10 Thoughts for July 5, 2014

1. Even without the final slots filled in for the final 8 of the World Cup, we can now call it the war between the Americas and Europe.  Asia and Africa are shut out, here on out.
2. This video from Conan O'Brien on the World Cup, actually expresses my feelings on it.  Do watch all three parts.  I'm not actually watching the World Cup.
3. The NCAA is a favorite punching bag, for good reason, I believe.  But maybe this time it'll get it right...they've decided to reopen its investigation into UNC's widespread academic fraud.  I harbor zero faith in the NCAA, however, because the last several years has shown us that they can't even follow their internal processes.  All this might be moot, though, as the NCAA will be broken when they lose their trial against Ed O'Bannon.
4. This Christian Science Monitor poll is dumb.  According to CSM, Americans believe that the "failure to address extremist gains in Syria paved the way for the ISIS march through Iraq."  Why is that dumb?  Because the only way to address the extremists' gains in Syria was to support Bashar Al Assad.  A three-way war involving moderates fighting both ISIS and Bashar Al Assad would not result in victory...or maybe Americans don't remember what happened when Bush entered a second war.  The premise isn't whether or not Obama could have prevented the involvement of extremist fighting in Syria.  However, were this the case, the fact of the matter is that a majority of Americans at the time (and to this day) did not want to get involved in any way in the Syrian civil war.  Therefore, either this is push-polling, or complete horseshit by Americans incapable of accepting blame for their earlier opinions, or both.
5. The more conversations I have offline and online with people about climate change, the more I realize that most people just don't understand: At this point we're deciding whether we want to be screwed royally or royally x 10.
6. June is gone, but I wanted to trot out this post from June 2012, four months before the start of Windows 8 sales.  I said Windows 8 would fail.
7. Mt. Waialeale on Kaua'i, generally inaccessible, had an apparently massive landslide.  No one saw it happen, and no one heard it -- the only sign that something happened was tons of brown water in the ocean.  If you watch the video flyover of the slide, it is epic.  Drop jaw at the end.
8. Apparently a Palestinian kid was abducted, killed and set on fire by some Israeli kids.  That's pure crazy.  Killing an innocent kid does not make right what happened to those three Jewish kids abducted a week ago and found dead the other day.
9. WaPo has analysed college rape data for the period between 2010 and 2012, here's some info on Oregon schools:  Reed College is ranked 3rd in the nation with 9.62 reported rapes (on and off campus) per 1000 students; Willamette University is ranked 15th with 4.44 reported rapes per 1000; Pacific University is ranked 29th with 3.22 reported rapes per 1000; Concordia University is ranked 57th with 2.25 reported rapes per 1000.  It doesn't mean that these schools have higher incidence rates, but that they do have higher reporting rates.  Some schools might have a stronger, supportive culture for reporting rapes.
10. Oregon Representative Greg Walden (and former Senator Gordon Smith) voted for the 2008 FISA Amendments Bill (HR 6304 ,110th).  Oregon Democrats Sen. Wyden, Rep. Blumenour, Rep. Wu, Rep. DeFazio and Rep. Hooley all voted against it.  Frontline previously noted that this was the Bush Administration's attempt to legalize the NSA's dragnet.  Today, we find out via WaPo that this (called "section 702") dragnet netted about 9 in 10 people who weren't the NSA's target, and the information that was hoovered was kept. Whoa, this is major.  Greg Walden voted to spy on ordinary Americans, and then to keep that information collected.  He needed to go, yesterday.