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showing up Nicky Hilton:

Nicky Hilton asked, “I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?” I would like to repond to that. When I was 21, I was busy working toward my Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Minnesota. I was the first to synthesize the compound okadaic acid — shown to be the leading cause of breast cancer.
- Steven F. Sabes
Wayzata, Minnesota

Tantek points to John’s post on Optimism Tax:

I’ll consider the loss to be part of my optimism tax. I sporadically pay this fee (when people take advantage of my trust in goodness) in exchange for optimistic freedom.

I would be less at-risk if I concentrated more on the negatives. “What if _____ happens?” But it’s not worth it. The cost to my quality of life (by worrying more) is far more expensive than the cost of losing some stuff.

I pay that, too.

Cenk Uygur:

We live in a twisted world, where right is wrong and wrong reigns supreme. It is a chilling fact that most of the world’s leaders believe in nonsensical fairytales about the nature of reality. They believe in Gods that do not exist, and religions that could not possibly be true. We are driven to war after war, violence on top of violence to appease madmen who believe in gory mythologies.

Business Week writes about The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard…. I’m not sure they gave an answer, but I wanted to highlight this:

That helps explain why time pressures seem to be getting worse. Globalization and the Internet create great new opportunities, but they also ratchet up the intensity of competition and generate more work — especially with the existing corporate structure still hanging on tightly. “Nobody wants to give up their territory or their control,” says Shoshana Zuboff, a former professor at Harvard Business School. Adds Lowell Bryan, a McKinsey & Co. director: “Professionals are still being managed as if they were in factories, in organizations designed to keep everybody siloed. At less well-run companies, you’re struck by how frustrated people are. They work like dogs and are wasting time.”

As voted on by the readers of Foreign Policy and Prospect: Top 100 Public Intellectuals.

‘No-fly’ action takes pilot’s job:

Cape Air pilot Robert Gray said he feels like he’s living a nightmare.
…
When Gray showed up for work a couple of weeks ago, he said Cape Air told him the government had placed him on its no-fly list, making it impossible for him to do his job. Gray, a Belfast native and British citizen, said the government still won’t tell him why it thinks he’s a threat.
…
The agency denied an administrative appeal by Gray and refused to disclose what information it had, but it provided Gray’s lawyers with a computer printout that indicated it was about a Robert Gray who is Hispanic. The Cape Air pilot is white.

Nutjob at Wal-Mart photo lab calls secret service on high school art project:

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.