Saturday Sabbulonarium Suspiration

 Jesse V

Video

http://www.ora.tv/offthegrid/article/2015/9/4/syrian-refugee-crisis-4-million-refugees-arab-nations

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Way Too Much

 John Koblin writes in the NY Times that there's a crisis in television programming felt among executives, viewers and critics, and it's the result of one thing: There is simply too much on television.

 John Landgraf, chief executive of FX Networks, reported at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour that the total number of original scripted series on TV in 2014 was 371.

 The total will surpass 400 in 2015. The glut, according to Landgraf, has presented "a huge challenge in finding compelling original stories and the level of talent needed to sustain those stories."

Michael Lombardo, president of programming at HBO, says it is harder than ever to build an audience for a show when viewers are confronted with so many choices and might click away at any moment.

 "I hear it all the time," says Lombardo. "People going, 'I can't commit to another show, and I don't have the time to emotionally commit to another show.' 

I hear that, and I'm aware of it, and I get it." Another complication is that shows not only compete against one another, but also against old series that live on in the archives of Amazon, Hulu or Netflix. 

So a new season of "Scandal," for example, is also competing against old series like "The Wire." "The amount of competition is just literally insane," says Landgraf.

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What they didn't say is that farm kids are over all healthier than kids that didn't grow up on farms, which is the truth.

For researchers trying to untangle the roots of the current epidemic of asthma, one observation is especially intriguing: Children who grow up on dairy farms are much less likely than the average child to develop the respiratory disease. 

Now, a European team studying mice has homed in on a possible explanation: Bits of bacteria found in farm dust trigger an inflammatory response in the animals' lungs that later protects them from asthma. 

An enzyme involved in this defense is sometimes disabled in people with asthma, suggesting that treatments inspired by this molecule could ward off the condition in people.

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Oh Really Hillary?

An anonymous reader points out comments from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in a new interview with Al Jazeera about Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was the U.S. Secretary of State.

 Snowden said, "Anyone who has the clearances that the Secretary of State has or the director of any top level agency has, knows how classified information should be handled.

 When the unclassified systems of the United States government — which has a full time information security staff — regularly get hacked, the idea that someone is keeping a private server ... is completely ridiculous."

 While Snowden didn't feel he had enough information to say Clinton's actions were a threat to national security, he did say that less prominent government employees would have probably been prosecuted for doing the same thing.

 For her part, Clinton said she used the private server out of convenience: "I was not thinking a lot when I got in.

There was so much work to be done.

 We had so many problems around the world.

I didn't really stop and think what kind of email system will there be."

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 To downgrade the human mind is bad theology. - C. K. Chesterton

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