We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I'm supposed to read the papers and paste some of the more interesting items on this page for you to peruse. We're all supposed to have a few laughs, go tsk, tsk, or on the odd occasion, applaud what we see. Today I was brought up short, as they say. Like a baby midget in the circus. I'm still capable of being shocked, I guess. The papers are full of man's inhumanity to man these last few days, but nothing about a terrorist attack surprises me anymore. Doesn't even move the meter, I'm ashamed to say.
It was more the mundane aspect of the depravity I discovered that got to me. The everyday humdrum attitude that everyone seems to have about it, like it was traffic or inclement weather. I found myself on the KTLA5 webpage while I was looking for something. I gather that KTLA serves the eastern part of Los Angeles, mostly. Here's a list of the headlines I found on one page, all labeled "Local News":
Downey Police Officer Apparently Targeted in Fatal Shooting in Station Parking Lot
Suspected Carjacker Fatally Shot by Deputies After Allegedly Taking Hostages at Downey Restaurant
Firefighter Fatally Shoots Wife, a Sheriff’s Deputy, in Apparent Murder-Suicide: LASD
Man Holding Knife to Hostage’s Neck in Front of Burning El Monte Home Shot by Police
Suspect in Killing of Woman Found Buried in Valinda Yard Is Fugitive Santeria Priest Accused of Rape
2 Found Dead, Others Injured After Shooting Spree in Banning; Man in Custody: Police
Fresno County ‘Murder Suspect’ Arrested in El Monte on Rape Charge: Authorities
Human Remains, Including Skull, Found at Valinda Home During Dig Linked to Missing Person Case
L.A. County Firefighter Suspected in Sexual Assault Case Arrested Near El Monte School: Police
Man Arrested After Allegedly Filming at Least 7 People in Brea Starbucks Bathroom
Teen Charged After Allegedly Raping 72-Year-Old Woman at Senior Living Apartment Complex in Huntington Beach
The Newspaper neglected to mention that the "fugitive Santeria priest" suspected of murder had raped a child. All the news that fits, I guess, and the fact that the rape victim was a child can't compete with everything else the headline has going on.
I can't say I blame the news organization. They have a lot of ground to cover. I didn't even bother listing all the plain old murders I found on that page. There was a kind of monotony to them. The KTLA news page even tried to get me to pay attention to a car wreck. That doesn't even register as bad news to me anymore after reading the rest of the happenings from one little corner of our world.
Well, don't worry, you can count on me to keep bringing you the news, but as soon as I'm done, I'm shaving my head, putting on flowing robes, and fashioning a placard that reads REPENT, THE WORLD WILL END TOMORROW. You'll find me out on the sidewalk, waving at passing cars, and apologizing to everyone for not making the sign 50 years ago when it would have been timely.
His discovery generates exciting new prospects for how this process could be used to forge new energy sources in a carbon neutral way. Potentially, hydrogen could be transported to other locations and burned as fuel.“In theory, this should be a self-sustaining energy source,” Mendoza-Cortes said. “Perhaps in the future, you could put this material on your roof and it could turn rain water into energy with the help of the sun.”But, unlike many other energy sources, this won’t have a negative effect on the environment. “You won’t generate carbon dioxide or waste,” he said.
I see. He's terrified of producing a beneficial trace gas, or any "waste." He will, however, propose the mining of lots of manganese, a material that causes permanent neurological disorders, tremors, facial muscle spasms, difficulty walking, acute bronchitis, aggressiveness, and hallucinations. But he'll make enough juice to charge his phone, so it's all good.
UnitedHealth Group Inc raised new questions about the viability of Obamacare on Thursday, saying that in 2017 it might stop selling individual plans on the insurance exchanges created under U.S. President Barack Obama's healthcare law.
I don't have any questions about the viability of Obamacare, and never did, but thanks for playing.
Owners of New York City's taxi "medallions" filed a lawsuit (PDF) against city regulators today, saying their business has been devastated by the decision to allow companies like Uber to compete using "E-hail" services. A medallion is required to operate a New York City yellow taxicab, the only type of vehicle allowed to accept passengers who hail cabs on the street. Until recently, those medallions could sell for over $1 million. Companies like White & Blue Group, one of the plaintiffs in the case, managed fleets of licensed taxicabs by leasing out the medallions.
Here's an errand for you, kind reader. Apply for a permit to do anything in New York City. Then tell the person behind the counter you don't need to fill out any forms, or pay any fees, because you wrote 200 lines of javascript, frosted it with a little html, and pasted it into your phone. I promise I'll drag the river to find you.
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber told the students he agreed with them that Wilson was racist and that the university needs to acknowledge that, according to a video posted to YouTube. But a school spokesman said the president also told students it is important to weigh Wilson's racism, and how bad it was, with the contributions he made to the nation.
Let's make a deal, college kids. I'll help you jackhammer his name off the building if you'll help me erase his signature from the Revenue Act of 1913.
When you’re long, the worst you can do is lose is everything. But when you’re short, everything and a lot more is at stake. He should have known better, no doubt, but you have to feel for this poor guy. This is what apparently happened, as Joe explains in his GoFundMe plea. “I was holding KBIO short overnight for what I thought was a nice $2.00 fade coming,” he wrote. “At the close of the bell I saw the quote montage clear out and figured today there was no action after hours in the stock. So I went to my office for a long meeting. I got out of the meeting and saw a message from one of my buddy’s, he asked if I was ok since I was short KBIO.”
I have no sympathy -- none -- for a college graduate that can't pluralize "buddy."
On Tuesday, the American Medical Association (AMA) called for a ban on direct-to-consumer advertisements for prescription drugs and medical devices. Such ads drive demand and costs for expensive name-brand treatments when those drugs may not be appropriate or when clinically effective, low-cost options are available, the doctors group said. The announcement is part of a larger effort by the association to make prescription drugs more affordable.
I have only one observation. If a man and a woman are in separate bathtubs, no amount of medication will initiate sexual activity between them. That's a cast iron fact.
The implications of a better understanding of mid-Victorian health are profound. It becomes clear that, with the exception of family planning, the vast edifice of post-1948 healthcare has not so much enabled us to live longer but has merely supplied methods of controlling the symptoms of non-communicable degenerative diseases, which have become prevalent due to our failure to maintain mid-Victorian nutritional standards. Dysnutrition is arguably the largest cause of ill-health today.
Sounds great. I'm all for a return to mid-Victorian Napier-style foreign policy, too: "Come here instantly. Come here at once and make your submission, or I will in a week tear you from the midst of your village and hang you."
There are of course some things that one could not have predicted. For example, it now seems that this scandal might be part of a broader “era of cheating software”, including everything from slot machines to voting machines, as well as an EU probe of TV makers into “Volkswagening” their energy efficiency test scores.
I have another theory. The emissions rules to limit CO2 are stupid and unattainable, and Volkswagen workers had to choose between fibbing and mass ritual suicide in the parking lot.
The poll, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, shows great disparities in quality of life among the city’s five boroughs. The stresses weighing on New Yorkers vary widely, from the Bronx, where residents feel acute concern about access to jobs and educational opportunity, to Staten Island, where one in five report recently experiencing vandalism or theft.
Half say they are barely getting by, and the other half didn't hear the question because their head is in the oven.
This processor that I designed and built is an accumulator-memory machine, that is, a single register is used in programming. I wanted an instruction set similar to those of the 8-bit microprocessors I was used to. However, the Z-80 and 6502 CPUs had complex instruction sets, with variable instruction lengths. I knew from experience that a programmer uses only a subset of these, so I designed an instruction set that was similar to this commonly-used subset. It has 16 instructions in all, with eight arithmetic-logical operations, and eight data movement and jump instructions.
That is a nifty piece of work. After the zombie apocalypse, he'll be an emperor-god because he'll be the only man on Earth able to program an LED register to show the vague outlines of a naked woman.
Well, that should tide you over until tomorrow. Remember, Maggies Farm loves you and wants you to be happy, so if by some twist of fate you accidentally enter the broadcast area for KTLA, roll up the windows, lock the doors, and keep driving.
Every person's list will vary due to geographical, climatological, financial, and cultural matters, but I think it's a good topic to think about, especially for parents.
Regardless of their genitalia or gender identification, what are the basic life skills you want/wanted your kids to attain before they are/were kicked out of the nest and sent on their way in life?
I'll begin with my How To list which is probably somewhat New England-oriented (my partial list, as an example), How To:
Ride, handle, and care for a horse, ski, sail a boat and handle a powerboat in rough weather, ride a bike, handle all types of firearms, catch and clean a fish, train and handle a dog, change a tire, drive a tractor, tap a Sugar Maple, swim, golf, play tennis, play some team sports, throw every kind of ball, tie knots, play some card games, play an instrument, split wood, identify basic local birds, trees, and animals, go to church, exercise daily, basic cooking, try every sort of new food, perfect table manners and social conversation, dress appropriately to occasion, write a thank-you note and a condolence note, deliver a brief speech to a crowd, make a garden, pay attention to geography and geology, cement a post, use basic tools (and chain saws for boys), do laundry, clean a house, start a fire, tell a story without boring the listener, drive a stick shift, and, not least, travel internationally with confidence.
Put your ideas about basic life skills in the comments, please.
Are
the elite colleges really any better? (education sentences to ponder) -
See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/how-good-are-elite-colleges-really-education-sentences-to-ponder.html#sthash.42kYOCIa.dpuf
Are
the elite colleges really any better? (education sentences to ponder) -
See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/how-good-are-elite-colleges-really-education-sentences-to-ponder.html#sthash.42kYOCIa.dpuf
We used to be rather better at this cloak and dagger stuff.
Perhaps it was because we were all sure we were on the same team back in the day. Kennedy was a bit of a dolt compared to Eisenhower, but he wasn't any kind of friend to the commies. The Bay of Pigs was about as dumb an attempt at exercising American power as you could come up with, but he didn't mess it up on purpose because he was secretly hoping the other side would win. I'm not sure you can count on that brand of My mother, drunk or sober patriotism anymore.
Not too many years earlier, Eisenhower was able to go on national television and admit he was the one that sent Francis Gary Powers to spy on the Soviet Union from the edge of space. He knew that everyone on the other side of the aisle wouldn't impeach him over it. It was, after all, in the United States' best interest. Well, if it worked it was.
While terrorists are raging all over the landscape, our intelligence experts are busy in nondescript buildings in Virginia rifling through Tea Party tax returns. Anyone that understands opportunity cost knows that when some tasks get done to the last jot and tittle, others get the back burner. The Rumford Meteor japed that the massacre in Paris had an effect: France Finally Uses the List of Terrorists They’ve Been Keeping at the Bottom of a Locked Filing Cabinet Stuck in a Disused Lavatory With a Sign on the Door Saying Beware of the Leopard
If that's funny, it's because it's true. France had a list of 168 locations they had identified as possible terrorist hideouts. They used the list to conduct raids the day after the bloodbath. What exactly was a more important use of their time the day before the massacre? Putting someone in the clink for working 36 hours a week?
Even the entertainment about dealing with an implacable enemy used to be better. I'm sick of rogue CIA agents. I long for the good old days of CIA agents who were rogues. Not the same thing, is it?
“When I was five years old my mom told me ‘there’s this thing called OCW,’” says Rungta, who was homeschooled. “I just couldn’t believe how much material was available. From that moment on I spent the next few years taking OCW courses.” When most kids are entering kindergarten, Rungta was studying physics and chemistry through OpenCourseWare. For Rungta’s mother, the biggest challenge to homeschooling her son was staying ahead of him, finding courses and materials to feed his insatiable mind.
C'mon, admit it. Public School is obsolete. It serves only as an academy for depravity at this point.
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
Yeah, and the burglars are 100 percent less likely to shoot your dog.
"This showed a linear association between sex and happiness up to a frequency of once a week, but at higher frequencies there is no longer an association," Amy Muise, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who led the research, said in an email. "Therefore it is not necessary, on average, for couples to aim to engage in sex as frequently as possible."
Once a week? Maybe. I'll reserve judgment until they clarify whether that means at least two people are in the room.
Once the Food and Drug Administration approved Addyi, a failed antidepressant repackaged as a libido pill for women, drug-maker Valeant Pharmaceuticals bought the company selling Addyi for $1 billion. If they were expecting to cash in on a blockbuster drug, early sales aren’t very promising: in the first month, only 227 prescriptions for the drug have been written.
You're not allowed to drink alcohol when taking this drug. No one's getting any action under those circumstances.
In the U.S., senior care is not something many entrepreneurs are thinking creatively about. Not so in Japan: In the past year, 60 gambling-themed senior-daycare centers have opened up, giving some of the nation’s elderly not just basic shelter, but a place to spend time that’s appealing and fun.
You mean Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun aren't nursing homes?
When we first meet Catherine Earnshaw, she is a ghostly hand rapping on a window in a storm—which is to say, she is essentially the storm itself, rattling the glass panes of her former home. At every point thereafter, emotional drama and atmospheric drama are one. If Lear is minded like the weather, Catherine and Heathcliff are bodied like it—together, the most famous storm ever to strike the Yorkshire moors.
There's always plenty of weather in bodice rippers. Otherwise Fabio's pectorals wouldn't glisten with sweat as his hands slowly made their way up inside her chemise, the faint aroma of the sodden garden surrounding them like the perfume of Aphrodite, and all that sh*t.
Philadelphia police said Officer Joseph Marion, 39, was outside of a Dunkin Donuts on Wadworth Avenue on Feb. 14 when an employee lost control of a shopping cart he using was to put down salt.The cart hit Marion's vehicle, spurring Marion to get out and start attacking the employee. Marion also allegedly assaulted a woman who intervened in the initial attack.
When executives at Taco Bell found out that the Downey building that housed their first restaurant was at risk of being demolished, they ordered the store “to go.” The birthplace of the Mexican fast food chain, located on Firestone Boulevard, is up on rails and ready to roll. Founder Glen Bell built the mission style building in 1962 and on Thursday night at 10:30, store “Numero Uno” will begin the 45-mile ride to company headquarters in Irvine.
I'm fairly certain the first and only taco I ate at Taco Bell hasn't moved an inch since I swallowed it.
Rocky Ouprasith, now 23, was the man behind RockDizMusic.com and RockDizFile.com. The latter was the second-largest online file-sharing site specialising in pirated music in the United States in 2013, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Federal law enforcement shut down the sites in October 2014, and Ouprasith pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright infringement in August. In addition to a 36-month prison term, he will also get two years of supervised release, forfeit over US$50,000 and pay nearly US$50,000 in restitution.
No one should ever go to jail for copyright infringement, which is a civil violation, or should be. Same goes for tax evasion. If you can't collect the money upfront, willingly, you're not entitled to it. Jailing people for owing money is medieval.
John le Carré, one of England’s greatest novelists, author of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and creator of the character George Smiley, was born David Cornwell in 1931 in Poole, England. He was 2 when his father—who was always either booming or busting, expanding and contracting to the rhythm of his own dodginess—got 15 months for fraud and other charges. “He could put a hand on your shoulder and the other in your pocket and both gestures would be equally sincere,” David’s brother Tony once said.
"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom is the best spy movie ever made. Discuss.
A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school and formal education. Here’s what he found.
An interesting topic. There is no doubt that schools are there to do the things that parents are not equipped to do or might not have time to do: acculturation, academic skills, some practical skills. Foundations for life.
Defined benefit pension systems have rules that strongly favor long term workers. Workers often didn’t qualify for pensions until they worked a threshold number of years—if you left the company before you ‘vested’, you lost your pension benefits. And because length of service played a large role in calculating pension benefits, workers who changed jobs or careers often ended up with very small pensions. There have been heartrending cases of workers in manufacturing companies who lost everything when their jobs went abroad before they had worked enough years to collect a good pension. And in their 40s and 50s, many could not replace those jobs or the lost pension benefits.
Those old-time pensions are a thing of the past, except for some government employees.
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
Look, I know you mean well, and some of you look quite fetching in a lab coat, horn rims, and high heels, but I am not interested in your "studies." You do not seem to have studied anything but grievances in school, yet you publish studies by the ream as soon as you escape. I do not care a fig if you think my cell phone is giving cancer to my autism. I am not all that interested in your theories about the correlation of causation with the cessation of sensation in my foot as I drop off to sleep at night.
I sleep when I'm tired and I eat when I'm hungry and I drink when I'm thirsty and I read when I'm curious and I wonder what you're on about. If you've got evidence, trot it out, but I warn you I'm going to want to inspect your test tubes before I throw away my office chair and sit on a beach ball.
"In our study, we found people who drank three to five cups of coffee per day had about a 15 percent lower [risk of premature] mortality compared to people who didn't drink coffee," says one of the study authors, nutrition researcher Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health. Decaf drinkers also saw benefits.
This article is only sorta-correct. It's true you'll live longer if you don't get in my way when I'm trying to get coffee.
Harvey hadn't snatched the brain for the morbid fascination of keeping a part of history the same way some collectors have done with Annie Oakley's gun or Neil Armstrong's hair. Instead, Harvey was hoping to learn whether or not Einstein's genius could be quantified. Was his brain somehow wired differently than ours? Gutfreund dismisses that line of research. "I don't know," he says. "Your brain is different than my brain. There are no two brains alike."
This is the equivalent of breaking into a bank to steal the deposit slips. Ted Williams frozen head is never going to bat .400, either.
But the truth is there are 2.5 billion people globally who lack access to even the very basic necessities of sanitation, cleanliness and safe water — that's twice the population of the U.S.World Toilet Day is November 19, and aims to raise awareness about the global issue of poor sanitation around the world. We ask: What would your life look like if you had to exist without access to clean water? To a hot shower? To a private, indoor toilet?
Another paid advertisement masquerading as a news article, but I'll play along: America doesn't have "access" to water. We have a population of capable humans who consider an inexpensive supply of potable water for its citizens to be an important, if trivial, undertaking, and then makes it happen. Well, except California.
I’ve consistently experienced connectivity issues between the cup and the app on my iPhone. Sometimes the app wouldn’t recognize the cup, so I’d have to physically reset the cup in order for it to work. I had to do that at least 10 times over the last couple of weeks. It was pretty frustrating, so I ended up not using Pryme for about a week until last night. I, once again, reset the cup and then connected it via Bluetooth to my phone. It worked fine until I woke up this morning and tilted the cup to look at my Pryme level. According to the cup, I was at my Pryme, even though I hadn’t had any water for the previous several hours. Sigh.
Yet another fake ad, but I'll play along. This woman believes she needs a handheld supercomputer wirelessly attached to an electronic cup in order to get herself a drink of water. She's the target audience for the last fake article, I imagine.
There is an unnamed epidemic slowly traveling through the middle of the U.S. This epidemic goes by many names, but our venture fund refers to it as “early exit disease.” This disease spreads when founders realize sub-$20 million exits. Many of these exits could have grown much larger. Instead, early exits have been quietly devastating the Midwest region’s startup maturation, cutting off the very process that first created Silicon Valley — and which could create more tech capitals in the middle of the country.
The article says startup owners are cashing out before they've sufficiently bilked investors out of enough money to fund still more startups. Welcome to the fabulous new iAmway economy!
The first, built in 1887, was Sioux City’s corn palace, which spanned more than 18,000 square feet, rose 100 feet high and cost $25,000–hundreds of thousands in today’s dollars. In the year it was built, a drought had devastated crops across the middle of the country. But for some reason, Sioux City's part of Iowa was spared and even had an excess of corn. The city wanted to signal that life in the Midwest wasn't as dreary and desperate as it might seem, and, as Pamela H. Simpson writes in Corn Palaces and Butter Queens, the idea for the palace came from a town meeting, at which one enterprising man asked “why, if Saint Paul and Toronto could have ice palaces, Sioux City couldn’t have a corn palace.”
The United States has always been an endlessly interesting place, and continues to be so.
What happens when you apply thousands of LED lights to a bicycle? You fit right in with Venice, California locals. Venice Beach, which served as a US hippy hub of the 1960s, is now seeing dozens of locals cruising its boardwalk late at night with brightly glowing rides.
The United States has always been an endlessly interesting place, and continues to be so.
Mr. Jindal unveiled a series of policy proposals, ferociously attacked Donald J. Trump and spent considerable time courting conservatives in Iowa, which begins the presidential nominating process. None of it worked.
If a couple more Republican candidates quit, they're not going to be able to field a baseball team.
A disgruntled crowd member stormed the pitch and hit an assistant referee with his penis during a football match in southern Spain. The incident occurred during a match between Second Division Andaluza Sénior and fellow Andalusian team CD Abes in Granada on Sunday.
I've noticed that gruntled people never attack anyone with their penis.
The analysis of a fossil tooth from Siberia reveals that a mysterious people known as Denisovans, discovered a mere five years ago, persisted for tens of thousands of years alongside modern humans and Neanderthals.The find underscores that our Homo sapiens ancestors shared the Eurasian continent with other human-like populations. For hundreds of thousands of years, modern humans lived alongside Neanderthals, a sister hominid species that died out about 40,000 years ago. Denisovans appear to have shared some of that territory as well.
I know they're scientists, but I doubt I'm related to Julia Roberts.
Well, there you go. If I were you, I'd blow off work, get hopped up on pots of coffee, build a house out of corn shucks, and then ride a bicycle covered with LEDs in circles around it. If you don't, the terrorists have won.
India has to be one of the most complicated nations on earth. It is not really a nation except nominally. It's an antique empire with little except a corrupt, incompetent, and inertly-lazy bureaucracy to duct tape it together.
Well-trained paramedics and EMS-type people can do a lot of good, if they have the skills to decide what needs more expertise and what does not. Even the best-trained MDs often get that wrong.
Like our editor, I am more interested in vigorous fitness for functional life and endurance rather than in conspicuous muscle mass. However, it has not escaped my notice than some mass has a signaling effect on females.
Limitations I have found in my (recent) mixed cardio-resistance-endurance program are strength and power in my extremities, ie forearms and lower legs. Those tend to be neglected in resistance work. They are more or less expected to respond in strength to the other things you do.
That is true to a point, perhaps, but, for examples, but my dead lifts and kettlebell walks are limited by my grip strength. Lower leg strength is needed for everything you do, posture and agility, and especially to prevent injury.
What I am learning is that I have to strengthen everything to pursue my maximum functional endurance. The two go hand-in-hand.
The passionate endeavors to eliminate the classical studies from the curriculum of the liberal education and thus virtually to destroy its very character were one of the major manifestations of the revival of the servile ideology.
It is a fact that a hundred years ago only a few people anticipated the over-powering momentum which the antilibertarian ideas were destined to acquire in a very short time. The ideal of liberty seemed to be so firmly rooted that everybody thought that no reactionary movement could ever succeed in eradicating it. It is true, it would have been a hopeless venture to attack freedom openly and to advocate unfeignedly a return to subjection and bondage. But antiliberalism got hold of peoples’ minds camouflaged as superliberalism, as the fulfillment and consummation of the very ideas of freedom and liberty. It came disguised as socialism, communism, planning.
No intelligent man could fail to recognize that what the socialists, communists and planners were aiming at was the most radical abolition of the individuals’ freedom and the establishment of government omnipotence.
Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, 1956 (h/t Reader)
Since the entire world has quickly settled on singing a dreary, infantile ditty written by a wife-beater that extols the state religion of Nazi Germany and the USSR as a response to an existential threat, I guess it's time to move on to new topics. Speaking of existential, didn't those Frenchmen invent existentialism? No, I think that was Kierkegaarde. Maybe it was Nietzsche. Whatever. It was one of those grouchy fellows. I was doodling in my copybook and trying to get a peek down a girl's blouse that day in school, and must have missed it. At any rate, Europe is just a bunch of zebras at the watering hole watching a lion eat their little sister while mumbling, "Wasn't me, don't care." Who am I to bother about it? Let's read the papers:
Ignored in news coverage of the Paris massacre is the single most pertinent piece of background: A 2014 opinion poll found that ISIS had an approval rating in France (at 16%) almost as high as President Francois Holland (at 18%). In the 18-to-24-year-old demographic, ISIS’ support jumped to 27%. Muslims comprise about a tenth of France’s population, so the results imply that ISIS had the support of the overwhelming majority of French Muslims (and especially Muslim youth), as well as the endorsement of a large part of the non-Muslim Left.
Like Obama, Hollande looks at terror attacks through the lens of self-interest. If it affects their personal reputation, they get peevish and start talking like a fop's idea of Audie Murphy. Otherwise, they really don't give a sh*t.
Hacker collective Anonymous posted a video Saturday on YouTube in which it declared a cyber war on ISIS. In the nearly two-and-a-half-minute video, a person wearing the group’s signature Guy Fawkes mask read a statement in French promising that the hacktivist organization would attack ISIS in cyberspace with the ultimate goal of weakening the terrorist organization.
I'm sure a multinational terrorist organization is shaking in their sandals over the prospect of a deluge of fake one-star reviews on Yelp.
Machine made snow is made up of exactly the same stuff as natural snow - frozen water. When the weather provides cold temperatures, but no moisture, our snowmaking team simply adds just the right amount of moisture to the atmosphere to produce excellent snow. It may sound easy, but making great snow requires millions of dollars in specialized equipment and an experienced team of snowmakers.
In my experience, machine snow is half-frozen filthy retaining pond water sprayed all over you if you deign to ski on a weekday.
Society judges people by what they can do for others. Can you save children from a burning house, or remove a tumor, or make a room of strangers laugh? You've got value right there. That's not how we judge ourselves though. We judge ourselves by our thoughts."I'm a good person." "I'm ambitious." "I'm better than this." These idle impulses may comfort us at night, but they're not how the world sees us. They're not even how we see other people.
Silly me. I thought holding up an inexpertly lettered sign with a preachy message and a hashtag was the pinnacle of human achievement.
In a religion where the first woman in history is said to have caused all kinds of problems, the Roman Catholic Church should have perhaps been able to see what was coming with Francesca Chaouqui.Her hiring in 2013 to be part of COSEA, the Pope’s Commission for Reference on the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See, was an eyebrow-raiser for Vatican watchers and Italian tabloids alike.She was, at 30, the youngest member on the influential eight-member panel by more than two decades. She was also the only female.
Bombshell? You guys don't get out much. She reminds me of homely girls who go to Star Wars conventions.
WASHINGTON — In response to the Paris attacks, a top American intelligence official on Monday renewed a debate on government surveillance and privacy, denouncing “hand-wringing” over intrusive spying and saying that leaks of classified information had made it harder to identify terrorists.John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be speaking in part about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications that were disclosed by Edward J. Snowden in 2013. Those disclosures prompted sharp criticism and new restrictions on electronic spying both in the United States and in Europe.
Ever hear of the Fourth Amendment? Cute little thing. It was popular around here 200 years ago. It almost seems like you have a problem using probable cause to determine who to surveil because then you'd have to admit who is probably gonna cause a problem.
A man has been sentenced for knocking out his sister's two front teeth in a row over a Christmas record 40 years ago. Patrick and Anita Ackroyd disagreed over John Lennon's Happy Xmas (War is Over) when they were teenagers in December 1975. A court heard that he punched her in the face and knocked out her teeth in an assault that has left her wearing a dental plate ever since.
Judge: I need to know which one of them liked that dreadful song in order to rule against him or her.
Weapons have been stolen from an Army base following a break-in just 24 hours after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris. The firearms went missing from the armory at the Lincoln Army Reserve Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, on Saturday night after the suspects entered the building through the roof.
Recently, US presidential candidate Ben Carson commented on his theory that the pyramids were actually primarily used for storing grain, much to the consternation of the US media. Why do pyramid mysteries and alternative theories persist even now? And why have we never explored them fully?
Don't worry. ISIS will crack those open like a pinata after their next Mahdi connects the Sudan to Vienna.
The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi, available on May 20, is a collection of artwork by Julius Csotonyi, an award-winning illustrator whose work lives in museums and in science papers. Csotonyi, who holds a PhD in microbiology, works frequently with paleontologists who need help bringing their fossil finds to life.
"Brutal" prehistoric world? Compared to what? My housecat will kill anything it can catch, and tortures it first, too. Your goldfish would eat you if it could fit you in its mouth.
Be careful out there in the brutal posthistoric world today.
Biceps are not major functional muscles. There are only three good reasons to strengthen biceps in isolation: arm-toning for middle-aged women, showing off in wife-beater Ts - and, usefully, to provide some complementary balance for the far more useful and important triceps.
However, fact is that most upper-body chest, core, back exercises, and full-body exercises and body-weight calisthenics like pull-ups and ropes activate biceps enough without needing to do very much of those muscle-isolating "curls for girls."
As BD has said, the Maggie's fitness philosophy for sedentary-working people is about overall fitness, muscle and cardiovascular endurance, athletic functionality, posture, core strength, and good body-weight management rather than body-building and body-sculpting. Maximally-functional for life, not for the gym, prison yard, or for the Gay Parade..
In my view, the more muscles an exercise stresses, the better. Besides intense interval cardio, what kills me but makes me fitter are pushing the full-body, mixed cardio+strength+core exercises like ball smashes, ropes, lunges with kettles, pull-ups, burners, and the like. You just do them until you break.
Yes, birds are still seen as essentially dinosaurs. Lots of new interesting evolutionary details though. The Cretaceous Extinction had a major impact on birds (and everything else) with which we are still living.
Well, it's Monday. Your favorite team lost, so the water cooler is looking less like an oasis and more like an enemy gun emplacement. Hey, Bob, did you see Peyton Roethlesberger throw a pick six and a tantrum on fourth down with the game on the line? You know, the one that caused my team to win, and your favorite team and their benighted fans to be consigned to ignominy and defeat? What did you think about that Bob? Did you enjoy it as much as I did? Whaddya say about that, Bob?
Me, I don't mind Mondays so much. I don't root for Jameis Manziel or Cam Bradford or Russell Brees, so it's of little consequence if the Green Bay Pacers fall to the Dallas Drovers. The first day of the work week holds no terrors for me. I kind of like it there. No one makes me rake leaves at the office. I don't have to change every battery in every smoke alarm in the building at 4 AM because I can't figure out which one is beeping. It would be silly to be required to paint the outside of a skyscraper, wouldn't it? I don't even know where to look for the gutters on a 50-story building, never mind clean them out. No, the office is just fine. Besides, the Internet connection is better, and I get to read the Maggie's Farm morning links while pretending to be working, instead of pretending to be asleep on the couch when my wife gets home with groceries.
Two brothers who used H-1B workers to create a low-cost and profitable on-demand workforce were found guilty Thursday in federal court of violating the law. The trial took place in U.S. District Court in Dallas and lasted for six days. At the end, a jury convicted Atul Nanda, 46, and his brother, Jiten "Jay" Nanda, 44, each of one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud, one count of conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens and four counts of wire fraud. The U.S. filed the indictment in 2013. Penalties range as high as $250,000 in fines and upward of 20 years in prison. A sentencing date was not set.
Silly me. From what I've observed, I would have assumed that a "fraudulent H-1B case" would involve NOT bringing illegal aliens into the country to work like coolies.
I was a total monster. I was spending $1,000 a week on weed, and everyone I was in the band with at the time smoked as much as I did. There's so much stupid behavior caused by weed, but I always had that cliché: I needed it for creativity. I've come to realize that at the end of the day, it's only you yourself that creativity comes from. It doesn't come from weed.
Um, it's really only necessary for your audience to be stoned, not you. Sober or not, your records sound like Sesame Street on Seconal, dude.
The standard error of measuring inches or liters is usually zero assuming you have perfectly reliable, standard measurement devices. Intelligence tests generally show high test-retest reliability but they also have a standard error, and the standard error is often larger for higher scores than for lower scores. Any intelligence test score change after an intervention needs to be considered relative to the standard error of the test. Studies that use a single test to estimate intelligence before and after an intervention are using less reliable and more variable scores (bigger standard errors) than studies that combine scores from a battery of tests.
I have always found that the only way I could measurably increase other people's intelligence is by drinking heavily. The girls get better looking, too.
He was a successful and well-traveled professional, with close to seven figures in the bank, and plans for much more. And then he gave it all away, more than $718,000, in chunks at a time, to two Manhattan psychics.They vowed to reunite him with the woman he loved. Even after it was discovered that she was dead. There was the 80-mile bridge made of gold, the reincarnation portal. “I just got sucked in,” the man, Niall Rice, said in a telephone interview last week from Los Angeles. “That’s what people don’t understand. ‘How can you fall for it?’ ”
Well, those psychics certainly measurably increased that guy's intelligence. While $718k isn't exactly cheap, it still cost less than a Head Start class.
An official government site confirms the ban with a generic message that reads, "After technical analysis and legal consideration ... administration measure has been taken for this website." The note is dated November 13th. According to the statement, Reddit was taken down under Turkey's controversial internet censorship law, known as Internet Law No. 5651. Under the law, Turkish Supreme Council for Telecommunications and IT (TIB) can ban websites and block internet content for a handful of reasons, including anything involved with pornography, prostitution, drugs, terrorism, illegal file sharing, sexual abuse of children, and "crimes against" Mustafa Atatürk, the first president of Turkey.
I've blocked Reddit from my computer under an uncontroversial lack of interest in the opinions of neckbeards law.
"Made in France," directed by Nicolas Boukhrief, stars Malik Zidi as the journalist who uses his own Muslim background to infiltrate a mosque in the suburbs of Paris. He eventually hooks up with a group of would-be terrorists planning to "sow chaos in the heart of Paris," according to a synopsis on the French movie website Allociné.
The Paris gig has been cancelled. I wouldn't worry about it, though; it's not a big Cinema Verite town.
A local NBC affiliate reports that 30-year-old Branden Joseph Deel began his Downton Abbey–disc binge in January 2014, “when he stole 12 DVD box sets worth a total retail value of $560.88 and has continued to target retailers since then.” As Downton Abbey fans ourselves, we can‘t help but hypothesize that “the Downton Abbey addict” was so enraged by a story line early in the period drama’s fourth season—that Lady Mary would dare to entertain a flirtation so soon after the tragic death of her one true love, Matthew—that, in an act of misguided revenge, he tried to wipe out local retailers’ Downton stocks and possibly save fellow fans from future devastation.
Occam's Razor: he needs coasters and finally ran out of AOL discs.
And as more and more of what we listen to comes from our hard drives and cloud services, we’re less dependent on the medium itself and more dependent on the technology that turns data to drum beats. But the audio company, Schiit, which started back in 2010, argues that the best way to maximize the sound that comes into your headphones is to connect the headphones via USB to an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The idea is that, whether you have lossless, uncompressed files (which, unlike stripped down MP3s, hold more information and more accurately represent the original sound), iTunes, or a streaming service like Spotify, you’re not getting the full potential without a middleman.
First sentence begins with "And." Second sentence begins with "But." The author then uses parentheses to enclose a dependent clause instead of commas. The rest is all stupid, useless Schiit. So the answer to the second question is 01101110 01101111! Whoops, forgot to convert it to analog. NO!
As the largest developer of ad blockers, Eyeo, with its popular Adblock Plus, has found itself at the center of a fierce debate about ethics and, potentially, the legality of blocking mobile browser ads. The subject has been a popular one in Europe for some time, but it caught fire in the U.S. in June when Apple announced that its iOS 9 mobile operating system would enable (and some say welcome) mobile ad-blocker apps on iPhones. (A new Adblock Plus iOS app for iOS 9 was approved by Apple in September.)
Adblock won't ever stop things like that Popular Science "article" about a particular brand of audio converter. Me, I just want a parentheses blocker.
The Redmond-based tech giant has been eager to build buzz around the launch of its first standalone Asia Pacific location and second flagship, after the two-storey Microsoft store in Manhattan. Customers queued in the bright sun with the the promise of free concert tickets and lucky door prizes for early birds, before the window coverings dropped to reveal store staff dancing and cheering inside.
I wonder. Is it no longer possible for a tech company to survive in the market without pretending the entire business is a Gymboree?
That should be enough information to tide you over until lunch. If you fib and say you have a doctor's appointment right after, you might make it until 3:30 before you're required to do any actual work. Make sure to leave early, too. As they say on the Department of Public Works crew, "No sense killing the job."
Some readers may remember when that was a bumpersticker. (It's on the same order as Bird Dog's old school football cheer: "Repel them, repel them; make them relinquish the ball.")
It is a theme on this blog to think about the things that people hold most dear and the things they hold to be sacred. I tend to judge such things based on people's behavior, not on what they say. I tend to believe that God should come foremost in my life, but I can be a hypocrite at times.
Karl Reitz at TCS looks at secular religions - systems of belief which can play as strong a role in shaping people's lives as loving God can for the religious. His piece is consistent with several things we have written over the past week or two. A key quote from An atheist's defence of religion:
The fundamental difference between traditional religions and these secular religions is that secular religions promise us that perfection (heaven) is possible here, on earth, in present times. Conservatives, starting with Eric Voegelin, have long warned against buying into these secular religions by warning us not to "immanentize the eschaton." As Jonah Goldberg explained:
"Immanentize means to make part of the here and now. Eschaton, like eschatology, relates to the branch of theology which deals with humanity's destiny. You know, the end times, when all of that wacky, end-timey, Seventh-Seal stuff happens (oceans boil, the righteous ascend to heaven, Carrot Top is funny, etc). Hence 'immanentizing the eschaton' means, in effect, trying to make what is reserved for the next life part of the here and now."
There are two utopias - the womb, and Heaven (if you can get there before they close the door). Life is bracketed by utopias, but in between we must toil and strain and sometimes suffer. It's "the way things are", as the mice say.
Bliss and ease are only momentary during this brief spell on earth, and it has something to do with how reality was built. Specifically, I think it has to do with finiteness, limits, and scarcity - of just about everything, and not just of material things. I know only about four things that do not fit that: air, a dog's love, God's love...and blogs. No scarcity of good blogs.
All humans are thought to be descendants of one woman, Mitochondrial Eve, who lived around 140,000 years ago - 4600 generations ago - in West Africa. Our cellular mitochondria follow the female genetic line.
In the linked piece, our Berkshire friend also notes, interestingly, in a quote:
Do the math as you count generations into the past. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on through the centuries. Soon you reach a point where the number of ancestors in a given generation is larger than the population of the Earth at the time. (This is possible because as you move back, a single individual may occupy a large number of slots on your family tree, which is known as pedigree collapse.)
Pic is by Masolino, c 1426, in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence
Every person's list will vary due to geographical, climatological, financial, and cultural matters, but I think it's a good topic to think about, especially for parents.
Biceps are not major functional muscles. There are only three good reasons to strengthen biceps in isolation: arm-toning for middle-aged women, showing off in wife-beater Ts - and, usefully, to provide some complementary balance for the far more useful and important triceps.
Earliest Beginnings Of Bird Evolution Brought Into Focus With New DNA Analysis
I almost tripped over a big fat Striped Skunk in my gym's parking lot before dawn last week. I was lucky not to alarm him, and he just scurried away.
A repost -
Pepper, especially.