Pot Legalization Bill Clears House Panel (Texas)

A proposal to legalize marijuana in Texas will head to the calendars committee, and possibly the House floor, after it was approved by a House committee Wednesday evening.

House Bill 2165 by state Rep. David Simpson, R-Longview, would allow possession and delivery of marijuana beginning in September 2015. It would still be illegal to sell the drug to minors. The measure passed the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on a 5-2 vote.

“I don’t believe that when God made marijuana he made a mistake that government needs to fix,” Simpson wrote in a March op-ed in the The Texas Tribune. He said the plant should be “regulated like tomatoes, jalapenos or coffee.”

The measure initially passed on a 5-1 vote, catching at least one member of the committee by surprise: state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, who wasn’t present for the first vote. Leach asked Chairman Abel Herrero, D-Robstown, to take another vote so he could register a vote against the measure. Leach said Herrero knew that he was opposed to legalizing pot. A second vote was taken.

http://www.texastribune.org/2015/05/06/pot-legalization-bill-headed-house/

John Oliver - Japan Mascots

The Lengths Japan’s Bicycle Moms go to for a Sale

Looking for Adam

Business booming for Cherokee Nation: Report shows $1.55 billion impact

To reach Friday’s luncheon, guests walked through the Hard Rock Hotel’s busy lobby, with tourists lining up to check in, then across the casino floor, crowded with noontime gamblers.

So it was obvious, even before Cherokee Nation officials handed out this year’s Economic Impact Report, that business is booming for the tribe. But the financial numbers from 2014 were so high, they surprised even the people who calculated them.

The Cherokee Nation had a $1.55 billion economic impact last year on northeast Oklahoma, including a $460 million impact on Tulsa County alone, according to an analysis performed for the tribe by economists at Oklahoma City University.

That’s up more than 50 percent from just five years ago, when the tribe reported a $1 billion economic impact.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/finance/business-booming-for-cherokee-nation-report-shows-billion-impact/article_760c9f87-d04b-595e-9197-5fa5b4cb5f29.html?mode=story

Simulated Worlds Will Soon Be Indistinguishable From Reality

The technological singularity is a hypothetical moment in the future when artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human intelligence—and capable of creating smarter iterations of itself. Apply the same general idea to simulations and you get the "simulation singularity": when a simulated world is indistinguishable from reality.

This was the theme of a talk this week at London’s Digital Shoreditch festival by engineer Andy Fawkes, who works for global simulation software company Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BIS) and is director of tech and training company Thinke. "Will there be a world where the simulation may be just as good as the real world?" he asked. Could it even be better than the real world?

"In a sense, I think in some regards it’s already happening," Fawkes told me in an interview. If people’s minds are already accepting a simulated world as “real” somehow, then we could perhaps consider that we’ve already reached the tipping point. In his talk, Fawkes showed examples of driving simulators from a game that were very nearly visually indistinct from real-life footage.

Another example that shows the power of realistic simulators is in the military sphere: pilots learn to fly using simulators that effectively trick the brain into thinking it’s actually controlling a plane. In the US, a quadriplegic woman was able to "fly" an F-35 fighter jet using nothing but her mind. Fawkes looks forward to strapping on an Oculus Rift in old age and “escaping” his weary body.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-simulation-singularity-is-near

Asian-American groups accuse Harvard of racial bias in admissions

The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful

SEYMOUR HERSH HAS DONE THE PUBLIC a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

http://www.cjr.org/analysis/seymour_hersh_osama_bin_laden.php

Egyptian Court Sentences Ousted President Morsi to Death

Source: NY Times

CAIRO — An Egyptian court sentenced Mohamed Morsi, the country’s deposed president, to death on Saturday over his involvement in a prison break during Egypt’s 2011 popular uprising.

Mr. Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the country’s first democratically elected president and came to power following the 2011 revolt that ended the three decades of autocratic rule of Hosni Mubarak. After a divisive and chaotic year in office, Mr. Morsi was ousted from power by the military in July 2013 following another wave of protests.

The jailbreak case was a sign of the sweeping reversal of Egypt’s political tide since the 2011 uprising. The former head of state had been detained in a revolution that many Egyptians hoped would bring about an end to arbitrary detentions and other abuses by the security state.

Saturday’s ruling was read out in a courtroom in a converted auditorium at a police academy on the edge of Cairo. Mr. Morsi, who was sentenced along with more than 100 others, and a crowd of other defendants appeared inside a glass and metal cage inside the courtroom. The judge Shaaban el-Shami’s words triggered shouts from inside the cage, muffled by the glass. As the session ended, the prisoners chanted “Down with military rule!”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/world/middleeast/egyptian-court-sentences-ousted-president-morsi-to-death.html?_r=0

A big problem with the official narrative of the bin laden killing.

Which seal killed bin laden?