Friday Miscellany!

• Cold War II advances as Germany blocks $7B of defense exports to Russia, France sends jets to the Baltics, Polish separatists are demanding their own autonomous region in Ukraine, and Russian energy firm Gazprom sends Kiev a huge $11B heating bill.


• Today a 16-year-ld was stabbed to death on her prom day. Authorities are looking into claims that her killer was seeking revenge for her not accepting his prom invitation. Putting the horror of this aside, there's a LOT of sexual politics to unfold here, should this in fact be the killer's motive. It's not just that, now, teenage girls have to worry about getting fucking stabbed to death in the halls of their high school if they turn down a date. It's also that our culture, going back to antiquity, accepts violence as a legitimate means to reclaim one's manhood. We seem reluctant to tackle this phenomenon, and until we do, we can count on more violence like this.


• I would cheer harder for orbital solar power if the cost wasn't so hefty. Right now, solar and wind cost about $1/watt nameplate, and are better options.


• Speaking of green, I'm actually all in favor of Google selling my data to electric utilities, provided they're properly anonymized. If they can predict peak load times better, they can reduce power production and save money (and in most cases fossil fuel consumption and thus carbon emissions).


• SpaceX just announced that one of their booster rockets just made a soft landing. Meaning that, in principle, it can be recovered and reused.


• If you caught "Portlandia" again last night, you got to see my friend Caitlin Nolan for all of five seconds and one spoken line --- she was the teenager pointing out the bad Ronald McDonald art to her dad. It's not quite the airtime that she got last week, but any Portlandia air time is worth bragging about! If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the episode using the usual means. Or you can catch that particular sketch right here on Huffington Post.