosion. Along the central region of the galaxy, clouds of dust block the light from distant stars and create dark patches.
To the left of NGC 4424 there are two bright objects in the frame. The brightest is another, smaller galaxy known as LEDA 213994 and the object closer to NGC 4424 is an anonymous star in our Milky Way.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/16041398814/in/photostream/
The sea as abstract art
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The Yellow Sea [crop]
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/16639035116/in/photostream/
Why one science journal wants to publish failed studies
If science were a TV show, it would be a lot more like Modern Family than Breaking Bad: the promising and positive results from studies are usually on display, not the dark, ambiguous underbelly of failed and inconclusive research.
This is because research suffers from what's known as "publication bias": not all studies that are conducted actually get published in journals, and the ones that do tend to have positive (i.e. statistically significant) findings. This is a big problem because it means we have a biased picture of what's going on in science, and many researchers waste their time and funding repeating work that's already been done. The issue is so severe right now that some have wondered whether negative results are disappearing entirely from some countries and fields of science.
Now, one journal is trying to correct publication bias: PLoS One this week launched its "Missing Pieces" collection of negative, null, and inconclusive studies — in other words, a celebration of the seamier side of botched and boring experiments that usually never sees the light of day.
Articles in the collection include one that failed to find that women's support groups had a significant impact on postpartum disorder in Bangladeshi mothers (despite promising findings in similar research in India) and a study that could not replicate four previous experiments on the "depletion model" of self control, an increasingly popular idea that posits that self control is a limited resource that runs out in people.
more
http://www.vox.com/2015/2/27/8119957/publication-bias
Hillary Clinton has a plan to fix Washington. It is not a good plan.
by Ezra Klein
There's a lot of chatter about what Hillary Clinton's campaign will actually be about. But the truth is, coming up with a policy agenda is the easy part. The hard part is going to be persuading voters that that agenda can pass.
The Obama years have been, for liberals, a searing lesson in the limits of the presidency. Obama made huge progress on liberal goals when he had a Democratic majority from 2009-2010. Since then, his legislative agenda has been blocked. A president without a Congress can't make much change. And the next Democratic president isn't going to have a Democratic Congress. Population patterns and gerrymandering mean the House is safely under GOP control at least into the 2020s.
Now, with Republicans nearly certain to keep control of the House, the 2016 Democratic candidates are going to have to somehow convince voters that they not only have ideas, but they have a plausible plan for getting those ideas passed into law.
The New York Times reports that at the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women, Clinton previewed her answer. It's not very good:
"I’d like to bring people from right, left, red, blue, get them into a nice warm purple space where everybody is talking and where we’re actually trying to solve problems," Mrs. Clinton said.
And I'd like to ride a Google Bus to work in the morning. But it's not going to happen. I don't work at Google. And Hillary Clinton doesn't work in a political system where right, left, red and blue are going to meld into a warm purple.
more
http://www.vox.com/2015/2/27/8117611/hillary-clinton-bipartisanship
Charles P Pierce- The Passion Of Big Chicken: Nothing Left But The Sad Recriminations
Chris Christie's prospective presidential campaign has sunk so deep that James Cameron can't find it. (Somebody over the weekend even opined that what Christie really is angling for is a gig as a TV pundit.) So he dropped by CPAC this afternoon to show America what it's going to be missing.
"The word they miss is passionate," Christie said.
"But, sit down and shut up?" Ingraham shot back
"Yeah, well, sometimes people need to be told to sit down and shut up," the governor said as the audience applauded.
Christie milked it, adding at "some more of that stuff should be happening in DC," particularly directed at the Obama administration.
"Someone should say it's time to shut up," Christie said of those inside the White House, to even greater applause.
I can think of a number of other words that "the press" has missed in describing him. This can be blamed in many cases on FCC regulations.
It's become rather pathetic to watch Big Chicken come to the painful realization that reality and mathematics can't be bullied into silence. There's no room for him at the inn now that Jeb (!)'s come to call, because The Base doesn't trust him since he got Obama cooties on him during Superstorm Sandy. The state that he putatively governs is heating up a kettle for him. His blowhard personality is all he has left.
more
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33369/the-passion-of-big-chicken-nothing-left-but-the-sad-recriminations/
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