Salon magazine has the article Bernie Sanders wants to lead “a political revolution” to make America more Scandinavian.

The article has a video of Sanders being interviewed bu George Stephanopolous. Salon chose to quote these words from Bernie Sanders in part of the interview.

“In countries like Denmark, Norway, Sweden — very democratic countries — voter turnout is a lot higher than it is in the United States,” he said.

“In those countries, health care is the right of all people,” Sanders added. “College education and graduate school is free. Retirement benefits [and] child care are stronger than the United States of America. In those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people and the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.”

ABC News also has an article, Sen. Bernie Sanders Says America Needs ‘Political Revolution’ in 2016, about this interview. There is something about what the ABC News article decided to talk about that strikes me as a little less substantive and a bit more about political soap opera. And that gives you a hint as to why George Stephanopolous needed to be tamed.

Sturbridge for Bernie Sanders also mentioned this article.

The article contains a video interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC television. You could label this interview as Bernie Sanders stands up to George Stephanopolous and wins. He was very civil and emphasized the positive reasons for wanting to run. By trying to stay positive, he diverted leading questions that were meant to elicit negative comments about his political rivals.

If nothing else, we finally have a candidate that resists being dragged into the mud by the media pundits, and he does it in a very civil way.

MoveOn.org has posted How to Take Back Our Economy and Democracy From the 1% on their Facebook page.

It sounds like a good list of bullet items. There is one of them that I must comment on.

I suppose it might be too complex in the poster to explain why you don’t need to raise taxes on the rich to “pay for better schools and rebuild the nation’s infrastructure”. After all the FED arm of the government creates money from computer key strokes. You don’t need taxes to get the money for the government to pay for something. You need to tax the rich to prevent them from using their huge stashes of cash to compete for resources with the government that is using its money to “pay for better schools and rebuild the nation’s infrastructure”.

It may sound like a distinction without a difference to quibble about the reason for an agreed upon tax increase. However, people do derive other policy plans from what they think taxes are for. Seeming to promote the false belief of the purpose of taxes here might encourage other people to extrapolate that false belief to programs that do not make sense.

io9 has the article New Test Suggests NASA’s “Impossible” EM Drive Will Work In Space.

The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, there’s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum during acceleration. Hence the skepticism.

I have just realized the value of dark energy and dark matter in physics. The answer to every seemingly impossible invention that seems to defy the laws of physics is “but what about dark energy and dark matter?” Since all we know about dark energy and dark matter are their effects on the expansion of the universe, we might as well attribute all unexplained behavior to them. Well, I don’t really mean attribute it to these factors. The issue is that you can’t say anything is impossible when you know you have something that affects physical objects, but you don’t know what that something is. As our <sarcasm>beloved</sarcasm> former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, would say this is something we know we don’t know. As he would go on to say, what about all the things we don’t know we don’t know?